This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treasman, Fiction Editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Aishagul Savash read her story intimacy from the October 20th, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Savash is the author of five books, including the novels White on White and The Anthropologists,

a non-fiction work, The Wilderness, and the story collection Long Distance, which was published earlier this year.

Now here's Ayshigl Savash.

Intimacy I first became acquainted with the author through mutual friends from our part of the world.

Even though they were all well established in the city, they hadn't given upon the old ways.

They introduced newcomers to the group, helped them with logistics, finding housing, doctors, whenever they could.

I too had benefited from their warm welcome when I moved to the city,

even though I was usually suspicious of such generosity, not of receiving it, but of offering it up,

as if such open-handedness might make a fool of me. It was a surprise that the author agreed to

meet with me. In fact, he was the one who

suggested it. I was far enough along in my career to know that people like him didn't usually have

time for such meetings. I could now re-evaluate my disappointment of earlier years when writers I admired had politely declined to read my books,

or to meet me following a public event that had brought them to the city.

At one time, I had felt angry at them.

I took their refusal a selfishness, a hardness toward the world.

But years had passed, and though I had not gone as far

in my writing as I might once have dreamed, I too received messages from strangers, readers,

countrymen, students, who wish to connect, to discuss, to marvel at all that we had in common,

and I had no qualms about ignoring them.

...