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The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Yiyun Li Reads William Trevor

May 1, 2025·1 hr 11 min·5 clips
William Trevor fixed a curtain so Yiyun Li could see flowers without the sun in her eyes—a short story writer's attention to detail.
Deborah Treisman opens with the podcast's familiar setup. A guest writer chooses a New Yorker story from the archive, and Yiyun Li chooses William Trevor's "The Piano Tuner's Wives." The premise is sharp enough on its own. Violet married the piano tuner when he was young. Belle marries him later, after he once rejected her. Treisman names that wound before the reading starts, and it matters, because Belle's happiness arrives with humiliation still attached. Then the story takes over. Its seaside world feels autumnal, private, and uneasy. Belle wants the ordinary comfort of marriage, but the places she visits with her husband already belong partly to Violet, from boarding-house voices to walks remembered near the strand. His kindness is real, which makes it worse. Even the offer of a television feels tender and slightly bruising, because it shows how often he still compares Belle with Violet's habits. Trevor keeps the drama indirect. Courtesies, repeated phrases, and small scenic details say more than a confession would. Belle notices plenty and says little. The lighthouse visit makes that doubleness sharper, as a man who knew the first wife receives the second and the poured whiskey turns memory into company. Treisman closes by placing Li among her recent books and pointing listeners back to the larger New Yorker fiction archive and related story podcasts.

As heard by us

Yiyun Li reads William Trevor's remarriage story as a quiet study of love, substitution, and the first wife's lingering claim.

Yiyun Li returns to William Trevor on The New Yorker: Fiction with "The Piano Tuner's Wives," a story that begins with a clean hurt: Violet married the piano tuner when he was young, Belle when he was old, after he had once chosen Violet over her.

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