Aase Berg and Johannes Goransson read for Apostrophecast

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode Swedish Poet and Critic Aase Berg reads her surrealist poetry, and Johannes Goransson, editor of Action Books, translates. In this way we hear the ancient sing song lilting of a cousin language reminding us that poetry is sound first, and recieve the challenge of Berg's images, both visceral and abstract. Please enjoy Aase Berg and Johannes Goransson.

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.

Caitlin Doyle

This episode we bring you the voice of Caitlin Doyle. In Caitlin Doyle's world Siegfried and Roy never met, Hegel and Breugel discuss obscure bagel-like breakfast options, and Paris is more likely a Hilton than the capital of France. Caitlin Doyle’s poetry moves effortlessly from wit to profundity, a tonal range matched by a remarkable breadth of technical ability. Please enjoy Caitlin Doyle.

Weston Cutter

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you poetry from Weston Cutter. Listening to Weston Cutter read is like enjoying driving alone. The muse speaks to him from posters above the urinals and she awakens him from the roadside as a little boy with visible dreams. Mr. Cutter sometimes has a hard time taking himself seriously, but then, you're having so much fun, it just makes sense to laugh. Please enjoy Weston Cutter. 

Davis Schneiderman

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we hear Davis Schneiderman recording in collaboration with Don Meyer, reading from his forthcoming novel, Drain. In Drain, we are taken down into the wasted basin once home to Lake Michigan, now the subject of a turf war between worm-worshiping outlaw nomads and the bovine inhabitants of corporate sprawl colonies. If the plot sounds surreal, psychedelic and darkly hilarious, then it matches the prose, which plunges and leaps in stylish virtuosity. Please enjoy Davis Schneiderman.

Claudia Smith

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we're pleased to give you the short fiction of Claudia Smith. Smith's stories begin innocently enough, but soon her perfectly selected details lead her characters and listeners alike to the edge of transgression and into the wilderness beyond. Listen if you dare. Please enjoy Claudia Smith.

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.

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.

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."

Richard Siken

Welcome to the one year anniversary of Apostrophe Cast. This episode we are proud to bring you the poetry of Richard Siken. Siken's work is fun and cool and frightening like a boyhood friend who sees no reason to stop wrestling just because one of you has lost a tooth. Please enjoy the poetry of Richard Siken.

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.

Danielle Pafunda

We are proud to present Danielle Pafunda reading a creative lecture. With dizzying erudition, she delights us at the intersection of poetry and scholarship, biology and criticism. The effect is something like a psychedelic sermon. Please enjoy Danielle Pafunda.

Sabrina Orah Mark

Sabrina Orah Mark is a poet-fabulist whose work is part ghost story, part myth, and part sacred text. Each poem is like an artifact from a sealed and secret vault; each poem is itself a sealed and secret vault, beckoning, glistening, and exhorting any would-be opener to enter carefully and to remember what wonder feels like. There is eeriness, and levity, and eerie levity; there is exultant familiarity set against ominous inscrutability. Listen as Sabrina reads from her forthcoming book Tsim Tsum, and introduces us to Walter B., Beatrice, and The Oldest Animal—characters who, like the world they inhabit, are perpetually on the brink of disappearance.

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.

Matt Bondurant

Matt Bondurant is the international bestselling author of The Third Translation. His second novel, The Wettest County in the World, inspired by his favorite relative will be available in the fall. But as spring turns to summer, Bondurant reminds us that the best novelists are also poets. Please enjoy Matt Bondurant.

Brian Connell

Brian Connell is perhaps the best kind of dreamboat--one who is already betting on intimacy's work lasting longer than the glitter of high winds and long kisses. His songs hint at the golden lining of beginnings, but focus more fully on the entropy that he insists is where romance can be trusted in its exposure. These are not odes to melodrama or highliving. Connell's voice is plaintive, and he howls and croons not to sweep you off your feet, but to make your gut swing because he can call you on the lost moments of driving your car, standing at a party, cutting coupons, lost in the whammy of the world and one's place in it. Grandiose. Yes. The stuff of literature. Yes. These are odes to our empty pantries--the ones only holding candied yams and rice--that are
in most homes, both the happy and the sordid.

Nida Sophasarun

Nida Sophasarun's poems refuse to sit still. The liveliness of her mind means that a household's collection of glasses are as worthy of her careful attention as exotic birds in far-flung places. The generosity of these poems means that her readers learn, in the grace of the poems' unfoldings, how the nonhuman elements in our worlds speak to the vulnerability of the individual who is looking for connection. Hers are lines you want to read slowly, out loud, delighting in the words as well as the twists and turns that they lead you through, because Nida Sophasarun is "telling you the truth / even if it's not all // completely true."

Cecily Parks

Cecily Parks’s poems investigate the natural world, the landscape of the American West, and their inhabitants (current, past and imagined). While searching for and extracting signs from their surroundings, many of her speakers call out for something – some force – to move them. In these moments she crafts lines that are at once graceful, haunting and heart-breaking. Reading from her first collection of poems, Field Folly Snow, this is Ms. Cecily Parks.

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.

Mary Phillip Sandy

This week we bring you Mary Phillip Sandy and her explorations in God and Country. As she investigates notions of Freedom, Motorcycles and Christian Rock, her descriptions fall squarely to give us a portrait of the implications and accessories of belief, as well as of her own hometown in rural Maine. We are proud to bring you Mary Phillip Sandy.

MC Hyland

MC Hyland is a mix of the austere and the bright. Her work plays on hard travels and the less bruised expectations preceding them, while also collaging the wild and the far away (tigers, serpents, convertibles, prophets). In all, Hyland's poems make us glad that the world is as severe as it is, just so that her eye can fall on it and tell us about its sharp edges. We are pleased to bring you MC Hyland and these wonders, as she prints a broadside on a letterpress late into the Alabama night.

Daniel Groves

Groves' work is superlative in his generation: it is both the most traditional, in that its roots extend the widest and deepest into our tradition, and the most relevant, with its gaze fixed on the vanities and verities of today; it is both the smartest and, at times, the silliest. Even as these verses befuddle us, a superficial examination will certify them as the wittiest, but anyone who loves poetry will recognize that, though he eschews sentimentality, Groves has written some of the saddest poems of the new century. We are the proudest of podcasts to bring you Daniel Groves.

Amy King

It's Christmastime, and what better way to celebrate than with good food, good wine, a good friend ... and her poems. In this reading, Amy King takes us to dinner, but it is not bread alone that we enjoy. King's poems don't simply satisfy, they challenge us to reconsider our assumptions about language itself.

Donna Stonecipher

As the holidays begin we are proud to present Donna Stonecipher. Her poetic narratives suggest the possibilities of unconscious life, experienced as we sleep, whether dreams or nightmares. But listeners will find that Stonecipher’s affecting images are the products of an acutely awake and aware existence. They are, in fact, hyper-real. She allows us a rare glimpse of the sublime that appears only when we are brave enough to contemplate so thoroughly as to overcome those fictions that conveniently insulate our psyches and create our false notions of “reality." Please enjoy Donna
Stonecipher.

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.

BJ Hollars

In the first half of November we are treated to the wise domestic humor of B.J. Hollars. A father's patience with a mouse is set against the background of a family losing patience with him. As he loses his eldest daughter to a boy friend, he must struggle with his squandered authority and his own impotent jealousy. Please enjoy "infestation."

Ryan Wilson

At the end of October, as working adults around America put serious thought into what Halloween Costume to wear, it is appropriate that we listen to Ryan Wilson, a poet who finds the place between past and present, maturity and immaturity, childhood and adulthood, where most of us live. He has returned with riches. In the tradition of Donald Justice and Stanley Plumley, we give you Ryan Wilson.

Richard Nathan

In the middle of October we hail Richard Nathan, a British adventurer who would be right at home with the likes of Robinson Crusoe or Dr. Livingstone. But his wilderness isn't to be found in the midst of far-away continents nor deep in a romantic past. His wilderness is North America and some of its longest-inhabited regions. His time is now. Mr. Nathan took a walk from Canada to Mexico. His adventure just might change the way you think about our country. Take this journey with Richard Nathan.

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.

Mark Leidner

In the midst of September we are proud to bring you the work of poet Mark Leidner. It is difficult to describe Leidner's work without using the word "uncanny," and yet he begins so simply. His poems are deceptively conversational, as if talking to a friend at a bar or over the phone, but before you know it your brilliant friend has stopped kidding around and has lapsed into pure poetics. We hope you enjoy Mark Leidner's Apostrophecast.

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Joan Biddle

As August ends, Joan Biddle reads poems of heartbreaking delicacy and intimacy. It might seem redundant to describe a poet's work as intimate . . . until you've heard Joan Biddle. Describing the French countryside and crab rangoon with the same care and wonder, Biddle invites us into a world as familiar as a favorite bathrobe and yet even "boners" achieve poetic luminosity. Miss Biddle's poetry makes friends and confidants of its readers.

Ned Oldham Launches Apostrophecast

In our first podcast, Ned Oldham of The Anomoanon graces us with a previously unreleased track, "The Wind," from the album "Songs From A Child's Garden of Verses." In this inspired project, Oldham has set Robert Louis Stevenson's deceptively simple poetry to music, and created an aural world both sublime and eerily familiar. Just as in Stevenson's poems, the apparent innocence of childhood is a conceit used to explore the wonder and melancholy of a world before, or beyond, dreary explanation. In "The Wind," a child considers the nature of air in motion with biblical sincerity. Oldham captures the emotion in sound. No mean feat. As the philosopher said, "Childhood is not a phase of life and it does not end." Listen to "The Wind" and Join us again on the 29th of August for poet Joan Biddle's Apostrophecast.

Dandy Elf

This week Dandy Elf reads from his new book Living Under the Mushroom. In the segment, he looks at his time as a shoe leather tanner. Elf is the author of 16 previous memoirs, the recipient of an NEA Grant, and the first person to be named a MacArthur genius fellow twice. Please find out more about Elf at his website www.littleman.com.