Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you a reading from Sasha Fletcher's novella, When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds, available from Mud Luscious Press. In antiquity, Apocalypses were a thriving genre. Their creation has revived in our ow…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you a reading from David Peak's unpublished novel, The River Through the Trees. Good fiction makes strange places seem familiar and familiar places seem strange; it forces us to empathize with enemies, and reexamine our friends; it allows us to consider the unthinkable, and understand the inscrutabl…

This episode Apostrophe Cast is pleased to give you a peak at D.W. Lichtenberg's germinating novel, Time Flies in Ways. In this excerpt, D.W. Lichtenberg is a kind of reluctant hypnotist -- reluctant because he is just trying to tell you the truth, and he can't help that it is so easy to hypnotize you. He just can't help it. His words just keep flo…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode Heather Cousins opens the cellar door and ushers us down into the potato room. With a deceptive clarity, Cousins' voice leads us deeper and deeper into the darkness with meticulous details, like "practical, good girl underwear." But soon, we are lost under the surface of this bright, normal world in places w…

This episode we bring you the melancholy music of Erika Moya. Painted in breaths measured out like brushstrokes, Moya's images build rich and lonely dwellings in a landscape where it often rains, beautiful lovers are drowning in the distance, and there is more moonlight than sunlight. The listener may want to console Ms. Moya, but we must be gratef…

This episode we bring you the magical mind of Adam Mansbach, reading from his new novel Rage is Back. Mansbach's sleight of hand is invisible whether he is conjuring forth the voice of Dondi, the drug-dealing scion of a high art graffiti writing dynasty, or bending time to put him, and us with him, into tomorrow before we can blink an eye. But unde…

This episode David Goodwillie takes us underground with domestic terrorists in Manhattan, reading an excerpt of his novel American Subversive, out now from Scribner. Infiltrating the Mall of Manhattan through the eyes of a young woman radicalized by her brother's death in Iraq, the glossy surfaces of the city fracture as army brats gone rogue plan …

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we are pleased to present the triumphant mutations excerpted from Lily Hoang's forthcoming novel Evolutionary Revolution, out this July from Les Figues Press. From brothers who can wear the same shirt at the same time to asexual mermen, from sideshow freak stage mothers to a girl with truly unforgettable thi…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you the brand-spanking new bible stories of Bryan Furuness, in which Lucifer is a precocious little boy and Jesus is his accident-prone buddy. The suburban children of this unholy scripture effortlessly humiliate their mortal parents, who lock them out on summer days, and paint moustaches on their p…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we invite you to explore the world of poet Danielle Sellers reading from her collection, Bone Key Elegies available from Main Street Rag. Inhabited by tribes of beautiful, semi-wild children destined to suffer and become wise, its beaches and cities shine by the light of her radiant details. And at the cente…

This episode we bring you Joseph Young reading from Adam Robinson's collection, Adam Robison and Other Poems available from Narrow House, and Adam Robinson reading from Joseph Young's collection of microfiction, Easter Rabbit, available from Publishing Genius. Are they two ventriloquists using each other as dummies or two dummies using each other a…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we are proud to bring you Carol Novack, Publisher and Editor of Mad Hatter's Review. Her multimedia, musical concoctions seem to spring directly from her mind, and their array of sensations and provocations will make an indelible impression on yours. Please enjoy Carol Novack.…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode Swedish Poet and Critic Aase Berg reads her surrealist poetry, and Johannes Goransson, editor of Action Books, translates. In this way we hear the ancient sing song lilting of a cousin language reminding us that poetry is sound first, and recieve the challenge of Berg's images, both visceral and abstract. Pl…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. In The Mothering Coven, Joanna Ruocco builds us a vacation cottage in a mad village inhabited by brilliant kooks such as Mrs. Borage, who mixes metaphysics with the chores, and ace reporter, Duncan Michaels, whose articles are never read. When it is time for you to leave this place, we think you will find the characters …

We are pleased to commence the New Year with a reading from Kristina Marie Darling. Ms. Darling effortlessly spins philosophy into poetry, weaving high concept with flights of lyricism that both delight and challenge. Please enjoy Kristina Marie Darling.By The Apostrophe Cast Editors

This episode we give you Scott McClanahan reading "This is a Story with a Phone Number in It" from his collection, Stories II. Shining a bright beam of wry intelligence into the darkest corners of the down economy, Mr. McClanahan gives the people you might hang up on a voice. You will never answer a call from a telemarketer the same way again. Plea…

This episode we bring you the voice of Caitlin Doyle. In Caitlin Doyle's world Siegfried and Roy never met, Hegel and Breugel discuss obscure bagel-like breakfast options, and Paris is more likely a Hilton than the capital of France. Caitlin Doyle’s poetry moves effortlessly from wit to profundity, a tonal range matched by a remarkable breadth of t…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you poetry from Weston Cutter. Listening to Weston Cutter read is like enjoying driving alone. The muse speaks to him from posters above the urinals and she awakens him from the roadside as a little boy with visible dreams. Mr. Cutter sometimes has a hard time taking himself seriously, but then, you…

This episode we bring you excerpts from J. A. Tyler's novella, A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed, forthcoming from fugue state press in 2011. In these passages Tyler moves from meditations on comforting a lover fretting over lost luggage into the cosmically signifcant love and longing of a He for a She until the lovers' striving blasts a…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we hear Davis Schneiderman recording in collaboration with Don Meyer, reading from his forthcoming novel, Drain. In Drain, we are taken down into the wasted basin once home to Lake Michigan, now the subject of a turf war between worm-worshiping outlaw nomads and the bovine inhabitants of corporate sprawl col…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode Claire Hero reads from her first full-length collection of poetry, Sing, Mongrel, available from Noemi Press. In Sing, Mongrel, as she walks us like little children through a dark forest, Hero draws the inner beast out from hiding to serve as her muse, conjuring forth songs gruesome, honest and darkly wondro…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you an excerpt from a novella of prose poetry by Molly Gaudry, due out from Mud Luscious Press this December. In We Take Me Apart, Gaudry draws on Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and familiar fairy tales to create a jagged modernist narrative as beautiful and dangerous as broken stained glass. Pleas…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we are pleased to bring you two seasons from a shepherd's calendar by poet Nate Pritts. Pritts's third collection, The Wonderfull Yeare, will see print in 2010, but its timeless quality speaks to every date. Just as the summer dies, it is right that we bring you his 14 poem cycle, "Sonnets for the Fall," and…

We have all heard rumors that literature is dying, but every so often one reads a new journal that renews one's faith in the future. The Collagist is just such a journal, and the contributors Charles Jensen, reading five poems from Nanopedia, Kevin Wilson, reading from the Big Book of Forgotten Lunatics, and Kim Chinquee reading three pieces of fla…

Welcome to Apostrophe Cast. This episode we bring you the subversive pastorals of Allison Titus. In the tradition, pastorals refer to the edenic tranquility of shepherds with nothing better to do than compose lyrics. But Allison Titus's shepherdess sees ruined factories on the horizon, lame stock to be tended to, and fences as far as the eye can se…