Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast

I know, I know, I'm late for Bloomsday, and at this point, I thought you'd have forgotten. My friends, why haven't you forgotten? I mean, you surely know that the world is breaking the sound barrier with how fast it seems to be going where this cozy handbasket might be taking it, wherever it is handbaskets go.

Some of you may remember the sweet sounds of Patrick Scott from earlier Miette Bailouts. When I put out the call for guest readers, he was quick to the case. But Patrick's a busy guy, now that he's a famous filmmaker, and so when you listen to his lustrous interpretation of Flannery O'Connor, you will pick up the occasional whirr of what seems a loud computer fan...

If you know Sam Jones from various internet outlets, you will be neither surprised nor disappointed that he chose to read Walser for his guest stint here. However, if you know Sam Jones from various internet outlets alone, you might not know...

The voice you are about to hear is not my own, though today's guest narrator insists his distinctive lilt can be attributed to "equal parts whisky, speed, and diction practice." Which means that it's probably closer to my voice than we'd think at first listen. And so, I would appreciate no murmured speculation on rhinoplastic nasal blockage or testosterone injections on my part. For the next month or two...

I know, it's been a while. I've been trying to Have A Summer over here, an effort thwarted by an adverse reaction to allergens purportedly getting caught up in butterfly currents on the other side of the world. Either that, or it's the Romantic Lady Writer's Disease, which would be fine by me, inasmuch as any anachronistic way to go down is fine by me. But I do wish it'd forestall another decade.

Bloomsday is here again, as you surely know, and as is my ritual, here’s another story from the Dubliners. This is the 7th such reading, and sometimes, the thought of keeping this up for eight more years to finish the collection is one I tend to avoid. But to keep things spicy in the meantime ... Read more

I yanked tonight's story from The Best of American Short Stories 1980, a volume edited by the great Stanley Elkin. If you take one look at it, you'll see that 1980, while not considered a boon year for American fiction, perhaps should be. Donald Barthelme, Mavis Gallant, William H. Gass, Elizabeth Hardwick Grace Paley, Peter Taylor, and I'm thinking...

Whenever an internet missive or blip crosses my screen with Kyle Minor's name attached, I open it up in awe of his apparently continual reading and writing and thinking acutely about the finer side of the bookish life. I don't know whether this relentless pursuit of the craft can be had without a truckload of drugs, but I also think the drugs necessary for his task probably haven't even been concocted yet. You could get your brain into top form fast by looking closely at the right 2/3 of his legendary reading list...

I hadn't read Frank O'Connor's stories in a very long time-- he fell into the gutter of authors I'd studied to a point of boredom as a student, and while I've spent a good deal of my adult life sweeping those gutters and asking absolution from what I've swept up, it took a while to get to him. I'd associated it so closely, in the vast netherlands of the juvenilia of my headspace, with hackneyed Catholic guilt tropes in Comic Sans all the way through...

Fernando Pessoa has been a long-standing point of not insignificant fixation in the writerly pursuits of Your Faithful (If Not Schedularly Published) Storyteller, for reasons that will be forehead-smackingly obvious to some of you. As for the rest of you, rather than stand around in the dark, I welcome you to take a guess. Should you want that guess to be educated,

There's a quite decent independent bookstore in the town in which I'm staying this week, a bookstore that will be closing soon for all the usual reasons. I plan to spend a fair amount of time later this morning vulturing my way through this store, and walk out picking my teeth with unsold reading lights and hauling overstuffed bags full of firesale booty that can no way be described as "carrion" no matter how many ways I stretch the metaphor...

Are your toes frozen? I hope not. Especially if you're as big of a pansy about the weather as I am. Because the weather knows this about me and is a relentless jerk about this, my revenge is in the form of a seaside adventure story based largely on southern waters. Which is, admittedly, analogous to bringing double your milk money to school and handing one over freely to the big bully. But I don't know how to kick the weather where it deserves to be kicked, so this is the...

Well, here we are having taken yet another circumnavigatory Gregorian tour together, and I hope that you've put away your party hats and crackers and are back to the grind, having disregarded all the unreasonable expectations you made of yourselves for the coming months. Because I have nothing but sympathy: it's too cold to get up and run ten miles and do the laundry and tidy the front garden and write your best auntie a letter every morning. I understand. Stay in bed. Read a good book. Listen to a good story.

If you've been listening for a while, you may know that I have an unfortunate habit of whining, incessantly and irrepressibly, in those months when the cold has rendered my extremities indistinguishable from assorted varieties of freezer section meats. It's a problem I've known about, it's one that those around me suffer in kind on behalf of all of you, and it's one that I'd love to kick, if only I inject some lock de-icer into these knees. Maybe anti-freeze would work?

This story is brought to you by a very nice man named Jake, who requested it a while ago, and when I read Philip K Dick instead last week, expressed some disappointment.

I got kicked in the inspiration after that bit of Nabokov (he has that effect), and was determined to give you new stories at least weekly. I'd cleared my schedule to dedicate more time to only these more self-satisfying projects, and then, disaster struck, in the name of green-biled phlegm and rancor of bronchitis.

It had been some years since I've read any Nabokov, which I can only blame a youthful use of mind-shrinking substances or a two-mile-long to-read list. But recently, I made a full-length audiobook of Dustin Long's Icelander, whose completion set me on a mission. I'm not going to shill Icelander too much (ahem, only five bucks! And I get a piece!), but there was no way for any reasonable person -- or even myself -- to finish it and not start thumbing through the old master's treasures, all of which I've loved plenty at some point or other. You'll see what I mean if you listen to Icelander (ahem: Iambik Audiobooks, who released it, features plenty other Miette-approved titles in its inaugural selection)....

The very first words of Gore Vidal's foreword to Alfred Chester's collected stories (Head of a Sad Angel Although it has been my misfortune to have at practically all the noted American writers of the last half century, I did have the great good luck never to have so much as glimpsed Alfred Chester....

Not long ago, I found myself in the unfortunate position of being deeply ensconced in a marvelous book while on a crowded public transportation system. “Nothing unfortunate about that, Miette,” you’ve said. I heard you. The unfortunate thing was that the title of the book, when viewed from across a subway car, can seem offensive. ... Read more

It's that time of year, my dears, where I'm about to head off to foreign parts for what's known in various circles as "vacation," "holidays," or "days spent without LCD bathing." I can't believe it, either, actually, and am not sure I'll be able to pull off things like "relaxing" and "not having much of anything to do," which have only existed as very high level concepts in my foggy head. And there are so many things lined up when I return that I'll probably never ever take time off again, which could be good for you, if your ears are burning. I'll do the big reveal of a few of those things as soon as I return...