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

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear most in Hamid read his story, The Face

and the Mirror, in the May 16th, 2022 issue of the magazine.

Hamid is the author of four novels, including How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and

Exit West, a winner at the LA Times Book Prize.

A new novel, The Last White Man, from which this story was adapted, will be published

in August.

Now here's most in Hamid.

The Face in the Mirror.

One morning, Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable

brown.

This dawned upon him gradually, and then suddenly, first as a sense as he reached for his phone,

that the early light was doing something strange to the color of his forearm.

Subsequently, and with a start, as a momentary conviction that there was somebody else in

bed with him, male, darker.

But this, terrifying though it was, was surely impossible.

And he was reassured that the other moved as he moved, was in fact not a person, not

a separate person, but was just him, Anders, which caused a wave of relief.

For if the idea that someone else was there was only imagined, then of course, the notion

that he had changed color was a trick too, an optical illusion, or a mental artifact,

born in the slippery halfway place between dreams and wakefulness, except that by now

...