This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, 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 Gallatin Canyon by Thomas McGuin, which was published in the New Yorker in January of 2003.
The road stretched before me like an arrow.
There was only enough of it left before Rigby for me to say, perhaps involuntarily, I wonder if we shouldn't just get married.
Louise quickly looked away.
The story was chosen by Thea Obrat, who is the author of two novels, the Tiger's wife and Inland.
Hi, Thea.
Hi, Deborah.
So you said when we first talked about doing a podcast episode that you wanted to read a western story.
Why was that?
I think that there's a renewed interest in literature of the west and also, also by authors who hail from the west.
And this story, I think, is so deeply rooted in landscape and space and a certain kind of mentality of the mountain west, which it both honors and excoriates.
I've loved the story ever since I first read it, and it just feels very emblematic of the space to me.
Now.
When the story came out in 2003, you were a teenager.
Did you read it then?
I did not.
I'm ashamed to say I read it some years ago.