In many parts of the world, a theater that features puppet shows is known as a balloon theater. The title of this collection invokes an image of puppets under the control of a master.

Each of these thirty stories and essays presents an immaculately described, fully inhabited world of authentic characters crossing class and cultural strictures to resist the forces that would control them. A failed musician travels to Russia seeking a wife and rediscovers his inspiration.

A SCUBA diver remembers how to see. Two men, one successful, one a failure, meet in a mall and reawaken their long-past rivalry.

A cocky high school student who is humiliated in a classroom peer-pressure experiment finds grace and forgiveness. A tough but well-adjusted kid finds poignancy in the home life of a classmate who is neither tough nor well-adjusted.

An expatriate teacher who has left his family to engage his true self is unsettled by a cancer diagnosis. A writer in his “last few inches” of life engages his dreadful circumstance with lyrical clarity.

In Balloon Theater, Steve Moncada Street explores the misunderstandings, satisfactions, self-deceptions, betrayals, and eventual (if tentative) understandings of well-intending people trying to discover their own particular frequencies. .