The Talking Book Podcast

New reading from Kevin Maloney for your listening pleasure...From cult author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim, Kevin Maloney delivers a vision of the world that is hysterical, terrifying, and true. A cuckolded husband finds a new identity as a ghost. A homeowner has a nervous breakdown while building a pergola. An angst-ridden teenager finds his spiritual equal in the mosh pit of an Alice in Chains concert. GET THE BOOK!

https://kevinmaloney.net/horse-girl-fever/

New episode with Richard Chiem! Seven years after its most recent release, You Private Person now returns in a brand-new edition by With an X Books. Named one of Publisher's Weekly's 10 Essentials Books of the American West, these stories are sharp, romantic, and heartbreaking to the core. A beloved collection, a cult classic, and a perfect pop song, You Private Person is your favorite writer's favorite book.

https://www.withanxbooks.com/youprivateperson

Did Vivienne Volker Kill Wilma Lang?

This question has dogged Vivienne ever since Wilma jumped from a window to her death shortly after Volker stole her lover, the visionary artist Hans Bellmer, in the 1970s. Once a famous artist and fashion icon, Volker is now in her eighties and spends her days in religious contemplation in rural Pennsylvania alongside her daughter Velour Bellmer, her granddaughter Vesta Furio, her much younger boyfriend—a garbageman named Lou—and Franz, the family dog. Their quiet lives are disrupted when Vivienne’s work is selected for inclusion in a high-profile retrospective called "Forgotten Women Surrealists" at the prestigious NAT Museum. However, when rumors of her past misdeeds begin to circulate and she is dropped from the show, a gallery curator enters the picture hoping to capitalize on the buzz generated by the controversy, sending the family's tensions, hopes, and dreams to a dizzying peak.

Set over the course of a fateful week, Vivienne deftly weaves surreal prose with a Greek chorus of internet comments and text messages, to ask the questions: what is the cost of vision, what is the price of art? What connects creation and procreation, a life and an afterlife?

https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781648210648/vivienne/

NDA is a collection of revealing poems and exchanges between Lily and their clients as they navigate the dark bohemia of NYC and LA as a nonbinary sex worker.

Spiral upward, downward, and side to side. From the safe words of New York to the alleys of Los Angeles....and all the flights in between.

https://www.farwestpress.com/far-west-books/p/nda-lily-lady

A new reading from Mallory Smart. Step into Stevie's world, a 26-year-old musician on the brink of fame. A tour offer catapults her into an existential voyage through life's intricate maze. Within this tense spiritual journey, Stevie confronts the age-old dilemma of fame versus the safety of a simpler existence, all while searching for her elusive tribe.

https://www.withanxbooks.com/store/p/i-keep-my-visions-to-myself-by-mallory-smart

Kris chats with B.P. Sweany about his novel The Sword and the Sophomore, plus an excerpt read by Tami Stronach!

About the book...

Arlynn Rosemary Banson is an atypical sixteen-year-old—the cool, popular outsider, effortlessly straddling the line between divas and dorks. Her forever young mother, Jennifer, is dedicated to making her life awkward by trying to be her friend. Her father, Alan, is a workaholic history professor who barely acknowledges his family’s existence. Her boyfriend, Benz, the quarterback and homecoming king, has just broken up with her, while her best friend, Joslin, bears reluctant witness to Rosemary’s romantic drama. But nothing prepares any of them for a Welsh foreign exchange student named Emrys Balin. Emrys looks like a teenager, but he seems to act much, much older.

Pre-order:

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Sword-and-the-Sophomore-Audiobook/B0CQQ6D3T7?qid=1718899369&sr=1-1&ref_pageloadid=not_applicable&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=83218cca-c308-412f-bfcf-90198b687a2f&pf_rd_r=FP9G6FA2DWV1ZT6QSZ9H&pageLoadId=aZI6DhtOpZ6nRqc6&creativeId=0d6f6720-f41c-457e-a42b-8c8dceb62f2c

“In this winningly oblique, slender, and wise-hearted novel, Jack Houghteling puts his finger on febrilely metropolitan human nature as it expresses itself (cerebrally, athletically, familially) in the outer boroughs and in patinated suburbia--and he does so in fleet, uncannily vivid sentences that are summational masterstrokes. Jack Houghteling is a writer of dumbstriking originality and virtuosity, and Sunnyside, his second book, is a dazzlement.” -- Garielle Lutz, Author of Divorcer and Stories in the Worst Way

GET THE BOOK

https://www.amazon.com/Sunnyside-Jack-Houghteling/dp/B0C2RZDJ5R

In Fear Not!, critic Josh Larsen makes the case that monster movies, creature features, slashers, and other fright films artfully reflect our deep worries in a way that resonates with the Christian experience. Combining critical observation and theological reflection, Larsen devotes each chapter to a different horror subgenre, connecting that subgenre to a commonly shared fear.

https://www.amazon.com/Fear-Not-Christian-Appreciation-Spirituality/dp/1666738522

https://www.filmspotting.net/

https://larsenonfilm.com/

Josh is the co-host of the radio show and podcast Filmspotting, author of Movies Are Prayers and Fear Not! A Christian Appreciation of Horror, as well as editor/producer for Think Christian, a website and podcast exploring faith and pop culture. He’s been writing and speaking about movies professionally since 1994.

Hal, an Afghan war veteran, begins to hear a voice telling him to go “home”—to a castle, in Scotland. But Hal has never been to Scotland. So whose voice is it? What does it want? And why is it calling Hal “home”? What follows is a surrealist road trip story, part Heart of Darkness and part bipolar Guardians of the Galaxy. In Farsickness, Joshua Mohr spins a picaresque, hallucinatory yarn like only he can, as Hal and the reader journey deep into the human soul.

GET THE BOOK!!!!

https://www.amazon.com/Farsickness-Novel-Joshua-Mohr/dp/B0C9SHFR1M/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=joshua+mohr+far+sickness&qid=1693021569&s=books&sr=1-1

“This book is like driving a Ferrari through a funhouse and then smashing through the windshield into another realm of existence. In other words, it’s what a book should be.” - BEN LOORY, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

New reading with Chase Griffin and Christina Quay. With music by M. Kilcullen...

Between the pages of an ever-shifting eternal text known as the Patasphere, a coven of psychedelic fiction fanatics and a duo of agents working for a private intelligence firm known as The Geist, LLC navigate their ways simultaneously through a labyrinthian pilgrimage to the ole haunts of their favorite thoughtform, a cult classic weird fiction author named Rocco Atleby, who may or may not be both creator and destroyer of their world.

Out now from Maudlin House. Get the book!

https://shop.maudlinhouse.net/