Category Archives: Fiction

Jenny Hollowell

Posted on by
Reply

Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe

Original airdate: June 25, 2010

“Birdie Baker has always dreamed of becoming someone else. At twenty-two, she sets off to do just that. Walking out on her pastor husband and deeply evangelical parents, she leaves behind her small-town, small-time life and gets on a bus to Los Angeles.

Nine years later, Birdie’s life in Hollywood is far from golden, and nothing in the intervening years—the brutal auditions, the tawdry commercials—has brought her any closer to the transformation she craves. Caught between success and failure, haunted by guilt about a tragedy in her long-forsaken family, Birdie is at the brink of collapse when she meets Lewis, a beautiful but naïve young actor with his own troubled history, whose self-destructive impulses run dangerously parallel to her own.” – from jennyhollowell.com

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

SUPPORT INDIE BOOKSTORES and BUY “Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe” HERE

William Ashanti Hobbs

Posted on by
Reply

Worthy

Original airdate: May 28, 2010

Miriam sat her glass down on the table with a thud.

“You the one from school still scratching yo’ head ‘bout why people act this and that way.” She pointed at the side of her head. “What I know ain’t in no book of facts. What I know is what is… sure as clay red. My knowledge from life, common damn sense.” She pointed at Ayanna. “All you
know’s some tumblin’ clouds of ideas nobody can touch. You full of facts but dumb ‘bout knowin’ yo’ people and yo’self.”

Miriam got up, snatched her pitcher of sweet tea and went into the kitchen.

- from Worthy

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

SUPPORT INDIE BOOKSTORES and BUY “Worthy” HERE

Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven

Posted on by
Reply

Richmond Noir

Original airdate: February 5, 2010

An anthology of all-new noir stories set in Richmond neighborhoods, edited by Blossom, Castleberry and De Haven. With a forward by Tom Robbins.

Features stories by: Dean King, Laura Browder, Howard Owen, Yazmina Beverly, Tom De Haven, X.C. Atkins, Meagan J. Saunders, Anne Thomas Soffee, Clint McCown, Conrad Ashley Persons, Clay McLeod Chapman, Pir Rothenberg, David L. Robbins, Hermine Pinson, and Dennis Danvers.

From the introduction…

“In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller tosses off a hard-bitten assessment of the City on the James: ‘I would rather die in Richmond somehow,’ he writes, ‘though God knows Richmond has little enough to offer.’ As editors, we like the dying part, and might point out that in its long history, Richmond, Virginia has offered up many of the disparate elements crucial to meaty noir. The city was born amid deception, conspiracy, and violence…”

Tom De Haven is the author of seventeen books, including Freaks’ Amour, Sunburn Lake, It’s Superman! and the Derby Dugan trilogy of novels. Andrew Blossom is the founding editor of Makeout Creek. Brian Castleberry is a playwright, novelist, and music critic. –from www.akashicbooks.com

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

SUPPORT INDIE BOOKSTORES and BUY "Richmond Noir"

Joanna Smith Rakoff

Posted on by
Reply

A Fortunate Age

Original airdate: December 4, 2009

“But this group, our group, wanted nothing to do with money, the whiff of which had, they thought, spoiled their brash bourgeois parents and aunts and uncles, all of whom were, inevitably, doctors or lawyers or businessmen or sometimes teachers, and none of whom had read Sentimental Education or could identify the term “deconstruction” or made regular visits to the theater, except, perhaps, to see musicals or Neil Simon comedies. They — the adults — were too corrupted, too swayed and jaded by the difficulties and practicalities of adulthood, by the banal labyrinths of health insurance and Roth IRAs, by the relative safety of Volvo versus Saab versus Subaru, or flat Scottish cashmere versus the newer, softer, fluffier — but possibly less durable — stuff, imported from Nepal, that Neiman’s is carrying lately.”

- from A Fortunate Age

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

M.T. Anderson

Posted on by
Reply

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation Vol 1 & 2

Original airdate: October 16, 2009

“The men who raised me were lords of matter, and in the dim chambers I watched as they traced the spinning of bodies celestial in vast, iron courses, and bid sparks to dance upon their hands; they read the bodies of fish as if each dying trout or shad was a fresh Biblical Testament, the wet and twitching volume of a new-born Pentateuch. They burned holes in the air, wrote poems of love, sucked the venom from sores, painted landscapes of gloom, and made metal sing; they dissected fire like newts.”

- from The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.