"The Tuesday Night Club" by Agatha Christie

...in which we are introduced to the author's greatest character and perhaps most unlikely detective, sweet old Miss Jane Marple. No surprise that this story contains both arsenic and a little bit of old lace, for it's the first time the public will meet Raymond West's aunt in the quaint little village which seems to have more than its share of mysteries and those quaint souls intent on solving them. Read by Scoot. Time 23:45.

Go, you--there are plenty of places where you can find out more about Miss Agatha Christie, far better places than this. (Though we will hint here at the story of her kidnapping, which we've always loved, whether it was a hoax or not; it just seems so fitting.) Surely the bookstore or library nearest you will have a whole shelf or two fitted out with some of the many mysteries of Dame Agatha. So, if this story is the kind of thing you like, stop reading this and get to those volumes as soon as you can!

"Game" by Donald Barthelme

Two people locked in a bunker deep underground act as some sort of sentinels guarding a mysterious console which may be attached to some sort of doomsday device. One plays jacks, the other doesn't. We don't know what it means, either. Read by Scoot. Time 12:11.

People say Donald Barthelme did more than just about anyone to change the face of the American short story during the 1960's and '70's, despite of or perhaps because of appearing regularly in the generally conservative New Yorker magazine. His wildy experimental, careening and erratic, always unpredictable prose had affinities with pop art and the revolutionary spirit of the times. He wrote a great many short stories, and a few novels as well, and he won some prizes and made some money, and then he died in 1989. Oh, well.

"Untitled" ("The Shower Curtain") by Marcel Cohen

Could this be our shortest reading yet? In an enigmatic little snippet of fiction, a shower curtain may be an important clue--oh, come on, it has to be! Read by Scoot. Time 1:52.

Who is or was Marcel Cohen? We don't know, but will have to find out. We do know this comes from a collection of similarly short pieces called The Emperor Peacock Moth. Nice title. Ah--here's something from the Burning Deck website, publisher of Mr. Cohen: "Marcel Cohen was born in 1937 in Asnieres and works as a journalist in Paris. He has written two novels, Galpa (1969) and Voyage a Waizata (1976), stories, and several volumes of very short stories whose admirable density brings them close to being poems, Miroirs (1981), je ne sais pas le nom (1986) and Le grand paon-de-nuit of 1990. He has also published a volume of interviews with Edmond Jabès, From the Desert to the Book (which has been published in English by Station Hill Press)." That enough for you?

"The Art of Vietnam" by Dallas Wiebe

Out of the blue, a Vietnam war veteran receives a summons from an old war buddy who asks his friend to come see himself and the wife he met in that country. What follows is disturbingly indicative of how battle scars can influence one's perspective on the world and on one's ability to tell a straight story. Read by Scoot. Time 10:13.

We don't know if Dallas Wiebe was ever in Vietnam himself, but we do know that he is from Kansas and has taught extensively in the Midwest. As his publisher's website says, "Burning Deck has published three volumes of short stories: The Transparent Eye-Ball, Going to the Mountain, and Skyblue’s Essays. His most recent book is Our Asian Journey (MLR Editions Canada), a fictionalized account of the great Mennonite trek to Central Asia in the 1880s and a study of the impact of language (Biblical) on a community. He has received the Aga Khan Fiction Prize, a Pushcart Prize (1979), an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship, and the Ohio Governor's Award for the Arts." Thanks to author and scholar Alan Leibowitz for donating several Burning Deck volumes to our collection!

"The Novel as History" by Harry Matthews

...Or perhaps "History as Novel (more accurately, as Short Story)." From recounting the time he was trapped in a bar during a blizzard in Detroit to the dawn of the Enlightenment, a long-winded raconteur barely leaves his listener enough time to think, "He's full of it!" Read by Scoot. Time 7:38.

At the time of this story's publication in the collection Country Cooking and Other Stories, in 1980 by the Burning Deck Press, the author had already been publishing fiction for nearly twenty years in places such as The Paris Review and Antaeus, and had been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Which is our way of saying we don't really know anything about him except what it says in the book's front matter and really should find out more soon!

"On Trains" by James Alan McPherson

When this story was written, most of the porters on American trains were black. Over thirty years later, not much has changed, and so this story's exploration of black and white relations on a long-distance train ride is still topical and still relevant. Read by Jonathan Strong. Time 12:09.

A professor at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop for a quarter of a century, James Alan McPherson is a Georgia native who studied to be a lawyer at Harvard and Yale but ended up publishing two award-winning collections of short stories, Hue and Cry and Elbow Room and (in 1969 and 1977, respectively). Though he is not a prolific writer (the best kind, usually), since then he has also published Crabcakes and A Region Not Home. John Updike selected his story "The Gold Coast" for his anthology, Best American Short Stories of the Century, so you know he must be good!

"The Unstrung Harp" by Edward Gorey

It is that time again, time for C(lauvius) F(rerdick) Earbrass to begin the doubtful enterprise of embarking on yet another novel, which will seriously disrupt his croquet matches and reading of the Compendium of the Minor Heresies of the Twelfth Century in Asia Minor. In the midst of his anxieties, he receives a mysterious silver-gilt epergne-and-candelabrum hybrid from a mysterious admirer and contemplates a stuffed fantod in a belljar. Read by Scoot. Time 19:20.

You might be as surprised to find Edward Gorey lurking on these pages as we are, since he is more often thought of as an illustrator than fiction-writer--though even if one takes away the idiosyncratic charm of his cross-hatched drawings (something one would never truly wish to do!), one will still have much to appreciate in his droll and acerbic prose. There are legions of his fans, us included, who still miss the tall bearded man in the big strange house on Cape Cod and his sporadic offerings of amusing books--and especially the whimsical musical "entertainments" he specialized in during his later years, sometimes appearing in these plays himself. The cult of Gorey is immortal, and it has already outlasted many of those delightful dust-jackets he designed for Manhattan publishers from the 1950's through the 1980's, which one still sees in used-book stores everywhere. Like Gorey himself, you can spot them at several paces. And want to take them home.

"Alternatives to Sex: An Introduction" by Stephen McCauley

Here's a "Stories to Go" exclusive, offered to our faithful listeners between our regular short stories: Stephen McCauley, author of such novels as True Enough, The Man of the House, and The Object of My Affection, introduces us all to his latest work, the forthcoming Alternatives to Sex. Look below and you'll find Mr. McCauley reading Lorrie Moore, as well as James Thurber some months ago. Now you'll hear his own words in his own voice. We hope you'll enjoy this brief excerpt and the author's commentary--and that you will rush right out to buy the book as soon as it hits your town. Time 6:40.

OK, Steve, what percentage do we get?

Authors, anyone?

We've just become aware that recently a few new people have been taking a peek at this site, and so first of all we want to welcome them--as well as give a hi-howdy to anyone who's dared to venture back here after recent problems with downloading and listening and story selection. We still have a backlog of things we want to accomplish--and must admit it might take a long time or never. What we'd really love is an Author's List so one could navigate to any particular entry with ease, but there doesn't seem to be any easy way for us Bloggers to do that. (Well, we could hand-stitch it, but that would take a very long time.) If anyone out there could show us how to create an index efficiently, please let us know! In the meantime, don't forget that there is one easy way already to find an author or topic, so easy that we've often forgotten it ourselves--just use the "Search This Blog" feature at the top of the page. Of course, if you don't know which authors or stories we've already featured, this might not be too helpful--but if the author or story you're looking for has already been presented, that search feature should lead you right to that page or those pages.

We'll be looking for more ways to improve this site as we go along. Sorry if the pages are getting a little more cluttered with options nowadays (more than we like, actually), but in an effort to "maximize our potential" and cooperate with the many methods of listening on- or offline, it looks like more clutter is the way to go. You might note that we now feature the timing of new entries (and will try to update previous ones, although Blogger updating can be very slow). And in the future we promise to have readers always say "The End," just in case there might still be any confusion. (After all, quite a few stories do have unexpected or abrupt endings.) Any further suggestions?

One other note: all of our entries past and present have been encode to 48 or 56 kbps, in an effort to balance file size with quality. Being that these are only monophonic voice recordings, that seems to work for us, but does it for you? We do wonder when our ISP server space will run out, even if we don't quite understand all these technical things...

Thanks as always for reading these bothersome notes.

Your Humble Editors

"How to Become a Writer" by Lorrie Moore

"How does one become a writer?" authors are probably often asked by acolytes and critics alike. This story might not help much, but it is a cleverly disguised bildungsroman disguised as a guide for would-be fictionists everywhere. Read by Stephen McCauley. Time 16:15.

It is up to the reader to decide how much of this story might really be autobiographical; Marie Lorena Moore the real person grew up surrounded by books and music, the daughter of parents who had both wanted to be writers at one time. By the time she was Lorrie Moore the writer, she had already won a Seventeen magazine contest and was fast on her way to tenure at The New Yorker and teaching college students to write. She is one of those somewhat rare writers known equally as much for her short story collections as her novels. Her fiction, as one might guess, can often be elusive, spurning or parodying convention.

Stephen McCauley's forthcoming novel Alternatives to Sex will be his sixth; he continues to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts despite everything. Look for a special advertising supplement from Mr. McCauley within the next day or so. If he's lucky, as he says, Oprah may mistake this latest novel for a memoir.

"The Man in Pyjamas" by Eugenio Montale

On his way down the corridor of a hotel late at night, a guest overhears another guest's anxious voice on the phone in her room. Immediately the unintentional eavesdropper begins to conjecture all sorts of possible scenarios--all that's possible within the space of a couple of pages, that is. Read by Scoot. Time 4:18.

Let's consider this story absurd, since that's how it's categorized in the anthology from which it came (after having first appeared in London Magazine some month, apparently, in the 1960's). The author himself was not so usually absurd, since he was the rather serious translator into Italian of many writers in English, from Shakespeare to Hawthorne, as well as himself. More importantly, Montale was "the most influential Italian poet of the twentieth century," as it says right here in that anthology, and is said to have transformed modern Italian poetry the same way T. S. Eliot transformed English poetry. Who would have ever guessed that from this little scribble of a story?

"Cynthia" by Aldous Huxley

A goddess meets her god--or so the ugly, lovestruck "god" thinks. Here's one of those tales which might be told by Oxford graduates as they pass the decanter and thumb through Zuleika Dobson once again for inspiration. Read by Sebastian Stuart. Time 13:50.

The anthology this story comes from is so old it doesn't even mention Huxley's most notorious novel, Brave New World, which hadn't even been published yet. The author and satirist, one of the famous English Huxley family of scientists and artists, was only about 25, a recent college graduate (Balliol at Oxford) himself, when he included this story in his 1920 collection, Limbo. Soon after he would add Leda, Mortal Coils, and Antic Hay to his shelf at the booskhops. It was a long way from there to the swamis and Hollywood and the wild LSD trips that helped inspire a generation of rock stars and hippies until his final injection on the same day that both C. S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy died.

Fresh from several ghostwriting stints, Sebastian Stuart will soon be adding another book to the shelf that holds his thriller The Mentor. It's a comic novel he co-wrote called 24 Karat Kids, and it's already been blurbed by Woody Allen. He has spent much time recently doing scholarly research, as well as writing comic skits for hire, and he will be seen in a forthcoming documentary about his grandfather, the renowned anthropologist Branislaw Malinowski.

Get clicking!

What? You haven't clicked on our link to Librivox yet? If you haven't already, do so now--soon you'll be listening not just to short stories, but to entire books--novels and other works of wonder from out of the public domain and into your earphones! This is an important site everyone should know about, and even yours truly has taken part in the communal readathon. We thank Hugh McGuire from way up in the magical city of Montreal for putting together this important--nay, crucial--resource.

Just to listen to while on your way to the library or bookstore, of course...

"Silent Movie" by Charles Baxter

Maureen is tired of men--their voices, their demands, their ways, their world. And she is, most of all, tired of that man living with her. Read by Jonathan Strong. Length 10:37.

When he was a small child, Charles Baxter was dandled on the knee of rabble-rousing writer Sinclair Lewis. When he grew up, Charlie became a writer himself, specializing in tales of married couples like this one trying to cope with the large and small despairs of our existence, and of other lives of that famous "quiet desperation" in the American Midwest, where the author, as Lewis did, lives. Actually, his writing is not quite as sober as that description might suggest, because we all know the other side of that equation is a quiet joy. Look for Saul and Patsy, his most recent novel, and A Relative Stranger, the collection from which this story comes, and many others.

"A Girl Called Apple" by Hanan Al-Shaykh

Apple is an unmarried woman approaching middle age in a culture which, much like any other culture, expects most adults to marry, settle down, and have children. Living as she does with her family in an infrequently visited oasis, Apple's choices may be few, but her willpower strong. Read by Scoot.

Not surprisingly, the writer says she wrote this story after a visit to Yemen. Though she now lives in London, Hanan Al-Shaykh is a Shi'i Muslim from southern Lebanon, and is considered one of the most important female writers in the modern Arab world. Al-Shaykh began her career, as so many writers do, as a journalist in Cairo and Beirut. Her books, which, in part, examine power struggles between the sexes in the Middle East and beyond, include Women of Sand and Myrrh and Only in London--which gives you an idea of the cosmopolitan scope of her writing. Interestingly, the title of one of her lectures was "The New Scheherezade," so one might assume she has many more stories to tell us.

From the top shelf...

Just in case you missed this (of course you did!), here is the explanation we gave to a recent visitor to this site, one who wondered if our last story offering, by Jane Bowles, was complete. Since this answer applies to quite a few of our stories, we thought we might repeat and revise it:

Yes, as abrupt as it is, that is the end of the story. But you're not the first to wonder if the whole file of the day has been downloaded; indeed, as we have lately discovered, some of our offerings have been accidentally truncated--those have been fixed (permanently, we hope). We try to keep most of our downloads as small and brief as possible, usually choosing the shortest stories in the collections we own. (This doesn't mean, therefore, that they are all favorites!) Because most of our readings are so short or fairly short, many of them number among the authors' fragmentary or even not-quite-finished works. Other times, especially with the more experimental stories, the endings are purposely unsettling or left dangling. It's up to the reader to decide whether the way the story ends is successful or not. Don't worry; we'll try to have more unquestionably complete stories as often as we can... Thanks, Marc, for your query.

"Andrew" by Jane Bowles

A young man who joins the military becomes friends with another, strange young man whose officers allow him to camp out in the woods and cook meat over an open fire. Be prepared for fireworks! Read by Jonathan Strong.

Many people know her as merely the frail wife of writer/composer Paul Bowles (featured here previously), someone who followed him to Morocco, where she came under the thrall of an Arab woman who eventually, some say, led her to her destruction. Well, that may be partly true, but Jane Bowles was an excellent if idiosyncratic writer in many critics' regards, albeit one who took some decades to be fully recognized and realize her just rewards--post-mortem, as if often the case. Her play In the Summer House might be her most widely recognized work, but she is also well-known for her novel Two Serious Ladies and more recently for her collected stories, wherein this one is drawn. So, you see, she was much more than the neurotic portait of her in The Sheltering Sky. Not that we should ever think actual, "real" people ever haunt the otherworld of fiction, any more than those famous real toads in imaginary gardens!

From the desk of...

We continue to shuffle the virtual papers on our virtual desktop, trying to keep the "IN" box stack lower than the "OUT" box stack...

Recently we have discovered to our shock and dismay that cyber-critters apparently were nibbling away at the kilobytes of our digital files, so no wonder new and old visitors alike were having difficulty sometimes downloading complete stories! Several of the stories in our files were indeed truncated, no matter what our server had been telling us (oh, those coy servers!). For this, we greatly apologize for the frustrations we have caused now and then--or constantly. From this moment on, we intend to lay our digital traps with more care and catch these culprits before they do greater harm. Rest assured that we promise to become more vigilant and will always compare file sizes thrice before posting.

A recent visitor asked how to listen to our stories using iTunes; since we are not users of this fine program, we invite any readers out there to help guide us toward the best answer. What follows is a modified transcript of our very tentative response:

"...We've only just tinkered a little with that program, so don't know it very well (not being Apple or iPod persons ourselves, as much as we respect those fine products). On a Windows machine we do know that you can just do a search for "Stories to Go" in the iPod search box, and it should take you right to the recent episode(s). (Or at least that's how it worked last time we tried it.) Then you can just click and play through that program, right on your computer. Additionally, we think the program will help guide you toward archiving our files. From this website, one can probably right-click on one of the orange "feed" buttons and save it to your "feeder" program (such as iPodder). Or you can do it the easy way, as we do when we encounter material we like on podcasting websites, by right-clicking, saving it to one's computer, and then listening to it either on that computer or transferring it to one's digital audio player (they're just humble mp3 files, after all).


"Frankly, despite being podcasters ourselves, we are not experts on this and have often been overwhelmed by the little switches and levers that can inadvertently bring the whole machine to a crashing halt (see E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" for the most accurate description of our lives today, written some seventy or so years ago). Being simple sorts, we just like saving the mp3 files to our computer and dealing with them from there. Of course, it's not automatic, but we have found we just couldn't keep up with the sheer proficiency of any feeder program!

"If you're confused by all this, we don't blame you. Let us know how this works for you--and good luck!"


Lastly, we'd like to point out the fine work of fellow podcaster Jay King, who recently contacted us. Though he hasn't been doing this for too long, he's created some very interesting content, including his own productions of stories from Calvino's Invisible Cities (that seems to be a popular work among bloggers!). Despite whatever ideas this website may give you, there really is a lot of originality and energy out there in the blog/photoblog/vidcast/podcast-osphere. Give Jay a listen at

http://audiolingo.org/


PS Don't forget the divine Miette at the link down below to your left and some fine music-oriented podcasts from Podchaostrophe (formerly "podcasts with a lower-case p" by the mysterious "governor"), to be found at

http://guypluspodcast.blogspot.com/

We almost always really enjoy "guy's" musical selections and skills at arranging them.

Lastly, for mostly non-literary thrills, venerable eclectic nonprofit freeform New Jersey radio station WFMU's regular accumulation of dj bloggers, "Beware of the Blog," is one of the greatest delights of the Internet Age:

http://blog.wfmu.org/

Not to neglect the inimitable though oft-imitated imomus.com for all things Momus and Momusian or the world's greatest Alexandrian library of avant-gardia, ubuweb.com. Where else can one go to hear both Gertrude Stein and the Tape Beatles, look at Aspen magazine or outsider art, or watch Man Ray's or Marcel Duchamp's groundbreaking films?

"The Hit Man" by Bobden Uyl

A man walks into a bar... In this case, a bar on Jonkheren street in Amsterdam (or is it Rotterdam?), where a captive audience is entertained by a hired killer's tale of woe. There is sometimes, perhaps, little difference between the witness and who will be witnessed. Translated from the Dutch by E. M. Beekman.

Bobden Uyl is that next thing to a hit man: a hired writer, one whose works have been translated into German, Russian, Spanish, Bulgarian (!), and of course, English. As the book we're cribbing this from says, "His main theme is travel, from which his characters often return empty-handed or having made discoveries that they did not expect at all." We'll leave it to our listeners to determine whether any of this is to be expected or not. This year Mr. Uyl will be 75 years old, if that makes any difference to anyone.

"The Green Bird" by P. K. Page

Two young people visit the home of two much older people, perhaps not entirely willingly. In the course of their visit, however, at least one of them is profoundly affected by what she encounters there. Read by Scoot.

Patricia Kathleen Page is the grand old lady of Canadian literature, an English-born poet who has been publishing since the early 1940s; although she is a prize-winning poet, she has written fiction, as well. Her first book was The Sun and the Moon in 1944; her latest is 2002's Planet Earth, which has been ranked as one of the fifty most essential Canadian books. Though she grew up on the prairie and spent much time in Brazil, she now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.