David Peak

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you a reading from David Peak's unpublished novel, The River Through the Trees. Good fiction makes strange places seem familiar and familiar places seem strange; it forces us to empathize with enemies, and reexamine our friends; it allows us to consider the unthinkable, and understand the inscrutable. David Peak's reading does all this and more. Please enjoy David Peak.

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.