Junot Diaz reads Edwidge Danticat's "Water Child."
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear water child by Edwig Dantika, which was published in the magazine in September of 2000.
Word circulated quickly that Nadine Marie Osnak was not a friendly woman.
Water child was chosen by Juno Diaz.
Diaz's most recent book is the novel the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wilde, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008.
He has published eight short stories in the New Yorker, several of which were included in his collection Drown.
He's a professor of creative writing at MIT, and he joins me from the studios of WGBH in Boston.
Hi, Juno.
Hey, Deborah.
How's everything?
Good.
So when Ed Weech came on the podcast, she chose one of your stories, and now you've chosen one of hers.
So what's up with you two?
I know we have a Hispaniola conspiracy going on.
It's like full scale caribbean collusion.
Well, now, since you bring it up, she was born, and Eduic was born in Haiti, and you were born in the Dominican Republic, and both of you moved to the US as children.
You've both set fiction back home, and obviously there's this geographical and cultural proximity between you.
Do you think that there's also an affinity in your work?