The Talking Book Podcast

Jordan Castro is the author of two poetry books and the former editor of New York Tyrant Magazine. He is from Cleveland, Ohio. The Novelist is his first novel. Get the book: https://softskull.com/dd-product/the-novelist/ The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor’s embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first pers...

A reading from Maegan Poland, a fiction writer based in Philadelphia. Her debut short story collection What Makes You Think You're Awake? won the Bakwin Award at Blair Press and was featured on The Millions’ Most Anticipated for June 2021.

An excerpt from the new unabridged audiobook BODY HIGH, written and read by Jon Lindsey. Get it now: https://thetalkingbook.org/body-high

Listen to excerpts from COMMAND AND CONTROL, a new story by Sam Pink, forthcoming in the Southwest Review. Check out the author's work in the links below: https://thetalkingbook.org/audiobooks https://bookshop.org/books?keywords=Sam+Pink https://www.instagram.com/sam_pink_art/

A portrait of the artist at the brink of self-actualization, Salad Days is a vulnerable and evocative study of identity. Go get Laura Theobald's book right now. https://shop.maudlinhouse.net/#salad-days “Something about Salad Days reminds me of Emily Dickinson—if Emily were hornier and funnier. The poems have the kind of specificity that allows them to feel universal, like some beautiful, demented...

Rooted in New Orleans, Creole Conjure is an interconnected short story collection that mixes and matches folklore and fairy tales to create a unique mythos of its own. It follows various female or female-identifying characters trying to find their way in a world built upon deception and oppression. Inspiration was taken from European fairy tales, Greek mythology, and Louisiana folklore. It comes o...

https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680032550/imagine-a-death/ In the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn't the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moment...

https://thetalkingbook.org/mira-corpora JEFF JACKSON is a novelist, playwright, visual artist, and songwriter. His second novel Destroy All Monsters was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in Fall 2018. It received advanced praise from Don DeLillo, Janet Fitch, Dana Spiotta, Ben Marcus, and Dennis Cooper. His novella Novi Sad was published as a limited edition art book and selected for “Best of 2...

A reading from Mallory Smart The Only Living Girl in Chicago Zoe Clark is back in Chicago, and she already wants to run. But she can never turn her back on her monstrous hometown again. Grief, technology, isolation, and emptiness keep her up at night. Or maybe it's the coffee. Her brain feels like a mosquito trapped in amber, ready to be found in 65 million years by an enterprising paleontologist....

Featured story: The Mattress Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain. GET THE FUL...

Duncan Birmingham is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles. He’s been a writer and producer on numerous shows including Maron (with Marc Maron) on IFC. His book of short stories, The Cult in My Garage comes out in August from Maudlin House. https://shop.maudlinhouse.net/

Wes Tirey returns with his 10th record and label debut for Dear Life Records. It is a Midwestern Odyssey, borne from Tirey's childhood in Southern Ohio and from the literary traditions of Frank Stanford and Raymond Carver. Over the course of eighteen songs, Tirey explores through his characters themes of social and geographic isolation. He wanders through corn-laden and rust-covered wastelands, se...

A very special reading by Bud Smith called Free Bird from his collection Double Bird, out now from Maudlin House. Vivd. Odd. Hurtful. Unloved. Wet with dew. Out of its mind with joy. Get this damn book: https://shop.maudlinhouse.net/#double-bird

Amphibians invites further contemplation of female physicality--what it means to reside in a female form. An amphibious aircraft crashes in Maine, a young girl skinny-dips with her elders, a distraught cruise ship dancer boards a water taxi in Grenada, and travelers to Dubai and Abu Dhabi long for familiar oceans; back in New England, small-town artists try to smudge out their tedium with seaside...

The poems in Mik Grantham’s debut collection, HARDCORE, are deceptively simple, darkly funny, and as unforgettable as a nagging toothache. Grantham confronts grief in myriad forms; the loss of innocence coincides with the loss of a tooth; a relationship decays and is uprooted alongside ruminative dog walks and soul-crushing waitressing shifts. It is Mik Grantham’s refusal to wallow in the dour, he...

Squirting across the sunburned landscape of Southern California, Body High is a journey marked by misplaced lust, mistaken fathers, lost semen, and the kidnapping of a sperm bank daughter, whose untainted kidneys may hold the key to redemption or, perhaps, the realization of its impossibility. https://houseofvlad.bigcartel.com/product/body-high-a-novel-by-jon-lindsey Featured readers: Jon Lindsey...

The follow-up to his beloved debut collection Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me, Mark Leidner's RETURNING THE SWORD TO THE STONE is simultaneously profound and irreverent, in the same way that the world is flat as we walk and round as we live. https://fonografeditions.com/catalog/f0no10-mark-leidner-returning-the-sword-to-the-stone-print-book/

A reading by Shy Watson from her new collection HORROR VACUI, out now from HOUSE OF VLAD PRESS. https://houseofvlad.bigcartel.com/product/horror-vacui-poems-and-other-writings-by-shy-watson SHY WATSON wrote Cheap Yellow (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018) & co-founded blush lit. Find more work at places like New York Tyrant, The Rumpus, & [PANK]. Follow @formermissNJ on Twitter for updates.

Quero-Quero deals with emotional strife and survival, a story of two adolescent girls from Brazil during a time of political oppression in their country and nearby Argentina. Avital Gad-Cykman's book Life in, Life Out (Matter Press) came out in 2014, and her second book, Light Reflection Over Blues is forthcoming this year at Ravenna Press.

Sebastian Castillo is the author of 49 Venezuelan Novels (Bottlecap Press). You can find his writing in Queen Mob’s Tea House, Hobart, Peach Mag, X-R-A-Y Lit Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @bartlebytaco. Go get Sebastian's book "NOT I" here: https://www.wordwest.co/online-store/not-i-p178428336

The following is a new excerpt from Brad Phillips' forthcoming novel, set to be published by Tyrant Books in 2021. Check out his book Essays and Fictions at the links below. Print store.nytyrant.com/products/essays…y-brad-phillips Audio thetalkingbook.org/essays-and-fictions

Lee Matalone weaves a moving, beautiful narrative of home, identity, and belonging. Home Making is a somber, yet hopeful, ode to the stories we tell ourselves in order to make a family. Go get this book at: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/home-making-lee-matalone

Grant Maierhofer reads an excerpt from FLAMINGOS from the collection WORKS, out now from 11:11 Press. You can get a copy here: https://1111press.bigcartel.com/product/works-by-grant-maierhofer

Papal Glow is the time between centuries, that little dust mote trailing in the sun’s glare between folds of the partition that separates the public from true knowledge. It is the preventative strain keeping the powers-that-be at bay while the world swirls by unnoticed. Get the book here: https://papalglow.maudlinhouse.net/