Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast

Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast episodes:

• 07.25.2016

  A Little Cloud, by James Joyce

  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...

  
• 06.17.2015

  A Mother

  Much love from my hidey-hole, where I spent the bedtime hours in recitation from the beginning of Ulysses in celebration of the hour at hand. My audience of one was sound asleep by the snotgreen sea.

  
• 06.16.2014

  Counterparts

  In my many years of Bloomsday readings, I’ve neglected to tell you about my first run-in with the text. It was more years ago than I’ll ever admit, when I had recently moved to New York, and had almost immediately...

  
• 01.15.2014

  The Housekeeper

  Hello and would you just look at the calendar and where has the time gone? I would make excuses for the lapse in months or tell you what I’ve been up to, but that would be projecting, and if you...

  
• 06.16.2013

  A Painful Case

  I’m sitting on what may be the most beautiful beach in the world, trying desperately to avoid dropping my computer into the chasms dug in the sand by last night’s hatching turtles, and trying even more desperately to explain to...

  
• 01.09.2013

  Water Liars

  In the Wells Tower profile of Barry Hannah I reference in the spoken introduction to today's story (which you should treat yourself to), written before Hannah's 2010 death, the following is offered:

  
• 11.16.2012

  Strawberries

  A few weeks ago, there was a hurricane that you might have read about (unless it blew a rock on top of you and you decided to live beneath it, in which case, my sympathies). During this hurricane, I...

  
• 10.04.2012

  While the Women are Sleeping

  I'm sitting here desperately trying not to listen to the U.S. Presidential Debate that's streaming into my earbuds, because the entire thing seems like such hot-twisted-metal train wreckage that the hairs on my neck get singed just listening to it....

  
• 09.08.2012

  Houses (Guest narrator: Patrick Scott)

  When Patrick Scott has been known to bail me out of a slump in the past, he’s done so with his passel of Old Reliables: Raymond Carver. Flannery O’Connor. Russell Banks. The indisputably great, in other words. So when this...

  
• 06.15.2012

  Clay, James Joyce

  In some parts of the world, it’s Bloomsday already, and in yours, it may be at the end of a summery Friday work-day, so perhaps The Big Day will greet you just as you’re weeding through your feedreader with an...

  
• 05.25.2012

  Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

  It’s been a while since I’ve last read, for reasons whose details I won’t serenade you with, but which have to do with huge, overwhelming, life-changing projects that ultimately will leave me with more time to do this more often...

  
• 03.12.2012

  Breaking Camp (from Danvis Tales)

  If, while listening to tonight’s story, you come to the dialogue and have no idea about what I am talking, you won’t be alone. I staggered across tonight’s author by way of the great Hayden Carruth, whose introduction to Rowland...

  
• 01.31.2012

  The Night of the Ugly Ones

  Sometimes a story catches you by title alone. I have a real soft spot, personally, for "The Night of the" stories, no matter the medium. Hunters, Iguanas, Living Dead, even Comets (to a lesser degree)... all of these...

  
• 01.12.2012

  Illusion by Jean Rhys (Redux)

  Sometimes it just kills me how many stories I've read here. A lot, that's how many. And as much as I'm endeared to those earlier lo-fi bootleggy recordings, there are some stories which just aren't served by the...

  
• 12.15.2011

  Indiscretion

  You'll have to excuse the fact that this sounds somewhat as if it might have been recorded in a submarine in the icy waters beneath an alien planet; I haven't been around for a while, and my audio equipment was...

  
• 11.11.2011

  The Young Workman’s Letter (Guest narrator: Chris King)

  Usually, when I think about this humble little project, it fills me with all kinds of amourpropre. Even when I'm temporarily removed from my own devices (audiotorily speaking), I can't help but self-congratulatorily pat myself backwise (I'm flexible) at...

  
• 10.27.2011

  I Am Awake (Guest narrator: Philip Shelley)

  Tonight's guest narrator owns and operates The Devastationalist Manifesto, a project I desperately wish would soon revive itself from its two-year hiatus, and not just because I miss the occasional chance for self-gam-gawkery...

  
• 10.14.2011

  The Man Who Lost the Sea (Guest narrator: Shig Vigintitres)

  Sturgeon's a presence which should have been established here long ago, and I was grateful beyond expression when tonight's guest reader volunteered to represent him. That said, I was only told there was...

  
• 10.07.2011

  Enoch and the Gorilla (Guest Reader: Patrick Scott)

  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...

  
• 09.20.2011

  Frau Wilke (Guest narrator: Sam Jones)

  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...

  
• 09.14.2011

  Everything is Green (Guest narrator: George Carr)

  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...

  
• 08.03.2011

  Order of Insects by William H. Gass

  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. ...

  
• 06.16.2011

  Two Gallants by James Joyce

  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...

  
• 06.08.2011

  At the Anarchists’ Convention by John Sayles

  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,...

  
• 05.09.2011

  The Truth and All Its Ugly

  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...

  
• 04.07.2011

  First Confession

  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...

  
• 03.15.2011

  Letter from a Hunchback Girl to a Metalworker

  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,...

  
• 02.24.2011

  Killer Whales, Susan Daitch

  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...

  
• 01.28.2011

  The Force Acting on the Displaced Body, Christopher Rowe

  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...

  
• 01.06.2011

  A Woman of Properties, Jack Matthews

  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...

  
• 12.13.2010

  The Balloon, Donald Barthelme

  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. ...

  
• 11.23.2010

  The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe

  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.

  
• 11.17.2010

  Roog, Philip K. Dick

  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...

  
• 10.27.2010

  The Vane Sisters, Vladimir Nabokov

  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...

  
• 10.12.2010

  Here Be Dragons, Alfred Chester

  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...

  
• 08.23.2010

  Helpmate, Ben Greenman

  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...

  
• 07.23.2010

  Disappearing

  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...

  
• 07.07.2010

  A Small Circle of Friends

  I know; this is two posts in a row that make direct mention of ladies' underthings. I have three very good reasons for this:

  
• 06.16.2010

  After the Race

  Looking at the Bloomsday readings I've done to date, it's evident that my written prefaces have become some absurd equivalent of squealing fangirlish bra-tossing. I may (OR MAY NOT) be an excellent bra-tosser with perfect aim and pitch, and...

  
• 06.02.2010

  Sex and/or Mr. Morrison

  A disclaimer for you on this happy June that will become self-evident soon enough: I love this story. I could read it a thousand times over and give you a thousand different insights. I love it in the...

  
• 05.18.2010

  In the Avu Observatory

  A few days ago, I took a little trip to Toronto, where the jazz singers scat to sheet music, where wine is poured long before noon, and where the best booksellers refuse to serve the likes of me. While there,...

  
• 04.29.2010

  Sono and Moso

  Last week's New Yorker magazine included a series of letters written by Saul Bellow to other writers. I've often thought epistolary exchange between writers to be the most nettly of writing, both the most effusive and the most sincere,...

  
• 03.29.2010

  The Butterfly

  I've been wanting to read James Hanley to you for a couple of months now, ever since he was reintroduced to me a few months ago while I was yearning for a bathematic submergence in a foreign hotel.

  
• 03.16.2010

  The Fifth Story

  I read recently about toxic bread in a sleepy French village, about mass hallucinations and the newly revealed hypothesis that the CIA was responsible for covert LSD experiments. Apparently, the same thing might have happened in the subways of New...

  
• 02.27.2010

  Sir Henry

  I have a good excuse to spare you my blathery scrawl about the show-stopping beauty in this story -- the hot cats at Electric Literature have done so in a flashier way, and before you even tap the PLAY button...

  
• 02.10.2010

  The Trojan Horse

  Sometimes I think you haven't lived until you've been given the shoulder by a drunken horse in a bar. Other times I think the very stuff of life happens from being the drunken horse in a bar. But...

  
• 02.01.2010

  The Sorrel Colt

  The other day I was walking through a blistering, blustery, blinding-white below-zero snowstorm, cursing the day I decided not to live on a Caribbean island, and doubly cursing the day I decided not to be born with antifreeze for blood....

  
• 01.13.2010

  Gregory

  So, I know very little about the author of tonight's story. He has no Wikipedia page in any language that I can gather, one used copy of an out-of-print collection of stories available in English (that I can cursorily...

  
• 01.06.2010

  DiGrasso

  Oh, aren't we lucky!? A double-bluffed, double-dipped, double-headed dose of Isaac Babel. When you've had a listen here and discover that you're still running low on your recommended daily serving of Babel, you might head here to find...

  
• 12.23.2009

  On Hope

  I can think of nothing more apt for the rounding-out of a year than a fleeting little fable on outplaying inevitability. If you're anything like me, Inevitability is one collector you've managed to send off-course at least once this...