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

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Thomas McGuane read his story, Balloons, from the May 10th, 2021 issue of the magazine.

McGuane has published more than a dozen books of fiction,

including the story collection Scallatin Canyon, Crow Fair,

and Cloudbursts collected and new stories, which came out in 2018.

Now here's Thomas McGuain. Billoons.

Ten years before Joan Krebs left her husband, Roger, and moved back to Cincinnati.

I spotted the two of them dining alone by the bricked up fireplace and the old eagle grill.

She was a devoted daughter, her father, a sportsman with well-bred dogs, who arrived once a year

to peer at Roger and inspect the marriage. Roger always saluted his father-in-law's departure with the

words, good riddance. In those days,

Joan stirred up our tone with her air of dangerous glamour and the sense that her marriage to

Roger couldn't possibly last. It was nothing wrong with Roger, but talking to him was laborious.

As the founder of the once famous nomad agency, he sold high-end

recreational properties to members of his far-flung society, and he had taken on the language of

his clients. After he described a drought-stricken, abandoned part of the state as a, quote,

tightly held neighborhood, he came to be state as a, quote, tightly held neighborhood.

He came to be known as tightly held Krebs or T.H.

In the areas of Montana that were subject to his creative hyperbole, people bought God-Aulful

properties, believing that they were unacquired taste.

Renowned for his many closings, Roger was on the road a lot.

...