The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Edwidge Danticat Reads Zadie Smith

June 1, 2025·44 min·4 clips

Danticat and Treisman dissect the brutal killing of King Frog and the women's haunting, linked-arm formation.

The frame is quietly ceremonial. Deborah Treisman starts with the Fiction Podcast's monthly ritual, then anchors Zadie Smith's story in the magazine's archive and in June 2016. Edwidge Danticat picked the piece, and Treisman notes the return: Danticat was the podcast's second guest in 2007. Right away, Smith's title starts poking at the room. The first line under discussion seems to keep going from it, stacking arrivals by horseback, foot, car, motorbike, tank, and helicopter. It is a strange little list, and Danticat hears the sentence putting readers where the village is, off balance before anyone fully understands why. She brings in Haiti without overplaying it, remembering villages where strangers are normally welcomed until the stranger feels different. Then the mood flips. Hospitality becomes a group alarm. The reading keeps that collective feeling in the foreground, especially when Smith's village voice remembers women linking arms around the girls. Treisman stays close to the machinery of the opening: grammar, structure, and the charge of a sentence that refuses to behave like a normal sentence. Danticat answers from recognition. The broken form matches a social reality, a place learning in real time that it is vulnerable. At the end, Treisman returns listeners to the archive, including Danticat's earlier Fiction Podcast episodes and the magazine's author-read story podcast.

As heard by us

Edwidge Danticat reads Zadie Smith's village story and traces how welcome can turn into danger.

Edwidge Danticat returns to The New Yorker: Fiction with Zadie Smith's "Two Men Arrive in a Village," a story that begins in motion and alarm: strangers come by foot, motorbike, tank, helicopter, and the village has to understand what kind of arrival this is.

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