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

I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.

On this episode of the writer's voice,

we'll hear Thomas McGuain read his story

Thaddaway from the May 27th

2024 issue of the magazine.

McGuain has published more than a dozen books of fiction, including the story collection

Scalliton Canyon, Crow Fair, and Cloudburst collected in new stories which came out in 2018.

Now here's Thomas McQuane.

That away, the two sisters were growing old now, but they went on gazing toward Palm Springs from this windblown prairie town as though to Mecca. Each was a widow, Mildred thrice over. Her last husband had died after

decades of work as a brakeman for the Burlington Northern. And now the sisters, if not on public assistance were close to it

and despite their uncertain compatibility forced to live together in the same

house the house where they had grown up with a brother whose success had once been the town's biggest story.

Now Cooper lived in Palm Springs within walking distance of the former home of Lucille

Ball and Desi Arnaz and had among his conveyances a helicopter with a portrait of him

twirling allariat painted on the side which he used for visits to the chain of furniture stores he owned.

Although for a time Cooper's hometown cited him when listing its glories recording a polluter unwelcome elsewhere.

He never came back.

He didn't remember his origins fondly.

He remembered being pitied and ridiculed, ashamed of his shiftless

parents and their binges. Age and shared genetics made the sisters look enough alike

that though each four shapeless

...