Apostrophe Cast

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 own time as never before, but Sasha Fletcher's verve for celebrating the absurdity of an existence we can't fully explain in the face of an oblivion we can't explain at all is less a call to repentance than a cause for celebration itself. Please enjoy, Sasha Fletcher.

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 This episode we bring you a reading from David Peak's unpublished novel, The River Through the Trees.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 inscrutable. David Peak's reading does all this and more. Please enjoy David Peak.

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 flowing and flowing. He just keeps telling you the truth, and you keep listening and listening. And before you know it, he's got you, and you are enjoying, D.W. Lichtenberg.

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 where light, no matter how bright, cannot make the way forward clear. Mercifully, Cousins provides us with new eyes to see this world, like "two fat pearls." Please enjoy Heather Cousins reading from her debut collection, . Something in the Potato Room, available from Kore Press.

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 grateful that in quiet moments of sometimes difficult observation she has found splendours. Please enjoy Erika Moya.

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 under these dazzling effects, it is Mansbach's rhapsodies that stop the show, from the proper way to savor high grade marijuana to effortlessly skewering the architecture of race and class that constricts his character's will. Please enjoy Adam Mansbach.

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 to bomb boutiques from the warrens where illegal immigrants do the invisible living New York no longer advertises. Please enjoy David Goodwillie.

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 thighs, Hoang gives us a world that refuses to stay in the safe and comfortable shapes we have come to expect. Please enjoy, Lily Hoang.

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 portraits. Please enjoy the inspired work of Bryan Furuness.

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 center, all roads lead to the kingdom of her family, magnified into myth, ruled by a daughter who would scold gods and dogs alike. Please enjoy Danielle Sellers.