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 Last Night by James Salter.

He had known her when she was in her 20s long-legged and innocent.

Now he had slipped her as in a burial of sea beneath the flow of time.

Last night was published in The New Yorker in 2002.

It was chosen by Thomas McGuin, seven of whose stories have been published in the magazine.

McGuin's many novels include the Bushwack piano, 92 in the shade, and the cadence of grass.

He's also written screenplays in several books of nonfiction.

He joins me from the studios of Peak Recording and Sound in Bozeman, Montana.

Hi, Tom.

Good morning, Debra.

So James Salter has published a couple of nonfiction pieces in the magazine.

But Last Night is the only story of his that's been in The New Yorker so far.

When you chose it, were you just looking for a story by Salter?

Or was this story in particular very memorable for you?

Well, I picked the story because it's some ways because I wanted to find out why I'd been so moved by it.

I wanted to find out if I had been reasonably moved.

And so if one I kind of wanted to pick apart rather than just being kind of crushed by it,

because it's a very powerful story, I think.

No, before he became a writer, Salter was a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force,

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