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

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Garth Greenwell read his story The Frog King

from the November 26th, 2018, issue of the magazine.

Greenwell's first novel, What Belongs to You, was published in 2016.

It won the British Book Award for debut of the year and was a finalist for several

other prizes, including the Penn Faulkner.

Now here's Garth Greenwell.

The Frog King

It was too early for there to be so much light. So... The Frog King.

It was too early for there to be so much light, so that when I woke my first thought was of snow.

We had pulled the drapes before sleeping, but they did almost nothing to darken the room.

The snow caught scraps from street lamps and neon and cast them back up.

It was bright enough to see R still sleeping beside me,

cocooned in the blanket I had bought after the first night we spent together,

when I woke shivering to find him bound tight in the comforter we were sharing,

swaddled beside me.

He repeated the word all that day, apropos of nothing, swaddled, swaddled, swaddled beside me. He repeated the word all that day,

apropos of nothing, swaddled, swaddled, he had never heard it before, the sound of it made him laugh. He would sleep for hours still. If I let him, he would sleep the whole day.

He loved to sleep in a way I didn't, sliding into it at every chance. It was

like his native element, for as almost always I slept poorly, uneasily, I woke finally with a sense

of relief. He complained if I woke him. I'm on holiday, he would say, let me sleep. But he complained

...