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

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

On this week's episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Chimamanda in Gozi Adichie read her story Chuka from the February 17th and 24th

2025 issue of the magazine. Adichia's novels include half of a yellow sun which won the orange

prize for fiction and Americana, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. A new novel, Dream

Count, from which this story was adapted,

will be published in March. Now here's Chimamanda in Goze Adichie.

Chuka

I have always longed to be known, truly known by another human being.

Sometimes we live for years with yearnings that we cannot name, until a crack appears in the sky

and widens and reveals us to ourselves, as the pandemic did, because it was during lockdown that I

began to sift through my life and give names to things long unnamed. I vowed at first to make

the most of this collective sequestering. If I had no choice but to stay indoors, then I would oil my thinning

edges every day, drink eight tall glasses of water, jug on the treadmill, sleep long luxurious hours,

and pat-rich serums on my skin. But only days in, I was spiraling in a bottomless well.

Words and warnings swirled and spun,

and I felt as if all human progress was swiftly reversing

to an ancient stage of confusion. Don't touch your face. Wash your

hands. Don't go outside. Spray disinfectant. Wash your hands. Don't go outside. Don't touch your face.

Did washing my face count as touching? I always used a face towel, but one morning my palm grazed my cheek

and I froze, the tap water still running. I was alone in my house in Maryland, in suburban silence.

The eerie roads bordered by trees that themselves seemed stilled. No cars drove past. I looked out and saw a herd of

...