Apostrophe Cast

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you a reading from Sasha Fletcher's novella, When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds, available from Mud Luscious Press. In antiquity, Apocalypses were a thriving genre. Their creation has revived in our own time as never before, but Sasha Fletcher's verve for celebrating the absurdity of an existence we can't fully explain in the face of an oblivion we can't explain at all is less a call to repentance than a cause for celebration itself. Please enjoy, Sasha Fletcher.

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 This episode we bring you a reading from David Peak's unpublished novel, The River Through the Trees.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.

This episode Apostrophe Cast is pleased to give you a peak at D.W. Lichtenberg's germinating novel, Time Flies in Ways. In this excerpt, D.W. Lichtenberg is a kind of reluctant hypnotist -- reluctant because he is just trying to tell you the truth, and he can't help that it is so easy to hypnotize you. He just can't help it. His words just keep flowing and flowing. He just keeps telling you the truth, and you keep listening and listening. And before you know it, he's got you, and you are enjoying, D.W. Lichtenberg.

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode Heather Cousins opens the cellar door and ushers us down into the potato room. With a deceptive clarity, Cousins' voice leads us deeper and deeper into the darkness with meticulous details, like "practical, good girl underwear." But soon, we are lost under the surface of this bright, normal world in places where light, no matter how bright, cannot make the way forward clear. Mercifully, Cousins provides us with new eyes to see this world, like "two fat pearls." Please enjoy Heather Cousins reading from her debut collection, . Something in the Potato Room, available from Kore Press.

This episode we bring you the melancholy music of Erika Moya. Painted in breaths measured out like brushstrokes, Moya's images build rich and lonely dwellings in a landscape where it often rains, beautiful lovers are drowning in the distance, and there is more moonlight than sunlight. The listener may want to console Ms. Moya, but we must be grateful that in quiet moments of sometimes difficult observation she has found splendours. Please enjoy Erika Moya.

This episode we bring you the magical mind of Adam Mansbach, reading from his new novel Rage is Back. Mansbach's sleight of hand is invisible whether he is conjuring forth the voice of Dondi, the drug-dealing scion of a high art graffiti writing dynasty, or bending time to put him, and us with him, into tomorrow before we can blink an eye. But under these dazzling effects, it is Mansbach's rhapsodies that stop the show, from the proper way to savor high grade marijuana to effortlessly skewering the architecture of race and class that constricts his character's will. Please enjoy Adam Mansbach.

This episode David Goodwillie takes us underground with domestic terrorists in Manhattan, reading an excerpt of his novel American Subversive, out now from Scribner. Infiltrating the Mall of Manhattan through the eyes of a young woman radicalized by her brother's death in Iraq, the glossy surfaces of the city fracture as army brats gone rogue plan to bomb boutiques from the warrens where illegal immigrants do the invisible living New York no longer advertises. Please enjoy David Goodwillie.

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we are pleased to present the triumphant mutations excerpted from Lily Hoang's forthcoming novel Evolutionary Revolution, out this July from Les Figues Press. From brothers who can wear the same shirt at the same time to asexual mermen, from sideshow freak stage mothers to a girl with truly unforgettable thighs, Hoang gives us a world that refuses to stay in the safe and comfortable shapes we have come to expect. Please enjoy, Lily Hoang.

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you the brand-spanking new bible stories of Bryan Furuness, in which Lucifer is a precocious little boy and Jesus is his accident-prone buddy. The suburban children of this unholy scripture effortlessly humiliate their mortal parents, who lock them out on summer days, and paint moustaches on their portraits. Please enjoy the inspired work of Bryan Furuness.

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we invite you to explore the world of poet Danielle Sellers reading from her collection, Bone Key Elegies available from Main Street Rag. Inhabited by tribes of beautiful, semi-wild children destined to suffer and become wise, its beaches and cities shine by the light of her radiant details. And at the center, all roads lead to the kingdom of her family, magnified into myth, ruled by a daughter who would scold gods and dogs alike. Please enjoy Danielle Sellers.

This episode we bring you Joseph Young reading from Adam Robinson's collection, Adam Robison and Other Poems available from Narrow House, and Adam Robinson reading from Joseph Young's collection of microfiction, Easter Rabbit, available from Publishing Genius. Are they two ventriloquists using each other as dummies or two dummies using each other as ventriloquists? Who gets to sit on who's lap? Whatever the arrangement may be, the voices and visions they conjure from each other's mouths will astound and inspire. Please enjoy Joseph Young and Adam Robinson.

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we are proud to bring you Carol Novack, Publisher and Editor of Mad Hatter's Review. Her multimedia, musical concoctions seem to spring directly from her mind, and their array of sensations and provocations will make an indelible impression on yours. Please enjoy Carol Novack.

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.

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. In The Mothering Coven, Joanna Ruocco builds us a vacation cottage in a mad village inhabited by brilliant kooks such as Mrs. Borage, who mixes metaphysics with the chores, and ace reporter, Duncan Michaels, whose articles are never read. When it is time for you to leave this place, we think you will find the characters following you. Please enjoy Joanna Ruocco.

We are pleased to commence the New Year with a reading from Kristina Marie Darling. Ms. Darling effortlessly spins philosophy into poetry, weaving high concept with flights of lyricism that both delight and challenge. Please enjoy Kristina Marie Darling.

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.

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.

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. 

This episode we bring you excerpts from J. A. Tyler's novella, A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed, forthcoming from fugue state press in 2011. In these passages Tyler moves from meditations on comforting a lover fretting over lost luggage into the cosmically signifcant love and longing of a He for a She until the lovers' striving blasts all measures of time and space. Tyler explores the truths of relationships we understand but cannot explain as the smallest features of life become the occasion for poetry. Please enjoy J.A Tyler.

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.

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode Claire Hero reads from her first full-length collection of poetry, Sing, Mongrel, available from Noemi Press. In Sing, Mongrel, as she walks us like little children through a dark forest, Hero draws the inner beast out from hiding to serve as her muse, conjuring forth songs gruesome, honest and darkly wondrous. Please enjoy Claire Hero.

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you an excerpt from a novella of prose poetry by Molly Gaudry, due out from Mud Luscious Press this December. In We Take Me Apart, Gaudry draws on Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and familiar fairy tales to create a jagged modernist narrative as beautiful and dangerous as broken stained glass. Please enjoy Molly Gaudry.

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we are pleased to bring you two seasons from a shepherd's calendar by poet Nate Pritts. Pritts's third collection, The Wonderfull Yeare, will see print in 2010, but its timeless quality speaks to every date. Just as the summer dies, it is right that we bring you his 14 poem cycle, "Sonnets for the Fall," and follow it with the long poem in three parts with interludes "Winter Constellations." Please enjoy the poetry of Nate Pritts.

We have all heard rumors that literature is dying, but every so often one reads a new journal that renews one's faith in the future. The Collagist is just such a journal, and the contributors Charles Jensen, reading five poems from Nanopedia, Kevin Wilson, reading from the Big Book of Forgotten Lunatics, and Kim Chinquee reading three pieces of flash fiction, have written such good work that one must believe the rumors of literature's demise are premature. Please enjoy these readings from the contributors to The Collagist. 

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you the subversive pastorals of Allison Titus. In the tradition, pastorals refer to the edenic tranquility of shepherds with nothing better to do than compose lyrics. But Allison Titus's shepherdess sees ruined factories on the horizon, lame stock to be tended to, and fences as far as the eye can see, reminding us that in North America shepherds and cowboys sing sad songs indeed. Please enjoy the poetry of Allison Titus.