Scott McClanahan

This episode we give you Scott McClanahan reading "This is a Story with a Phone Number in It" from his collection, Stories II. Shining a bright beam of wry intelligence into the darkest corners of the down economy, Mr. McClanahan gives the people you might hang up on a voice. You will never answer a call from a telemarketer the same way again. Please enjoy Scott McClanahan.

Shane Jones

In this episode of Apostrophe Cast, Shane Jones brings us excerpts from his debut novel Light Boxes. These mystifying tableaux of Hummel-like not-so-innocents tearing at the edges of a mad ginger-bread world evoke Henry Darger, Edward Gorey, even Lewis Caroll. But in these excerpts where it is always February, in which hordes of maniacal priests curse flight, and children hope to repair the sky, an originality as unique as the winter light of childhood suffuses an unforgettable space Shane Jones has fashioned out of pure imagination. Please enjoy Shane Jones.

Shanthi Sekaran

This episode we bring you Shanthi Sekaran reading from her debut novel, The Prayer Room. Spanning decades, continents, cultures, sexes, generations, classes, and races, The Prayer Room pairs an unlikely English student with a young woman from a traditional Indian family and plops them in Northern California. How they got there and what ensues is storytelling at its best. Please enjoy Shanthi Sekaran.

Matthew Kirkpatrick

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we go underground with Matthew Kirkpatrick. In "Crystal Castles" a little girl who falls into a well and becomes a media-sensation meets her neighbor the mole, who eats dirt in variety of familiar ways and plays Atari. In "Nevada," Kirkpatrick takes us deep below the surface of the Silver State to the site of an underground nuclear test. What happens from there you have to hear to understand. A transcript of "Crystal Castles" is published at Action Yes, but only Apostrophe Cast can capture Kirkpatrick's voice, which is as stony as the Utah landscape he calls home. Please enjoy Matthew Kirkpatrick.

James Warner

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode, we are proud to bring you James Warner, a writer whose brilliant wit delivers bitter truths. Warner's story about a comedian whose routine is simply telling the truth about his disastrous life, starkly illustrates that humor is akin to madness, that laughter is never far from tears, and that the funniest things in life are the saddest seen from a surprising angle. Please enjoy "Hecklers," by James Warner.

Blake Butler

This episode we bring you Blake Butler reading from his new novella, Ever. Performing with a haunting modulation of his voice, Butler takes us spelunking into the depths of an irrational world dislocated from the comforting constrictions of cause and effect. But this is not a fantasy world of pleasure and irresponsibility, this is a world in which the disaster of another inexplicable moment is always occurring, and the high adventure of surviving is a matter of observing with as much sensitivity as possible. Please enter the labyrinthine realm of Blake Butler.

Sheri Reynolds

The new political age has begun, and Sheri Reynolds graces us with a challenging tale of gender and class identity that requires us to think in new ways. This excerpt from her new novel, The Sweet In-Between explores the existence of real people between the ocean and the land, between childhood and adulthood, between genders, between the right and wrong of the law, and between joy and despair. As difficult sometimes as it is to believe, Ms. Reynolds might convince you that even in these difficult interstices, simply existing can be sweet. Please enjoy Sheri Reynolds.

Sam Lipsyte

Welcome to the first Apostrophe Cast of 2009. We are proud to welcome the new year with Sam Lipsyte. Lipsyte is not the first writer to see comedic potential in the human desire to search for wisdom in the behavior of apes, but these letters from chimps to a researcher certainly makes him among the most successful. But more than simply hitting home runs off primatology humor, Lipsyte actually does find wisdom by analyzing the behavior of apes, accusing us all of being chimp-like in the process. We might be reminded that when we choose our closest friends from the animal world, we choose dwarf tigers and miniature wolves. Please enjoy Sam Lipsyte reading his story “Dear Miss Primatologist Lady in the Bushes Sometimes."

Michael Kimball

This episode features Michael Kimball reading from his latest book, Dear Everybody. In this intimate epistolary novel, a mentally ill weather man radiates crystalline awareness and luminous delusion while his family and others who knew him try to make sense of his tragic life. Both gloomy and amusing, Kimball's flurry of short short stories remind us of the necessity of communicating and the daunting difficulty of truly connecting. Please enjoy Michael Kimball.

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.

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. 

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."

Alissa Nutting

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast, and this episode, to the exquisite hideousness of Alissa Nutting. Nutting's suburban feminist gothic prances over manicured lawns through palaces of neglect and dementia in which tracheotomies, self-produced teen porn and routine abortions are rites of passage from a childhood without innocence to an adulthood without maturity. Ms. Nutting's story, "I Feel Nothing 4U," is witty, charming and incredibly disturbing. Please enjoy Alissa Nutting.

Garth Risk Hallberg

Garth Risk Hallberg has written the definitive field guide to the North American Family, a book you can open anywhere for illumination concerning the world's least predictable vertebrates. Please listen as Hallberg reads ten entries from the guide, as bewilderingly interwoven as the obscure ecosystem he describes.

Porochista Khakpour

In the cruelest month, we bring you Porochista Khakpour. The names of her characters are as old as history, and in these selections from her novel, she paradoxically collapses time and space in the experience of one universal family that could only exist in America today. Please enjoy Porochista Khakpour reading from Sons and Other Flammable Objects.

Amina Cain

Like the season itself, Cain's work is by turns sexual and beautiful, then suddenly harsh and cold. In every sentence she invokes a very familiar world of confusion and disappointment giving way to a much stranger world of promise and mystery. Please enjoy a world reborn in the short story Black Wings by Amina Cain

Carson Mell

The year has leapt, clocks have sprung forward, and to steady us, we present Carson Mell reading from his novel, Saguaro, a tale set in that rebel state, Arizona where high noon stays high noon all year round. In Saguaro, Mell gives us the life and adventures of aging musician, Bobby Allen Bird with narration that is utterly individual and never false, revealing to us, with what seems like effortless clarity, moments and impressions that we ourselves might forget to observe but that are life itself. 

Michael Swierz and Ying Xu translate Shu Ting

Shu Ting is the first contemporary female poet to gain mainstream acceptance from the literary establishment in The People's Republic of China. After coming of age during the turbulence of The Cultural Revolution, she was the only woman in "The Misty School" of poetry, whose other prominent members faced the kind of persecution American poets can hardly imagine. Ying Xu and Micheal Swierz are graduate students at the University of New Mexico, who met and forged a relationship over Shu Ting's words. As each helped the other understand the beauty and power of the modern world's two most widely spoken languages, Michael the poet and Ying the Academic, were inspired to record the translations, giving birth to these poems. As William H. Gass has said, "translating is reading, reading of the best, most essential, kind." So we are proud to give you Ying Xu and Michael Swierz reading and translating Shu Ting.

Harry Thomas

On the cusp of Valentine's Day, we bring you a tale of variations, Harry Thomas' "The Most Beautiful Boy in Alabama." Here, Thomas captures the many futures of beauty formed in limited geography: the wild and the fabled, the rebellious and the dull. This story has the makings of a perhaps fantastic Valentine—hot pink nail polish, sweaty hands, and a little fire. But there is more here than that, and in all it would be a dark valentine, indeed. We proudly bring you Harry Thomas.

Joshua Parkinson

For Thanksgiving, we bring you Josh Parkinson. Parkinson writes of a strange and beautiful world a funnier God might have built for his children in his backyard. But as much fun as it is to listen to Josh, something very like the truth is at stake. The story's whimsical exterior is like a candy shell on a diamond. Please Enjoy Josh Parkinson's " Maribeth V. The Government."

Josh is accompanied by the music of Steve Grubbs from Athens, GA, who performs as Little Francis. To learn more about Little Francis, please visit his MySpace page.

Click here to read the Apostrophe Cast interview with Josh Parkinson.

Kristen Iskandrian

With October so near, and still so warm, we bring you Kristen Iskandrian's exploration of the shapes of paper and glue, the hall smells, the return to the place where most of us have been and picked the carpet—school. As she reads from her ever growing project, The School, Iskandrian gives us a precise capture of the intense, mythical and scouring eye that such a place demands as it presents its pockets, wonders, and plain facts about function and future.