The Strange Recital

The Strange Recital

By Tom Newton and Brent RobisonArtsBooksPerforming Arts
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The Strange Recital episodes

  • Covid-1984, The Musical
    "Cheek to the cold floor, thick sole on my back, I began to sense my place in this moment in history. I had thought I was playing the hero, arriving just in time to save my mom, when I was put in a chokehold, thrown to the ground and tasered in the groin." A young Winston Smith faces a dramatic cultural shift: lockdowns, masks, surveillance, riots. "How did we get here?" he wonders, in a new satirical novel that looks back at the last four years. Can this story end more happily than Orwell's?
    33 min
  • Death Watch
    "'Like life, a watch provides complications to keep it interesting.' Watanabe sat cross-legged on a low stage while we sat packed around him, students at the feet of a high-art Socrates, all leaning forward to hear his surprisingly delicate voice." A luxury accessory that might, or might not, kill its owner. Does high risk mean high status? How does an ad man sell such a thing? Or is it all a hoax? A new novel explores the dark side of wealth culture.
    45 min
  • The Woman in White

    "The heat had been painfully oppressive all day, and it was now a close and sultry night.... It was nearly midnight when the servant locked the garden-gate behind me. I walked forward a few paces on the shortest way back to London, then stopped and hesitated."

    Who is the mysterious woman encountered on the road so late at night? Here's an atmospheric introduction to a classic Victorian novel, followed by a discussion of its author.
    34 min
  • A Book with No Author

    "A.J. Campbell lowered the folded newsprint to his lap. His heart fishtailed and he struggled to breathe. This thing he had just read was an impossibility."

    A man discovers that private episodes from his life have been published as fiction by a stranger. Who is this story-thief? And what can be done to make it stop? Listen to this sample of a new novel called A Book with No Author.
    28 min
  • The Bohemian Adventure

    "I have endeavoured to present the public with accounts of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, and of his singular intelligence, his vigour and his courage. He often joked with me that his great fame was due solely to my embellishments..." Dr. Watson at last reveals a never-before-told adventure in which Holmes faces a challenge he couldn't have imagined. What are the limits of the world's most logical mind?

    38 min
  • The Night Crier

    "Ed Marks woke from another dream about his wife. She'd been standing in front of him, wearing a white gown that rippled in a breeze he couldn't feel. In her arms she held a baby, too small and raw-looking to be alive."

    A man can't sleep. He's alone in the night. What is that sound, forever repeating from the dark woods? It has to be silenced at all costs.
    36 min
  • Overlook

    "Wheels of a Delta 88 spin fast on winter-ravaged Upstate roadways. Fallow fields, half-encrusted in snow, the rest furrowed in frozen field-rot and iced-over mud, unfurl themselves on either side of a moonlit ridge."

    March 1986. Richard Manuel of The Band doesn't know he's dead. His double drives the lonely Catskills backroads. What are they seeking? Will they come together in Woodstock?
    33 min
  • In Flames

    "The beautiful girl, my own girlfriend, lay on her back, needle in her hand. Her arm tied up with her underwear, pulled tightly with her teeth. She was unconscious."

    What if art in a gallery could show us a dying person's inner experience? Would we learn anything? A photographer who chases death tells his story.
    20 min
  • The Goddess in Love with a Horse
    "The first time Ava saw Angelo naked was on their wedding night (11 May 1860) when he strode into their bedroom, accidentally revealing to her startled eyes that from the waist down he had the hindquarters of a stallion." How should a young woman feel about her new husband's true nature? Horses are good! This excerpt from an award-winning novel uses warmth, humor, and magic to launch a multi-generational saga about a free-thinking artist.
    28 min
  • 2BR02B

    "Everything was perfectly swell. There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers."

    How to make our future a paradise! In 1962, Vonnegut applied his double-edged imagination to the challenge. Does this story still apply today?

    29 min

About The Strange Recital

From the publisher's feed

The Strange Recital is an audio forum for short fiction. We delight in perceptions of reality that twist and fold in unexpected ways.