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 Thomas McGuane read his story, Riddle,

from the November 13th, 2017 issue of the magazine.

McGuane has published 13 books of fiction,

including the story collection Scallatin Canyon and Crow Fair.

A new volume, titled Cloudbursts, collected in new stories,

will be published next year.

Now here's Thomas McGuane.

Riddle.

I must have been renting a place on 8th Street in Livingston at the time, so that I could meet clients in town.

My home was several miles south toward Gardner.

I was an architect, and I had a model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water which I built in

school on a library table in the front room.

Most of my clients thought it was my design.

The 8th Street house was on an elevated lot facing the old sewing machine shop.

I never went in there, but I recall that they sold machines with a foreign name

that were said to hem, darn, baste, and stitch back when people did those things instead of just

throwing stuff away. Eventually, the place went out of business. I had only the ground floor of the house.

The upstairs was occupied by a schoolteacher who entered her apartment by way of a very

unsafe-looking exterior staircase that unulated and squealed with her steps.

After drinking at the Wrangler until closing time one cold November night, i wandered around to main street which was empty at that hour except for a crippled old cowboy who was making his way toward the railroad yards

...