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 Zadie Smith read her story The Silence

from the July 7th and 14th, 2025 issue of the writer's voice will hear Zadie Smith read her story The Silence from the July

7th and 14th, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Smith, a winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Penn Audible Literary Service

Award, among others, is the author of two short story collections and six novels, including

NW, Swingtime, and The Fraud, which was published in 2023.

Now here's Sadie Smith.

The Silence

A great silence opened up inside her, but that made it sound more dramatic than it was.

It happened by degrees, creeping up slyly.

And at times, in certain places and situations, it was expected and welcome, on a long walk,

or when a person confessed something pitiful, or at a

funeral, or a party. In all those places where once she'd had a lot to say, too much honestly,

now there was this silence and she became a far better listener. Not consciously, that was just

one of the consequences.

It wasn't a Zen silence or an enlightened silence or anything she'd worked to achieve.

It was only a sort of blank. Once on a mini-break, she'd spotted a sentence,

graffitied on a bridge in Paris. The world is everything that is the

case. It was written in English and stuck in her mind. The silence felt like that. It spoke for itself,

but it could also offend and disappoint others the same way the world itself never seems enough for some people.

...