Selected Shorts March 2010

Time for another bunch of podcasts I’ve listened to! Wooo! Aren’t we all excited?

Note: These were distributed as podcasts during March. It appears that the show airs on the radio somewhat differently.

An Hour with Sherman Alexie

I don’t often get emotional over my reading. I’m just not that kind of guy. But listening last year to Sherman Alexie read his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian got me sniffling pretty damn good. As short as it is, it’s still a long investment in time and money. Selected Shorts gives you something free, and requires less than an hour of listening. Click on it now. Download. Listen. This is amazing! What is it? Well, it has an interview with Sherman, and he reads a few of his poems. Those parts are good. But what’s great is a reading of Alexie’s story Breaking and Entering by actor B.D. Wong. I only know Wong as the psychologist on Law & Order: S.V.U., but he’s got a number of awards for acting on Broadway. And his reading here is incredible! A Chinese American reading a story written by a Native American about a Native American mistaken for a white man who kills a black teenager. Kid breaks into a house he thinks is empty. In a scuffle, the owner kills him. The story is from his book War Dances. Did I mention it’s amazing?

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

Mysterious Circumstances

The first story in this episode is Thomas Walsh’s Double Check. It’s an old pulp story from Black Mask in 1933. Detective investigates threats against a bank executive. The banks is on the rocks, and so there are lots of people who stand to lose money because of the guy. Lots of people with reason to threaten or off him. Gangsters get involved. Explosions! A complicit woman! Wisecracks! And a really good reading by gravelly voiced James Naughton.

The second piece is Dave Barry‘s False Alarm from his book Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up, read by Larry Keith. Some typical Dave Barry bits about how he can mess up his home alarm system repeatedly. I’m not really sure why, but Dave Barry humor doesn’t really do a lot for me. Including this story.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

Creatures of the Night

Vampire stories!

The first story is Stephen King’s Popsy published in Nightmares and Dreamscapes and read by Michael Imperioli. Sheridan is a gambler who got in too deep. Now he grabs little kids for a pedophile who pays off Sheridan’s marker to the mob. In this case, he tells a crying kid in the mall that he can help find the kid’s Popsy. Only Popsy finds him. This one didn’t really do a whole lot for me. It’s obvious where it’s going. It isn’t really scary. It isn’t really that creepy. Maybe I’m just desensitized.

Second story is a spoof written by host Isaiah Sheffer called Hotel Transylvania, read by the author. Here’s the thing. Spoofs written by outsiders have to be really good. Sheffer’s piece just comes off as condescension toward the horror genre.

Third story is Night Calls written and read by Lisa Fugard. Not a vampire story. A man cares for a rare heron in the bird sanctuary where he works. His daughter visits. The heron gets out. The father searches for the heron. Very melancholy tale.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

The Things They Carried

A replay of an earlier performance of Tim O’Brien‘s The Things They Carried from the collection of the same title, read by Dylan Baker. This is a Viet Nam war story. I’d never heard of it before, but it sure shows up as important in my Google searches. It’s less a war is hell story than a war is soul sucking story. At the beginning, O’Brien describes a platoon of soldiers by what they carry. At the beginning it’s stuff like P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs. Gradually, the things he describes them carrying become more and more immaterial, poise, and dignity. Really amazing story, and you really do get to know the men by the things they carry. Baker’s reading is superb.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

Lost and Found

Four stories this episode.

First up is Etgar Keret‘s Good Intentions read by Leonard Nimoy. I believe the story was written originally in Hebrew and translated to English by Miriam Schlesinger. It can be found in his book The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories. A hit man who thinks he has no feeling anymore finds out he can’t kill a man he admires. This felt very trite and unoriginal.

The second story is actually an essay by Colson Whitehead called Lost and Found from The Colossus of New York. It’s read by Alec Baldwin. I really liked this essay. Both Sag Harbor and this essay center on the place of memory and nostalgia in our lives. From saying that there are eight million New Yorks (or more), one for each person who experiences the city, to nailing down the experience where a place becomes fixed to a viewer at first view, Whitehead nail some really common experiences of place. Mix that in with some personal attachment to New York makes for something special. I think having a native New Yorker read this helps.

Third story: My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid from At the Bottom of the River, read by Laurine Towler. Unfortunately, I didn’t get this at all. It’s a mother and daughter story, but I only get that because Isaiah Sheffer says it is and the narrator keeps referring to her mother. This story is above my pay grade.

And last story is Charles Johnson‘s A Soldier for the Crown performed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. The story appears in Johnson’s collection Soulcatcher and Other Stories. First off, I had no idea about the history of the Black Loyalists during the American Revolution. This is something my history classes never covered, and I’m kind of pissed and kind of ashamed I haven’t learned about it before. Johnson’s story is about a fifteen year old slave who adopts the name Alexander Freeman after abandoning an American master to fight for the British along with a brother and a cousin, neither of whom survive the war. Alexander Freeman does though. It’s second person, which would be tougher to read in print, but works well in audio format. The story is good, though possibly that’s partly my thrill at learning something interesting about American history that I should have known.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)