This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from The New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

Each month, we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month, we're going to hear Two Men arrive in a village by Zadie Smith,

which appeared in the New Yorker in June of 2016. How proud we are in retrospect of our women

who stood in formation, arms linked the one to the next, and a ring around our girls, as the tall, dim man became agitated and spat on the floor.

The story was chosen by Edwidge Dantigat, whose works of fiction include the story collections Everything Inside and The Dewbreaker, both of which won the story prize.

Hi, Edwidge.

Hi, Deborah.

It's really, really nice to have you back on the podcast.

It's nice to be back.

It's been a while.

It's been a while, and I will never forget that you were the second guest ever on the podcast back in 2007.

And people weren't even doing that many podcasts back then.

Yeah.

So what made you want to talk about this story, Two Men Arrived in a Village, by Zadie Smith?

Well, I read the story when it was first published in the magazine, and I read the interview

that accompanied it.

And, you know, I'm interested in all things, Annie Smith. I'm like a

big fan. And this year I started thinking about it because, you know, in my birthplace in Haiti,

there's so many situations like that right now where many young men are walking in villages and causing terrible harm

and harming women and harming children and displacing people. Then, like, as someone who, you know,

...