Spoken into the Ether

Lucky 13! Baker’s dozen. Here we are, at the end of the road. It’s entirely possible I may drop a future short story on this feed, but as far as my old stories go, this is it. So I hope you enjoy it — at least as much as I have enjoyed sharing them with you, aurally. This story originally appeared in THE2NDHAND , which used to be printed on a broadsheet (11”x17”). A sample issue looked like this:...

So here we are — the end of the road. On June 17, 2025, I set out to record a dozen of my short stories for this podcast, and we have arrived at number twelve. As I mention in the intro of this episode, you can watch the adaptation of this short story on IMDB: Fork in Chopsticks Not sure how the filmmaker arrived at that title, but I remember holding no objections. I was just amazed that the short...

Back in 2007, I visited the City of Light for the first time during my honeymoon, and it did not disappoint. The photo below is from that trip almost twenty years ago, and even though the camera shook a little, I think it shook correctly. It still managed to capture all that glitter. I don’t write scifi stories too often — in fact, this might be the only one. And of all the short fiction I have wr...

Where were you when the OJ was declared not guilty? I was at my first real job (IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, in the journals department). Nobody got much work done that day, Tuesday October 3, 1995, as we were all fixated on the verdict. As I recall, not everyone had internet access at the office. I’m almost certain we found out via a live radio broadcast. The story...

Unlike Jake, one of the two main characters in this story, I’m incapable of growing a beard. A fu manchu may be possible, but even that is doubtful. Which is actually fine by me. I knew a guy in college who had a five o’clock shadow around one o’clock, every day. This particular feature of his body rarely brought him much joy. The fourth episode of this podcast featured a jettisoned chapter from m...

March-April 1995. I was a year out of college and working at my first real job when this story was published, but this story was written in that awful space between college graduation and first real job . Many of my friends had secured their jobs before they graduated because they earned STEM degrees, but not I. With an English B.A. in hand, I feared the worst — slinging fries at McDonald’s. Mispl...

Remember the GEICO caveman ads? Here’s the very first one: It premiered in 2004, and this story you are about to hear, “The Lost Diaries of a Cro-Magnon Man,” was written right around that time. So credit where credit’s due — thank you, GEICO Caveman! Also, thank you to Michael , who accepted this story for In Posse Review . For this episode, my audiobook recommendation is not for a book but for a...

Bonus alert! Before reading the short story “Little Things” for this episode, I read from an essay I wrote about the concept of home. This was for Kartika Review , back in the spring of 2010, which is all about my first house: That is the Alpha Tau chapter of Phi Kappa Tau, which still exists today at 106 The Knoll, Ithaca, New York, and indeed it was my first house, as my formative years were spe...

Number five is a bit of a change of pace: three flash fiction shorts for the price of one episode. They are as follows: * Bird Figurine * 1950 * Confessions of My Wart, Which Is on My Right Foot, Second Toe I don’t have a picture for the third story, but maybe that’s for the best. Does anyone really want to see a photo of a wart, even if it’s a talking wart? Maybe especially if it’s a talking wart...

Remember DVD extras? Or maybe I should ask…remember DVDs? Those shiny discs that looked like CDs? (If you now ask what a CD is, then I’m really in trouble.) Anyway, this is what I consider this episode to be — a DVD extra equivalent for my first novel, Everything Asian . Initially it was the second chapter, featuring a wayward mother and daughter team of shoplifters who ran into the Kim family. As...

Welcome to the third episode of Spoken into the Ether . “Translation” was published in Hyphen , in its Fall 2008 issue. The artwork for this story was created by Chloe Bonfield , who’s done amazing things since! When I first saw this illustration in print, I found it rather frightening and didn’t quite understand why Chloe had taken this dark path. But then I thought about this story from the moth...

Welcome to the second episode of Spoken into the Ether , the podcast disguised as an auditory delivery mechanism for my short stories. “Limits,” published in Carve Magazine, dates back to 2008, but its origins go back even further, to the early spring of 1990. It involves two seniors in high school, Joe and Chuck, and their collegiate futures. Hilarity and heartbreak ensue. And if you get to the e...

Today, my two mystery novels, Skin Deep and Deep Roots , are living their second lives with a new publisher, Datura Books ! To celebrate this grand occasion, I’ve decided to put out the first of a dozen of my short stories in audio form. It’s titled “The Suitcase,” and it was published in 2015 by The Margins , the magazine run by the Asian American Writers Workshop. The best way to do this was thr...