Jane Sandor

Since Thanksgiving and leftovers are only days away, for this installment, we bring you a short, salty bite of malls, celebrity, and music that will cheer you up if the economy, or all the pie, is getting you down. Jane Sandor is haunted by ghosts. Very well dressed ghosts with lots of money, syndications, and entourages. If we were to connect the dots in Sandor's version of LA, the famous (and the legion of the once-famous) are persistent specters that insist on behaving as if their world is normal. She explores what it means to be from a city where shine and any-minute-now success are common enough that instead of staring, one constantly curses for having to squint from the glare. Where childhood friends marry Tom Arnold. Where Rachel Hunter dances and dances and dances. And where everything is true in some form of perfection, imperfection, and the blur of the rewarded and the special. And, also, Ice-T is at the mall. Please enjoy this excerpt by Jane Sandor, with music by Jesse Toussaint & Dent Sweat.

Ben Tanzer

Welcome to This Apostrophe Cast. The theme of this week's show is Disappointment. For our reader, Ben Tanzer, specifically: what do you do when you really really like someone, and even maybe idolize them a little bit, and then you meet them, and they don't seem to like you? What do you do if that person could really help your career? Well, Ben Tanzer found out. So please enjoy "Ira Glass Wants To Hit Me," on This Apostrophe Cast.

Josh Maday

This episode we are pleased to present a short story by Josh Maday. In Josh Maday's work, something is not quite right. It keeps you mesemerized and guessing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes funny, but constantly creeping up on you with the sense that this skewed reality is heading somewhere you have always been afraid to go. When we finally understand his design, we realize that it is not Maday's work that is off, rather that he has discovered something wrong with the world. Please enjoy "Work Release" by Josh Maday. 

Celeste Ng

This week we are most pleased to bring you a gorgeous and melancholy tale from Celeste Ng. Mining the platinum veins of the unspoken and unspeakable in family affairs, Ng gives us both the richness of childhood imagination, and the frigid non-negotiable truths of adulthood. Please enjoy this short story by Celeste NG. Click here for an interview with Celeste Ng.

Randall Brown

This episode we are very pleased to present the Flash Fiction of Randall Brown. Like the trout Mr. Brown is so adept at snaring, these strange and muscular tales are fast, sleek, and seem to appear out of nowhere -- bright and striving at end of his taut lines. Please enjoy the odd flash fiction of Randall Brown. 

Caki Wilkinson

Caki Wilkinson's acrobatic brilliance--her nimble rhythms, double-jointed tropes, and gravity-defying rhymes--performs its signature moves in poems of such quick-wit and virtually effortless skill the rapt, delighting observer can only marvel at how, in just the moment it takes to catch one's breath, they break the heart. Ladies and Gentlemen, Children of all Ages, Please enjoy Caki Wilkinson.

Sheila Heti

This episode we are very pleased to bring you Sheila Heti. Both intense and delightful, Heti's work lures us in with brilliant reimaginings of powerful archetypes, then stings us with endings both surprising and inevitable. The result is a literature of the twilight world between reality and fantasy that instructs as it amazes. In "Autobiography of a Clown" Ms. Heti performs a kind of literary origami to fold and twist the story of a clown into a powerful extended meditation on a beautiful world we have lost, and the painful truths that remain the same. Please enjoy "Autobiography of a Clown."