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 Greg Jackson meet his story The Hollow

from the November 29th, 2021 issue of the magazine.

Jackson, a winner of the National Book Foundation's 535 Award, is the author of the story collection

of articles, which came out in 2016. His first novel, The Dimensions of a Cave,

will be published in 2023. Now here's Greg Jackson.

The Hollow.

Gene Valente had been an object of amusement to Jack in his college classmates,

and presumably he had gone on being one to other people ever since.

An awkward, intense, muscle-bound young man, the sort you could imagine crashing through a wall

accidentally. He had had the dim, muddled quality of students recruited to play football

at the school, who either didn't measure up academically or didn't believe they did.

Valente's claim to fame went and made him a figure on campus. One of that subset of maybe

50 classmates who, possessing some extravagance of character, defined the larger composite character

by which the student body understood itself, came from his having abruptly quit football during

sophomore year to take up painting. A passion he had developed apparently out of the blue,

and with a single-minded earnestness that embarrassed his more sophisticated classmates,

who knew to disguise their sincerity. When Valente left the football team,

changed his major and began hanging out with a group of drug e-slackers who loitered around

the visual arts department, like sun-drunk flies. The school paper ran a feature on his

unusual transformation, and he acquired the nickname Bozar. This gut shortened to BA,

...