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 Joseph O'Neill read his story,

Kyuka Lake, from the March 3rd

2025 issue of the magazine. O'Neill is the author of one story collection and five novels,

including Netherland, which won the Penn Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2009, The Dog,

and Godwin, which was published last year. Now here's Joseph O'Neill.

Cooke Lake Between the ages of 14 and 54,

Nadia does not for a single minute, not have an admirer or a boyfriend or a better

half. Then Drew, her husband, disappears forever. Each minute of the next six months is a thicket.

The thickets contain police officers, undertakers, insurance agents, attorneys, claims adjusters,

benefits counselors, human resources workers, notaries, friends.

Unforeseen names, Emmeline Cortez, Omar Eaton, Dallery Mason, Clyde Bender, become very important, then very unimportant.

Somewhere in there, her two daughters fly in from and back to their respective lives in Chicago

and Asheville. In early January, Nadia emerges from the last thicket, she drives up to Montreal. Her consciousness has

changed. It, the consciousness, has made her more optically alert. She notices first that a beautiful

spare brownness has befallen the forests, and second, that she could not care less about the brownness of the forests,

not even if she turned into an orangutanang. Orangetangs are on her mind because she has been

watching orangutang videos. Farther north, the sights, the snowy mountain tops, the ice cascades,

the towers on the St. Lawrence, insist on stronger

emotions. These emotions are not in her possession. She does have one encounter with the sublime.

It happens in the Adirondacks. The dense dark of night has gathered on every side, but in the west, above

...