The Talking Book Podcast

Rooted in New Orleans, Creole Conjure is an interconnected short story collection that mixes and matches folklore and fairy tales to create a unique mythos of its own. It follows various female or female-identifying characters trying to find their way in a world built upon deception and oppression. Inspiration was taken from European fairy tales, Greek mythology, and Louisiana folklore. It comes out this year on October 31st. This piece is an excerpt from the short story, "J. Allister's Shop of Horrors."

GET THE BOOK

https://shop.maudlinhouse.net/

FIND THE WRITER

http://christina-rosso.com or find her on Twitter @Rosso_Christina.

https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680032550/imagine-a-death/

In the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn't the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moments, a moment in which time seems to be running out.

JANICE LEE is a Korean-American writer, editor, publisher, and shamanic healer. She is the author of seven books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry. She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

https://thetalkingbook.org/mira-corpora

JEFF JACKSON is a novelist, playwright, visual artist, and songwriter. His second novel Destroy All Monsters was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in Fall 2018. It received advanced praise from Don DeLillo, Janet Fitch, Dana Spiotta, Ben Marcus, and Dennis Cooper. His novella Novi Sad was published as a limited edition art book and selected for “Best of 2016” lists in Vice, Lit Reactor, and Entropy. His first novel Mira Corpora, published in 2013, was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and featured on numerous "Best of the Year" lists, including Slate, Salon, The New Statesman, and Flavorwire. His short fiction has appeared in Guernica, Vice, New York Tyrant, and The Collagist and been performed in New York and Los Angeles by New River Dramatists.

A reading from Mallory Smart

The Only Living Girl in Chicago

Zoe Clark is back in Chicago, and she already wants to run. But she can never turn her back on her monstrous hometown again. Grief, technology, isolation, and emptiness keep her up at night. Or maybe it's the coffee. Her brain feels like a mosquito trapped in amber, ready to be found in 65 million years by an enterprising paleontologist. Full of anxiety, humor, philosophy, and grief, The Only Living Girl in Chicago is a stunning coming-of-age novel, a later bloomer's bible in constant, dizzying motion.

https://www.tridentcafe.com/trident-press-titles/preorder-the-only-living-girl-in-chicago-by-mallory-smart

Featured story: The Mattress

Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain.

GET THE FULL AUDIOBOOK AT THETALKINGBOOK.ORG

Sleepovers, written and read by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, was recorded and produced at The Talking Book Studio in Asheville, NC.

Duncan Birmingham is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles. He’s been a writer and producer on numerous shows including Maron (with Marc Maron) on IFC. His book of short stories, The Cult in My Garage comes out in August from Maudlin House. https://shop.maudlinhouse.net/

Wes Tirey returns with his 10th record and label debut for Dear Life Records. It is a Midwestern Odyssey, borne from Tirey's childhood in Southern Ohio and from the literary traditions of Frank Stanford and Raymond Carver. Over the course of eighteen songs, Tirey explores through his characters themes of social and geographic isolation. He wanders through corn-laden and rust-covered wastelands, seeking refuge and connection in diners and dimly-lit barrooms. Tirey's poetry is elegant and unflinching, painting portraits of an American life that feel uncannily familiar.

https://westirey.bandcamp.com/album/the-midwest-book-of-the-dead

A very special reading by Bud Smith called Free Bird from his collection Double Bird, out now from Maudlin House. Vivd. Odd. Hurtful. Unloved. Wet with dew. Out of its mind with joy. Get this damn book:

https://shop.maudlinhouse.net/#double-bird

Amphibians invites further contemplation of female physicality--what it means to reside in a female form. An amphibious aircraft crashes in Maine, a young girl skinny-dips with her elders, a distraught cruise ship dancer boards a water taxi in Grenada, and travelers to Dubai and Abu Dhabi long for familiar oceans; back in New England, small-town artists try to smudge out their tedium with seaside transgressions. Amphibians celebrates home in a cross-cultural way, and the sensation of feeling not quite right in one's own skin, on land and near water, at home and abroad.

The poems in Mik Grantham’s debut collection, HARDCORE, are deceptively simple, darkly funny, and as unforgettable as a nagging toothache. Grantham confronts grief in myriad forms; the loss of innocence coincides with the loss of a tooth; a relationship decays and is uprooted alongside ruminative dog walks and soul-crushing waitressing shifts. It is Mik Grantham’s refusal to wallow in the dour, her embrace of the grotesque and the unfortunate situations served up to her by life, that allow the underlying love and hope in these poems to shine through.

https://www.hobartpulp.com/books/hardcore