The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Karen Russell Reads Louise Erdrich

October 1, 2025·49 min·4 clips

Karen Russell reveals how Louise Erdrich's text about a 'heavy secret' stone inspired her during pregnancy.

The ritual is familiar. Deborah Treisman opens the New Yorker Fiction Podcast with its usual premise: one writer chooses a story from the magazine's archive. Karen Russell chooses Louise Erdrich. The story, "The Stone," first appeared in September of 2019, and this episode gives it room as both a reading and a conversation. The setup stays spare. Russell is introduced through her fiction, including "Orange World and Other Stories" and the novel "The Antidote," published earlier this year. Treisman notes that Erdrich had maybe a year ago read and discussed Russell's "Haunting Olivia." Then the story takes over, which feels right. The reading follows a girl, later a woman, whose attention to a stone becomes intimate, bodily, and strangely vast. Its scale keeps opening out. By the engagement peak, flesh, stone, molecules, decay, repetition, and time share the same imaginative weather. The conversation comes back softly. Treisman asks whether the story belongs to the woman, the stone, or some feeling held between them. Russell does not flatten it into one protagonist. She says Erdrich's stories often push against the single-consciousness model, letting attention move across beings and forms of life. The story stays realist, but Russell also hears science beside myth, especially in the unnamed woman and unnamed stone. Names start to matter. Other figures get ordinary human labels, including Ferdinand, who goes by Ted, while the central presences remain elemental. That unevenness feels chosen. Russell and Treisman treat the omission as respect, not as a puzzle to solve. What remains is grave and quietly wondrous: a person and an object imagined across time without either being made smaller.

As heard by us

Karen Russell reads Erdrich's stone-haunted tale with a patience that makes its mythic strangeness feel intimate.

Karen Russell's reading of Louise Erdrich's "The Stone" gives the episode a strange, patient gravity. A woman's life bends around a stone, and the stone, too, seems to acquire a history, a presence, and a kind of dignity.

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