 Lay yourself down to sleep with the soothing soporific of Miette's purring voice reading you classic works of short fiction. Sweet dreams.Primary Format :
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 Text Only listing of Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast Podcasts
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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 keeping the motor of this anthology running.
Then sometimes...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
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...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
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...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
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 a famous filmmaker, and so when you listen to his lustrous interpretation of Flannery O'Connor, you will pick up the occasional whirr of what seems a loud computer fan...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
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 might not know... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
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 than we'd think at first listen.
And so, I would appreciate no murmured speculation on rhinoplastic nasal blockage or testosterone injections on my part. For the next month or two...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Order of Insects by William H. GassI 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. Either that, or it's the Romantic Lady Writer's Disease, which would be fine by me, inasmuch as any anachronistic way to go down is fine by me. But I do wish it'd forestall another decade. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Two Gallants by James JoyceBloomsday 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 collection is one I tend to avoid. But to keep things spicy in the meantime [...]Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
At the Anarchists’ Convention by John SaylesI 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, perhaps should be. Donald Barthelme, Mavis Gallant, William H. Gass, Elizabeth Hardwick Grace Paley, Peter Taylor, and I'm thinking...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Truth and All Its UglyWhenever 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 don't know whether this relentless pursuit of the craft can be had without a truckload of drugs, but I also think the drugs necessary for his task probably haven't even been concocted yet. You could get your brain into top form fast by looking closely at the right 2/3 of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
First ConfessionI 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 those gutters and asking absolution from what I've swept up, it took a while to get to him. I'd associated it so closely, in the vast netherlands of the juvenilia of my headspace, with hackneyed Catholic guilt tropes in Comic Sans all the way through...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Letter from a Hunchback Girl to a MetalworkerFernando 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, rather than stand around in the dark, I welcome you to take a guess.
Should you want that guess to be educated, Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Killer Whales, Susan DaitchThere'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 vulturing my way through this store, and walk out picking my teeth with unsold reading lights and hauling overstuffed bags full of firesale booty that can no way be described as "carrion" no matter how many ways I stretch the metaphor...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Force Acting on the Displaced Body, Christopher RoweAre 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 the form of a seaside adventure story based largely on southern waters. Which is, admittedly, analogous to bringing double your milk money to school and handing one over freely to the big bully. But I don't know how to kick the weather where it deserves to be kicked, so this is the...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
A Woman of Properties, Jack MatthewsWell, 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 for the coming months. Because I have nothing but sympathy: it's too cold to get up and run ten miles and do the laundry and tidy the front garden and write your best auntie a letter every morning. I understand. Stay in bed. Read a good book ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The BalloonIf 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. It's a problem I've known about, it's one that those around me suffer in kind on behalf of all of you, and it's one that I'd love to kick, if only I inject some lock de-icer into these knees. Maybe anti-freeze would work?
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The Masque of the Red DeathThis 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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
RoogI 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 projects, and then, disaster struck, in the name of green-biled phlegm and rancor of bronchitis. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Vane SistersIt 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 set me on a mission. I'm not going to shill Icelander too much (ahem, only five bucks! And I get a piece!), but there was no way for any reasonable person -- or even myself -- to finish it and not start thumbing through the old master's treasures, all ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Here Be DragonsThe 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 the great good luck never to have so much as glimpsed Alfred Chester....Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
HelpmateNot 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 the title of the book, when viewed from across a subway car, [...]Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
DisappearingIt'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 not sure I'll be able to pull off things like "relaxing" and "not having much of anything to do," which have only existed as very high level concepts in my foggy head. And there are so many things lined up when I return that I'll probably never ever take time off again ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
A Small Circle of FriendsI know; this is two posts in a row that make direct mention of ladies' underthings. I have three very good reasons for this:
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After the RaceLooking 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 we all know that Joyce wouldn't be one to have a problem with women's undergarments tossed his way. But my first exposure to Joyce was in a sleepy little black shoebox theatre, where a troupe of mild-mannered turtlenecked barnstormers read from Dubline ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Sex and/or Mr. MorrisonA 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 peepish and borderline obsessive way its narratrice experiences love. Love it, in its own words, "as a mouse might love the hand that cleans the cage, and as uncomprehendingly, too, for surely I see only a part of him here." ...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
In the Avu ObservatoryA 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, I spent a day in rooms full of brainy people as obsessive as I am about books and reading and great literature and using technology in the service of all these things. That's right: me, your Miette, dropped down in the middle of Booknerdville. Must I even mention that it was terrific ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Sono and MosoLast 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, the most pretentious and the most vein-splittingly self-conscious. It's hardListen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The ButterflyI'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. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Fifth StoryI 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 York. And suddenly, so much is explained, especially as pertains to cockroach-squashing memories. [...]Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Sir HenryI 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 on your baubly mp3 players, you ought to watch this:Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Trojan HorseSometimes 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 usually, it has to do with neither of these things, and I'm fairly certain that none of it would be worth the slightest damn if there was no Queneau to neigh by.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Sorrel ColtThe 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. Because if I had been born with antifreeze for blood, I'd probably have other alien characteristics as well, such as the ability to launch an anvil from my hand that I could drop on the head of the person walking in the snowstorm next to me when that person ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
GregorySo, 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 find, anyhow), and a slight dusting of a presence in literary anthologies, including one in which I dusted off this. In fact, the only thing I'm certain of regarding tonight's author is that I really ought to attempt to learn basic Greek pronunciation if I'm going to crack a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
DiGrassoOh, 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 a new recording of an old reading of another one.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
On HopeI 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 year, and that itself is cause for champagne. Happy New Decade to all, but especially to those who continue to believe relentlessly in the potential of literature.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Emmy Moore’s JournalThere was a time when I was little (and I was so cute, and so little!) when I wanted to be Jane Bowles. I was obsessed with the puppet show, unhealthily so, though thinking back now, I can't think of any self-respecting adult who'd have introduced such a cute little thing to it.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Interior CastleI'm more than a little eager to introduce this bit of Jean Stafford-- in fact, the last time I was this eager, I was about to jump out of an airplane, an activity I was undertaking using age-faked identification, which was, to the best of my memory, the only time I've ever vomited directly onto the feet of an airplane pilot (the pilot then said this wasn't the first time his feet had taken ablutions this way). And wait, I don't mean to conflate Jean Stafford with my own underage retching. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Bound ManMy friends, a confession: I am a sucker. Little stray kittens and musty books and vegetably steamed dumplings.... these things were basically made for me. And stories like this belong on the list of things for which I'm a true sucker, and by "like this" I don't necessarily mean Austrian (though I don't mean "decidedly not Austrian" either). And I don't necessarily mean the sort of story that plucks your arteries and uses them to serenade you corrido-style. Although, again, I don't have ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Pool of the Stone GodFor those of you who will not be spending the weekend dressed scandalously and behaving just as badly, or scaring young children, or throwing personal hygiene product in the trees of your enemies, ...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Adventure of Prince Florizel and a DetectiveIt was recommended some time ago by a guy named Alex that I read the entire four-story cycle of The Rajah's Diamond, and it is a request I'll perhaps fill someday. I'm in the throes of a mini Stevenson obsession right now, so it seems the proper and selfish thing to do. But for now, I wanted to warn you that as an aperitif, what I'm offering here is, in fact, the last story in the cycle.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Trouble at Pow Crash CreekIt's probably one of the better things in life -- right up there with creative breakthroughs and lasting love and the slurp of streetside oysters -- to have one's hat tipped to new and great authors. In my case, it doesn't happen often, because I'm finicky and discriminating with my own tastes, or as others have said, snotty. Some of my closest friends, in fact, have sworn never again to share enthusiasm of their own discoveries, for fear of my response. I'm not proud of this....Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
I Stand Here IroningSo I have this tendency, as you may have noticed, to take a sharp left at matters of personal divulgences, which is a difficult thing to pull off today, given the severity and somber-ity of a story like this one. But so, okay, here you go, three very revealing facts about my own self to accompany a story of introspect and plaintivity and other words existent and non-:Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Space-Time for SpringersCan I tell you something about my speculative fiction habits? Of course I can-- this my barroom restroom wall and the red marker's in my slimy mitt.
Here's the thing: I just love stories about sentient animals. I can't get enough of talking dogs or super-intelligent rats or telekinetic polar bears-- this is the stuff of unconditional love. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Doctor’s HeroismWell, I've been reading some unavoidable news about Death Panels and baby killing nazi zombies terrorizing in the Norwegian mountains and all sorts of incessant catfighty nastiness which I suppose our world can take, given that it's really all pretty hopeless, when confronted by the threat of health care. Or zombies.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
An UnbelieverThe other day I was lying in the woods, on a hammock on a mountaintop, reading aloud to young people, and wondered, for a second, why there was no professional job market for reading aloud on hammocks to young people, why there isn’t a real market demand for just such a role and why imagined [...]Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
FeathersOh ladies! Oh men and oh boys and girls, the sexiest man alive is BACK. Patrick has been threatening to start up Patrick's Bedtime Story Podcast, and with a voice this smooth, he might have to do it, much as I'd miss his occasional guest posts here. I'll warn you that there's an outburst of laughter in the middle of this that I didn't have the heart to cut out, and also that he does a killer bird caw, and that Olla's voice is a little on the saccharinely fey side. It's that good.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
HollowBreece D'J Pancake was brought to my attention only a couple of years ago, one of those writers who didn't leave a whole lot left behind for us to gluttonously swallow, and one who was willing to grab the short story by the balls of its form and steer it where he wanted.
In his forward to the collection of Pancake's stories, James Alan McPherson quotes from a letter he received from Pancake:Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
An EncounterI'm so excited about Bloomsday that I'm sharing the love a day early this year. In fact, I was so excited that I almost went ahead and read all the stories from Dubliners that I haven't yet done for you, but then it hit me that I'd have to move forward next year with my plan to do Ulysses in its entirety. And, well, I don't know if I have the pipes for that yet. And I don't know if you have the perseverance to listen to me indulge the Joyce itch.Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
The Sailor-Boy’s TaleTwice now I've sat down to read something from Isak Dinesen's Winter's Tales
, and twice when pawing through for a good story, I've ended up spending hours re-reading the stories in here, to the point of distracted negligence, but to the point of great self-satisfaction nevertheless.
One day I'll just relent and read them all to you, but that'd be a big project, and if you're anything like me, you're already running on the fumes of big projects. ...Listen | Listen in your iPhone | |