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. In each of these thirty stories and essays, Steve Moncada Street 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.

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