Discuss “The Silence” by Zadie Smith

[We meet every Sunday when there's a new New Yorker, and we will meet on July 13, because the July 7 & 14 issue is the annual Fiction issue]

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, July 6, 2025 at 4 pm CDT/5 pm EDT, ont Zoom, we will discuss this week’s New Yorker Fiction story from the issue dated July 7 & 14, 2025: “The Silence” by Zadie Smith. The story was inspired by a Grace Paley New Yorker story (see below). The author has been published in The New Yorker many times since her debut in 1999.

Note: despite the two-week date on this issue, it is the 2025 Fiction issue, so we'll have a chance to meet with a new story next week.

1. Read “The Silence” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker's paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Alas, no audio this week.
3. The author interview, “Zadie Smith on Grace Paley’s 'My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age'” is at this link. The story that inspired "The Silence" is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

"Zadie Smith FRSL* (born Sadie; 25 October 1975) is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth*, published in 2000, was an immediate best-seller and won a number of awards. Smith became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.*

“Early life and education
“Zadie Smith was born on 25 October 1975 in Willesden, north-west London, to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith, who was 30 years his wife's senior. At the age of 14, she changed her name from Sadie to Zadie.”
- from Wikipedia's Zadie Smith page, footnote marks excised and asterisk added

* FRSL: Fellow, Royal Society of Literature