This is The Author's Voice, New Fiction from The New Yorker.

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

On this episode of the author's voice, we'll hear Zadie Smith read her story,

Two Men Arrives in a Village, from the June 6 and 13, 2016 issue of the magazine.

Smith is the author of five novels, including Swingtime, which will be published in November.

She's been publishing fiction in The New Yorker since 1999.

Now here's Sadie Smith.

Two men arrive in a village.

Sometimes on horseback, sometimes by foot, in a car or a stride motorbikes, occasionally

in a tank, having strayed far from the main phalanx,

and every now and then from above in helicopters.

But if we look at the largest possible picture, the longest view,

we must admit that it is by foot that they have mostly come,

and so in this sense, at least, our example, is representative.

In fact, it has the perfection of parable.

Two men arrive in a village by foot and always a village, never a town. If two men arrive

in a town, they will obviously arrive with more men and far more in the way of supplies, that simple

common sense. But when two men arrive in a village, their only tools may be their own

dark or light hands depending, though most often they will have in these hands a blade of some

kind, a spear, a long sword, a dagger, a flick knife, a machete, or just a couple of rusty

old razors. Sometimes a gun. It has depended and continues to depend. What we can say with

surety is that when these two men arrived in the village, we spotted them at once, at the horizon

...