The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Daniyal Mueenuddin Reads Peter Taylor

March 1, 2026·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

Daniyal Mueenuddin explains why Peter Taylor's seemingly dry stories actually hide bloody, violent movements beneath their surface.

1. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast features Daniyal Mueenuddin reading and discussing 'Two Pilgrims' by Peter Taylor, which appeared in the New Yorker in September 1963. 2. Deborah Treisman hosts as fiction editor; Daniyal Mueenuddin, Pakistani-American author of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner) and the 2024 novel This Is Where the Serpent Lives, is the guest reader. 3. The episode asks how Taylor uses his characters' manners and their habit of historical storytelling as a screen against confronting present-day violence. 4. Mueenuddin explains that his mother — who interviewed Katherine Anne Porter for the Paris Review — knew Peter Taylor and that Taylor's stories reminded her of Pakistan because of their shared concern with feudal class structures. 5. He describes first encountering Taylor's work as 'initially a little dry, almost mannered,' but finding that 'the bloodiness of it becomes more and more evident as one gets further in.' 6. The story is set in the mid-1930s, before World War II; its 17-year-old narrator drives his cotton-broker uncle and lawyer Mr. Louder from Memphis to Alabama for a lawsuit the narrator never learns the outcome of. 7. During the two-hour drive through West Tennessee's big cotton counties, the two men talk almost entirely about bird dogs and field trials, interrupting only to narrate historical events attached to the towns they pass. 8. At Waynesboro, the uncle notes that General Winfield Scott halted there on the Trail of Tears in 1838; the two men agree the removal of the Cherokee was cruel but that one must 'judge them by the light of their times.' 9. Cresting a hill, the narrator sees a farmhouse with smoke issuing from a window and geysers rising from the roof; smoldering tree stumps in the yard give the scene what Taylor calls 'an infernal effect.' 10. Both big men — over six feet tall, with 'sizable stomachs beginning just below the breastbone' — leap from the still-moving car, pull their coats over their heads, and sprint toward the burning house 'like two boys.' 11. A young woman rounds the corner of the house and screams at the sight of the hooded men; the narrator, told to calm her, notices her eyes are 'deep-socketed, almost freakishly large' and mismatched — one mottled brown, one gray-green — and reads 'deceit or guilt or suspicion' in them. 12. The men throw furniture, a mirror, a pitcher, and a chamber pot out the windows; when the uncle notices the chamber pot is the size of a beer mug and asks 'Where's your child, ma'am?', the woman's face transforms and she screams that her baby is inside. 13. The uncle and the narrator run through the burning house, which has windows burst from the heat and a hole in the ceiling 'so you could look right up through the flames to the sky,' but find no baby. 14. The farmer returns from the barn with a toddler tucked under one arm 'exactly as though it might be a sack of cornmeal'; he jogs on one shorter leg. 15. When the narrator tells the man his wife thought the baby was inside, the man says 'Like hell she did' under his breath, walks to his wife, and slaps her hard on the back of the head, knocking her off the stump. 16. The two men intervene — 'Lay off that, lay off now' — and the farmer says he had told his wife the baby was in the barn, but that 'she'd lose her head' — implying the cry was deliberate. 17. That evening at an old hotel in Alabama, the two men sit in the lobby repeating the same bird-hunting stories from the car; neither says a word about the burning house or the woman. 18. In the post-reading discussion, Mueenuddin argues that the men's habit of overlaying historical narratives on the landscape — Trail of Tears, Natchez Trace outlaws — means they are unable to see or engage with present violence; the historical stories displace the immediate ones. 19. The episode has a conversational, exploratory tone; Mueenuddin draws parallels to his own novel's themes and Treisman asks structural questions about Taylor's narrative choices. 20. Listeners familiar with Southern American fiction, interested in questions of class and storytelling, or who enjoy a guest reader with an unexpected biographical connection to the author will find the episode compelling.

As heard by us

Daniyal Mueenuddin's Peter Taylor reading turns a burning house scene into quiet, uneasy literary suspense.

The New Yorker: Fiction pairs Daniyal Mueenuddin with Peter Taylor's "Two Pilgrims," introduced by Deborah Treisman with the podcast's usual spare literary framing.

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A calm literary listen built around a story reading, a family connection, and Peter Taylor.

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