This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Debra Treesman, 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 Cowboy by Thomas McWayne.

The old fella had several peculiarities to him, most of which I've forgotten.

He was one of the few fellas I ever heard of who would actually jump up and down on his hat if he got mad enough.

The story was chosen by Sam Lipsight, the author of the Ask, Homeland, and other novels.

His latest story, Deniers, is in the May 2nd issue of the magazine.

Hi, Sam.

Hi.

So McWayne published his first novel, The Sporting Club, in the late 60s, and he's put out 11 books since then, including last year's novel, Driving on the Rim,

and the Collection Gallatin Canyon, which includes the story that we're looking at today.

When did you start reading him?

Well, I remember discovering him in my late teens.

I came upon a copy of the Bushwack piano, and that book really excited me and gave me sort of a sense of the possibilities of fiction at that time, and still today.

So then I just grabbed everything I could and followed his career, and as he wrote more books, I read them.

And so I've been a big fan for a long time.

Did your parents have the book kicking around? Was that where you found it?

No, it was one of those vintage contemporaries.

If you remember, and I was a kid, I was 16 in a bookstore, and I just saw it, and it had a cool cover, and I didn't really know anything else except it's a novel with a cool cover, and by bought it, that was it.

And what was it about McWayne that so appealed to your 16-year-old self?

I think that it was the fact that he was writing fiction that was funny, but was also serious about sentence making and language,

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