The Talking Book Podcast

New reading from Kevin Maloney for your listening pleasure...From cult author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim, Kevin Maloney delivers a vision of the world that is hysterical, terrifying, and true. A cuckolded husband finds a new identity as a ghost. A homeowner has a nervous breakdown while building a pergola. An angst-ridden teenager finds his spiritual equal in the mosh pit of an Alice in Chains conc...

New episode with Richard Chiem! Seven years after its most recent release, You Private Person now returns in a brand-new edition by With an X Books. Named one of Publisher's Weekly's 10 Essentials Books of the American West, these stories are sharp, romantic, and heartbreaking to the core. A beloved collection, a cult classic, and a perfect pop song, You Private Person is your favorite writer's fa...

Did Vivienne Volker Kill Wilma Lang? This question has dogged Vivienne ever since Wilma jumped from a window to her death shortly after Volker stole her lover, the visionary artist Hans Bellmer, in the 1970s. Once a famous artist and fashion icon, Volker is now in her eighties and spends her days in religious contemplation in rural Pennsylvania alongside her daughter Velour Bellmer, her granddaugh...

NDA is a collection of revealing poems and exchanges between Lily and their clients as they navigate the dark bohemia of NYC and LA as a nonbinary sex worker. Spiral upward, downward, and side to side. From the safe words of New York to the alleys of Los Angeles....and all the flights in between. https://www.farwestpress.com/far-west-books/p/nda-lily-lady

A new reading from Mallory Smart. Step into Stevie's world, a 26-year-old musician on the brink of fame. A tour offer catapults her into an existential voyage through life's intricate maze. Within this tense spiritual journey, Stevie confronts the age-old dilemma of fame versus the safety of a simpler existence, all while searching for her elusive tribe. https://www.withanxbooks.com/store/p/i-keep...

Kris chats with B.P. Sweany about his novel The Sword and the Sophomore, plus an excerpt read by Tami Stronach! About the book... Arlynn Rosemary Banson is an atypical sixteen-year-old—the cool, popular outsider, effortlessly straddling the line between divas and dorks. Her forever young mother, Jennifer, is dedicated to making her life awkward by trying to be her friend. Her father, Alan, is a wo...

“In this winningly oblique, slender, and wise-hearted novel, Jack Houghteling puts his finger on febrilely metropolitan human nature as it expresses itself (cerebrally, athletically, familially) in the outer boroughs and in patinated suburbia--and he does so in fleet, uncannily vivid sentences that are summational masterstrokes. Jack Houghteling is a writer of dumbstriking originality and virtuosi...

In Fear Not!, critic Josh Larsen makes the case that monster movies, creature features, slashers, and other fright films artfully reflect our deep worries in a way that resonates with the Christian experience. Combining critical observation and theological reflection, Larsen devotes each chapter to a different horror subgenre, connecting that subgenre to a commonly shared fear. https://www.amazon....

Hal, an Afghan war veteran, begins to hear a voice telling him to go “home”—to a castle, in Scotland. But Hal has never been to Scotland. So whose voice is it? What does it want? And why is it calling Hal “home”? What follows is a surrealist road trip story, part Heart of Darkness and part bipolar Guardians of the Galaxy. In Farsickness, Joshua Mohr spins a picaresque, hallucinatory yarn like only...

New reading with Chase Griffin and Christina Quay. With music by M. Kilcullen... Between the pages of an ever-shifting eternal text known as the Patasphere, a coven of psychedelic fiction fanatics and a duo of agents working for a private intelligence firm known as The Geist, LLC navigate their ways simultaneously through a labyrinthian pilgrimage to the ole haunts of their favorite thoughtform, a...

Violent Candy is a collection of sixteen stories about the the depths we go to find love for ourselves and from others, the trauma we obtain in childhood and carry with us into adulthood, the desperation to find connection in a world determined to tear us all apart, and the self-inflicted violence we sometimes direct at other. There's a woman who loses her child to Disneyland fantasies, a man who...

A visionary evocation of contemporary Appalachian life and labor. Gray draws upon his own experiences-specifically, the effects of the 2008 financial crisis upon his hometown of Jefferson, North Carolina-while also exploring Appalachian history, country music, and the politics of rural extraction. GET THE BOOK >>> https://www.garden-doorpress.com/store/thickets-swamped-in-fence-coated-briars

A woman wants to be caught stealing people's identities, but nobody is paying attention. A suburban father becomes convinced that he's transformed into a dinosaur-shaped chicken nugget. A hitman's target collapses before he can be killed. The novella and stories in Echo Chamber reverberate, wild and beautiful. GET THE BOOK >>>> https://www.tridentcafe.com/trident-press-titles/echo-chamber

Drew Buxton is a writer and social worker from Texas. His debut short story collection So Much Heart was released in July by With An X Books. His work has been featured in Joyland, The Drift, Electric Literature, Witch Craft, and Vice among other publications. Find him at drewbuxton.com. Get the book SO MUCH HEART: https://www.withanxbooks.com/store/p/so-much-heart-by-drew-buxton In a debut collec...

Had a blast with 103.3 FM's Wordplay hosted by Lockie Martin. Here's the spot. Readings from the studio by Claire Hopple and Ashleigh Bryant Phillips!

Adrian Shirk is the author of HEAVEN IS A PLACE ON EARTH (Counterpoint, 2022), a personal odyssey of American utopian experiments, and AND YOUR DAUGHTERS SHALL PROPHESY (Counterpoint, 2017), a hybrid-memoir exploring American women prophets and mystics, named an NPR ‘Best Book’ of 2017. Shirk was raised in Portland, Oregon, and has since lived in New York and Wyoming. She’s a frequent contributor...

A new reading from Alice Kaltman and her book Almost Deadly, Almost Good, out now from Word West press. Get the book! https://alicekaltman.com/almost-deadly-almost-good Alice Kaltman is the author of the story-collection STAGGERWING, the novels WAVEHOUSE, THE TANTALIZING TALE OF GRACE MINNAUGH, and DAWG TOWNE. Her new linked collection ALMOST DEADLY/ALMOST GOOD arrives November 2022. Alice’s stori...

Out May 15th! PURE COSMOS CLUB by Matthew Binder. https://www.stalkinghorsepress.com/product/pure-cosmos-club-pre-order-paperback/ In this biting satire, Matthew Binder takes surreal aim at the poses and pretensions of high art and fashion. With ruthless wit, Binder chronicles the struggles of Paul, an eccentric artist, and his companion dog, a disabled, quiche-obsessed terrier-mix named Blanche....

From Joseph Fasano, the acclaimed author of 'The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing', comes 'The Swallows of Lunetto', the powerful story of a young couple's escape from Italian fascism at the end of the Second World War. GET THE BOOK! https://shop.maudlinhouse.net/#the-swallows-of-lunetto "As essential as Hannah Arendt in understanding history and the heart." —Pietro Federico

A conversation with Christy Alexander Hallberg. We talk about her new audiobook Searching For Jimmy Page, then listen to an excerpt narrated by Melissa Connell. https://www.christyalexanderhallberg.com/searchingforjimmypage "The unraveling of eighteen-year-old Luna Kane’s haunted past begins in the winter of 1988, when her dying great-grandfather, a self-proclaimed faith healer, claims he hears ph...

An excerpt from the debut novel by Allie Rowbottom. Propulsive, dark, and moving, Aesthetica is a Veronica for the age of “Instagram face,” delivering a fresh, nuanced examination of feminism, #MeToo, and mother-daughter relationships, all while confronting our collective addiction to followers, filters, and faux realities. “This brutal tale of a teenage Instagram model teases out the ugliness of...

THE ENHANCERS follows three teenage friends as they encounter the pleasures and alienation that accompany coming of age in a techno-pharmaceutical society. The Enhancers questions who we are when valued most for our ability to process information. With mental augmentation as a baseline: how do we come to know ourselves and what does it take to break free? https://meeklingpress.square.site/product/...

Examining the sanctuary of the home and one of the horror genre’s most frightening tropes, Anybody Home? points the camera lens onto the quiet suburbs and its unsuspecting abodes, any of which are potential stages for an invader ambitious enough to make it the scene of the next big crime sensation. Who knows? Their performance just might make it to the silver screen. https://michaeljseidlinger.com...

MOTHERTHING is a darkly funny take on mothers and daughters, about a woman who must take drastic measures to save her husband and herself from the vengeful ghost of her mother-in-law https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696773/motherthing-by-ainslie-hogarth/ AINSLIE HOGARTH is the author of the YA novels The Lonely and The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated). She lives in Canada with her husba...

Please enjoy the author Bud Smith reading from his new novel TEENAGER, out now from Vintage. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/679124/teenager-by-bud-smith/ BUD SMITH works heavy construction in New Jersey. His story “Violets” appeared in The Paris Review. His new novel TEENAGER. It’s one of NPR’s best books of 2022. I read it and it’s my number one favorite book of 2022 so far.