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

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Andrew Sean Greer read his story,

It's a Summer Day, from the June 19th, 2017 issue of the magazine.

Greer is the author of five books of fiction, including the novels The Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.

A new novel, Less, from which this story was adapted, will come out in July.

Now here's Andrew Sean Greer.

It's a summer day.

Arthur Les recalls intercontinental travel advice

that his old flame Freddy once gave him.

They serve you dinner, you take your sleeping pill,

they serve you breakfast, you're there.

Forearmed, Les boards the aircraft, settles into his window seat, chooses the Tuscan

Chicken, whose ravishing name like that of an internet lover belies the reality mere chicken

and mashed potatoes, and with his thumbolina bottle of red wine takes

a single white capsule. The drug does its duty. He does not remember finishing the Bavarian

cream in its little egg cup, nor the removal of his dinner, nor setting his watch to a new time

zone. Instead, less awakens to a plane of sleeping citizens

under blue prison blankets. Dreamily happy, he looks at his watch and panics. Only two hours have

passed. There are still nine to go. Perhaps Freddy, who's 15 years less as junior,

did not correctly calculate the dosage for an older, more nervous passenger, or, to be precise,

for the middle-aged novelist Arthur Less. On the monitors, a recent American cop comedy

...