Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast
100 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 7 years ago - ★★★★ - 157 ratingsCurl up and fall asleep to the world's greatest short stories, the known treasures and the once-forgotten, purred to you as only Miette can.
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Episodes
A Little Cloud, by James Joyce
July 25, 2016 02:53 - 33 minutes - 30.8 MBI know, I know, I'm late for Bloomsday, and at this point, I thought you'd have forgotten. My friends, why haven't you forgotten? I mean, you surely know that the world is breaking the sound barrier with how fast it seems to be going where this cozy handbasket might be taking it, wherever it is handbaskets go.
A Mother
June 17, 2015 04:54 - 31 minutes - 28.9 MBMuch love from my hidey-hole, where I spent the bedtime hours in recitation from the beginning of Ulysses in celebration of the hour at hand. My audience of one was sound asleep by the snotgreen sea.
Counterparts
June 16, 2014 20:15 - 25 minutes - 17.2 MBIn my many years of Bloomsday readings, I’ve neglected to tell you about my first run-in with the text. It was more years ago than I’ll ever admit, when I had recently moved to New York, and had almost immediately found myself a nice new literary teenage boyfriend. We had only been dating a few […]
The Housekeeper
January 15, 2014 18:26 - 13 minutes - 6.16 MBHello and would you just look at the calendar and where has the time gone? I would make excuses for the lapse in months or tell you what I’ve been up to, but that would be projecting, and if you want to know these things, I’m sure you’ll just ask. In any event, the theme […]
A Painful Case
June 16, 2013 14:20 - 25 minutes - 1 ByteI’m sitting on what may be the most beautiful beach in the world, trying desperately to avoid dropping my computer into the chasms dug in the sand by last night’s hatching turtles, and trying even more desperately to explain to you why it’s been so long since I’ve flooded your Eustachians. But the beach is […]
Water Liars
January 09, 2013 17:13 - 11 minutes - 5.38 MBIn the Wells Tower profile of Barry Hannah I reference in the spoken introduction to today's story (which you should treat yourself to), written before Hannah's 2010 death, the following is offered:
Strawberries
November 16, 2012 19:30 - 13 minutes - 6.3 MBA few weeks ago, there was a hurricane that you might have read about (unless it blew a rock on top of you and you decided to live beneath it, in which case, my sympathies). During this hurricane, I was away on what was supposed to have been a Caribbean holiday of a few days, which turned into one of a few days plus a few days more plus a few bonus days.
While the Women are Sleeping
October 04, 2012 01:56 - 1 hour - 32.3 MBI'm sitting here desperately trying not to listen to the U.S. Presidential Debate that's streaming into my earbuds, because the entire thing seems like such hot-twisted-metal train wreckage that the hairs on my neck get singed just listening to it. And I like my neck-hairs.
Houses (Guest narrator: Patrick Scott)
September 08, 2012 21:55 - 27 minutes - 25.5 MBWhen Patrick Scott has been known to bail me out of a slump in the past, he’s done so with his passel of Old Reliables: Raymond Carver. Flannery O’Connor. Russell Banks. The indisputably great, in other words. So when this time, he sent this recording of a piece by a speculative fiction writer I’d never […]
Clay, James Joyce
June 15, 2012 22:35 - 19 minutes - 8.74 MBIn some parts of the world, it’s Bloomsday already, and in yours, it may be at the end of a summery Friday work-day, so perhaps The Big Day will greet you just as you’re weeding through your feedreader with an icy drink by your side while you dip your legs in a pool full of […]
Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning
May 25, 2012 17:26 - 35 minutes - 16.3 MBIt’s been a while since I’ve last read, for reasons whose details I won’t serenade you with, but which have to do with huge, overwhelming, life-changing projects that ultimately will leave me with more time to do this more often (I’ll need a little luck, if you want to drop some in the mail), but […]
Breaking Camp (from Danvis Tales)
March 12, 2012 13:03 - 11 minutes - 5.39 MBIf, while listening to tonight’s story, you come to the dialogue and have no idea about what I am talking, you won’t be alone. I staggered across tonight’s author by way of the great Hayden Carruth, whose introduction to Rowland E. Robinson’s Danvis Tales ranks among the most incisive layer-peeling short pieces of literary commentary […]
The Night of the Ugly Ones
January 31, 2012 19:43 - 10 minutes - 1 ByteSometimes a story catches you by title alone. I have a real soft spot, personally, for "The Night of the" stories, no matter the medium. Hunters, Iguanas, Living Dead, even Comets (to a lesser degree)... all of these things weaken my articulated joints. Tonight's story is no different in that regard, but all kinds of different if those Night stories are your precedents...
Illusion by Jean Rhys (Redux)
January 12, 2012 19:31 - 13 minutes - 6.28 MBSometimes it just kills me how many stories I've read here. A lot, that's how many. And as much as I'm endeared to those earlier lo-fi bootleggy recordings, there are some stories which just aren't served by the lack of quality, and some stories that, after this many years, should be read again anyway...
Indiscretion
December 15, 2011 20:17 - 24 minutes - 11.4 MBYou'll have to excuse the fact that this sounds somewhat as if it might have been recorded in a submarine in the icy waters beneath an alien planet; I haven't been around for a while, and my audio equipment was dusty and had been playing bingo in a church basement...
The Young Workman’s Letter (Guest narrator: Chris King)
November 11, 2011 19:21 - 28 minutes - 13.1 MBUsually, when I think about this humble little project, it fills me with all kinds of amourpropre. Even when I'm temporarily removed from my own devices (audiotorily speaking), I can't help but self-congratulatorily pat myself backwise (I'm flexible) at keeping the motor of this anthology running. Then sometimes...
I Am Awake (Guest narrator: Philip Shelley)
October 27, 2011 16:12 - 26 minutes - 12 MBTonight's guest narrator owns and operates The Devastationalist Manifesto, a project I desperately wish would soon revive itself from its two-year hiatus, and not just because I miss the occasional chance for self-gam-gawkery...
The Man Who Lost the Sea (Guest narrator: Shig Vigintitres)
October 14, 2011 18:26 - 29 minutes - 13.4 MBSturgeon's a presence which should have been established here long ago, and I was grateful beyond expression when tonight's guest reader volunteered to represent him. That said, I was only told there was...
Enoch and the Gorilla (Guest Reader: Patrick Scott)
October 07, 2011 16:13 - 17 minutes - 15.6 MBSome of you may remember the sweet sounds of Patrick Scott from earlier Miette Bailouts. When I put out the call for guest readers, he was quick to the case. But Patrick's a busy guy, now that he's a famous filmmaker, and so when you listen to his lustrous interpretation of Flannery O'Connor, you will pick up the occasional whirr of what seems a loud computer fan...
Frau Wilke (Guest narrator: Sam Jones)
September 20, 2011 19:03 - 12 minutes - 11.5 MBIf you know Sam Jones from various internet outlets, you will be neither surprised nor disappointed that he chose to read Walser for his guest stint here. However, if you know Sam Jones from various internet outlets alone, you might not know...
Everything is Green (Guest narrator: George Carr)
September 14, 2011 14:30 - 3 minutes - 1.71 MBThe voice you are about to hear is not my own, though today's guest narrator insists his distinctive lilt can be attributed to "equal parts whisky, speed, and diction practice." Which means that it's probably closer to my voice than we'd think at first listen. And so, I would appreciate no murmured speculation on rhinoplastic nasal blockage or testosterone injections on my part. For the next month or two...
Order of Insects by William H. Gass
August 03, 2011 16:55 - 22 minutes - 10.3 MBI know, it's been a while. I've been trying to Have A Summer over here, an effort thwarted by an adverse reaction to allergens purportedly getting caught up in butterfly currents on the other side of the world. Either that, or it's the Romantic Lady Writer's Disease, which would be fine by me, inasmuch as any anachronistic way to go down is fine by me. But I do wish it'd forestall another decade.
Two Gallants by James Joyce
June 16, 2011 17:07 - 26 minutes - 24.5 MBBloomsday is here again, as you surely know, and as is my ritual, here’s another story from the Dubliners. This is the 7th such reading, and sometimes, the thought of keeping this up for eight more years to finish the collection is one I tend to avoid. But to keep things spicy in the meantime […]
At the Anarchists’ Convention by John Sayles
June 08, 2011 17:35 - 29 minutes - 26.6 MBI yanked tonight's story from The Best of American Short Stories 1980, a volume edited by the great Stanley Elkin. If you take one look at it, you'll see that 1980, while not considered a boon year for American fiction, perhaps should be. Donald Barthelme, Mavis Gallant, William H. Gass, Elizabeth Hardwick Grace Paley, Peter Taylor, and I'm thinking...
The Truth and All Its Ugly
May 09, 2011 20:45 - 38 minutes - 35.4 MBWhenever an internet missive or blip crosses my screen with Kyle Minor's name attached, I open it up in awe of his apparently continual reading and writing and thinking acutely about the finer side of the bookish life. I don't know whether this relentless pursuit of the craft can be had without a truckload of drugs, but I also think the drugs necessary for his task probably haven't even been concocted yet. You could get your brain into top form fast by looking closely at the right 2/3 of hi...
First Confession
April 07, 2011 16:19 - 22 minutes - 10.2 MBI hadn't read Frank O'Connor's stories in a very long time-- he fell into the gutter of authors I'd studied to a point of boredom as a student, and while I've spent a good deal of my adult life sweeping those gutters and asking absolution from what I've swept up, it took a while to get to him. I'd associated it so closely, in the vast netherlands of the juvenilia of my headspace, with hackneyed Catholic guilt tropes in Comic Sans all the way through...
Letter from a Hunchback Girl to a Metalworker
March 15, 2011 15:43 - 11 minutes - 5.48 MBFernando Pessoa has been a long-standing point of not insignificant fixation in the writerly pursuits of Your Faithful (If Not Schedularly Published) Storyteller, for reasons that will be forehead-smackingly obvious to some of you. As for the rest of you, rather than stand around in the dark, I welcome you to take a guess. Should you want that guess to be educated,
Killer Whales, Susan Daitch
February 24, 2011 14:12 - 22 minutes - 10.3 MBThere's a quite decent independent bookstore in the town in which I'm staying this week, a bookstore that will be closing soon for all the usual reasons. I plan to spend a fair amount of time later this morning vulturing my way through this store, and walk out picking my teeth with unsold reading lights and hauling overstuffed bags full of firesale booty that can no way be described as "carrion" no matter how many ways I stretch the metaphor...
The Force Acting on the Displaced Body, Christopher Rowe
January 28, 2011 18:39 - 20 minutes - 9.64 MBAre your toes frozen? I hope not. Especially if you're as big of a pansy about the weather as I am. Because the weather knows this about me and is a relentless jerk about this, my revenge is in the form of a seaside adventure story based largely on southern waters. Which is, admittedly, analogous to bringing double your milk money to school and handing one over freely to the big bully. But I don't know how to kick the weather where it deserves to be kicked, so this is the...
A Woman of Properties, Jack Matthews
January 06, 2011 20:22 - 42 minutes - 19.7 MBWell, here we are having taken yet another circumnavigatory Gregorian tour together, and I hope that you've put away your party hats and crackers and are back to the grind, having disregarded all the unreasonable expectations you made of yourselves for the coming months. Because I have nothing but sympathy: it's too cold to get up and run ten miles and do the laundry and tidy the front garden and write your best auntie a letter every morning. I understand. Stay in bed. Read a good book. ...
The Balloon, Donald Barthelme
December 13, 2010 19:50 - 15 minutes - 14 MBIf you've been listening for a while, you may know that I have an unfortunate habit of whining, incessantly and irrepressibly, in those months when the cold has rendered my extremities indistinguishable from assorted varieties of freezer section meats. It's a problem I've known about, it's one that those around me suffer in kind on behalf of all of you, and it's one that I'd love to kick, if only I inject some lock de-icer into these knees. Maybe anti-freeze would work?
The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe
November 23, 2010 21:39 - 18 minutes - 17.1 MBThis story is brought to you by a very nice man named Jake, who requested it a while ago, and when I read Philip K Dick instead last week, expressed some disappointment.
Roog, Philip K. Dick
November 17, 2010 22:14 - 15 minutes - 13.8 MBI got kicked in the inspiration after that bit of Nabokov (he has that effect), and was determined to give you new stories at least weekly. I'd cleared my schedule to dedicate more time to only these more self-satisfying projects, and then, disaster struck, in the name of green-biled phlegm and rancor of bronchitis.
The Vane Sisters, Vladimir Nabokov
October 27, 2010 18:19 - 40 minutes - 37.1 MBIt had been some years since I've read any Nabokov, which I can only blame a youthful use of mind-shrinking substances or a two-mile-long to-read list. But recently, I made a full-length audiobook of Dustin Long's Icelander, whose completion set me on a mission. I'm not going to shill Icelander too much (ahem, only five bucks! And I get a piece!), but there was no way for any reasonable person -- or even myself -- to finish it and not start thumbing through the old master's treasures, all o...
Here Be Dragons, Alfred Chester
October 12, 2010 19:51 - 30 minutes - 28.1 MBThe very first words of Gore Vidal's foreword to Alfred Chester's collected stories (Head of a Sad Angel Although it has been my misfortune to have at practically all the noted American writers of the last half century, I did have the great good luck never to have so much as glimpsed Alfred Chester....
Helpmate, Ben Greenman
August 23, 2010 18:08 - 21 minutes - 19.9 MBNot long ago, I found myself in the unfortunate position of being deeply ensconced in a marvelous book while on a crowded public transportation system. “Nothing unfortunate about that, Miette,” you’ve said. I heard you. The unfortunate thing was that the title of the book, when viewed from across a subway car, can seem offensive. […]
Disappearing
July 23, 2010 17:58 - 11 minutes - 10.6 MBIt's that time of year, my dears, where I'm about to head off to foreign parts for what's known in various circles as "vacation," "holidays," or "days spent without LCD bathing." I can't believe it, either, actually, and am not sure I'll be able to pull off things like "relaxing" and "not having much of anything to do," which have only existed as very high level concepts in my foggy head. And there are so many things lined up when I return that I'll probably never ever take time off again, ...
A Small Circle of Friends
July 07, 2010 16:24 - 14 minutes - 13.4 MBI know; this is two posts in a row that make direct mention of ladies' underthings. I have three very good reasons for this:
After the Race
June 16, 2010 16:38 - 17 minutes - 8.24 MBLooking at the Bloomsday readings I've done to date, it's evident that my written prefaces have become some absurd equivalent of squealing fangirlish bra-tossing. I may (OR MAY NOT) be an excellent bra-tosser with perfect aim and pitch, and we all know that Joyce wouldn't be one to have a problem with women's undergarments tossed his way. But my first exposure to Joyce was in a sleepy little black shoebox theatre, where a troupe of mild-mannered turtlenecked barnstormers read from Dubliners...
Sex and/or Mr. Morrison
June 02, 2010 15:43 - 29 minutes - 13.3 MBA disclaimer for you on this happy June that will become self-evident soon enough: I love this story. I could read it a thousand times over and give you a thousand different insights. I love it in the peepish and borderline obsessive way its narratrice experiences love. Love it, in its own words, "as a mouse might love the hand that cleans the cage, and as uncomprehendingly, too, for surely I see only a part of him here." ...
In the Avu Observatory
May 18, 2010 17:16 - 16 minutes - 7.47 MBA few days ago, I took a little trip to Toronto, where the jazz singers scat to sheet music, where wine is poured long before noon, and where the best booksellers refuse to serve the likes of me. While there, I spent a day in rooms full of brainy people as obsessive as I am about books and reading and great literature and using technology in the service of all these things. That's right: me, your Miette, dropped down in the middle of Booknerdville. Must I even mention that it was terrific? ...
Sono and Moso
April 29, 2010 17:19 - 23 minutes - 10.7 MBLast week's New Yorker magazine included a series of letters written by Saul Bellow to other writers. I've often thought epistolary exchange between writers to be the most nettly of writing, both the most effusive and the most sincere, the most pretentious and the most vein-splittingly self-conscious. It's hard
The Butterfly
March 29, 2010 01:45 - 13 minutes - 6.18 MBI've been wanting to read James Hanley to you for a couple of months now, ever since he was reintroduced to me a few months ago while I was yearning for a bathematic submergence in a foreign hotel.
The Fifth Story
March 16, 2010 13:14 - 10 minutes - 4.94 MBI read recently about toxic bread in a sleepy French village, about mass hallucinations and the newly revealed hypothesis that the CIA was responsible for covert LSD experiments. Apparently, the same thing might have happened in the subways of New York. And suddenly, so much is explained, especially as pertains to cockroach-squashing memories. These days, […]
Sir Henry
February 27, 2010 20:12 - 30 minutes - 13.9 MBI have a good excuse to spare you my blathery scrawl about the show-stopping beauty in this story -- the hot cats at Electric Literature have done so in a flashier way, and before you even tap the PLAY button on your baubly mp3 players, you ought to watch this:
The Trojan Horse
February 10, 2010 16:12 - 25 minutes - 11.5 MBSometimes I think you haven't lived until you've been given the shoulder by a drunken horse in a bar. Other times I think the very stuff of life happens from being the drunken horse in a bar. But usually, it has to do with neither of these things, and I'm fairly certain that none of it would be worth the slightest damn if there was no Queneau to neigh by.
The Sorrel Colt
February 01, 2010 18:50 - 20 minutes - 9.34 MBThe other day I was walking through a blistering, blustery, blinding-white below-zero snowstorm, cursing the day I decided not to live on a Caribbean island, and doubly cursing the day I decided not to be born with antifreeze for blood. Because if I had been born with antifreeze for blood, I'd probably have other alien characteristics as well, such as the ability to launch an anvil from my hand that I could drop on the head of the person walking in the snowstorm next to me when that person p...
Gregory
January 13, 2010 03:16 - 15 minutes - 7.35 MBSo, I know very little about the author of tonight's story. He has no Wikipedia page in any language that I can gather, one used copy of an out-of-print collection of stories available in English (that I can cursorily find, anyhow), and a slight dusting of a presence in literary anthologies, including one in which I dusted off this. In fact, the only thing I'm certain of regarding tonight's author is that I really ought to attempt to learn basic Greek pronunciation if I'm going to crack at ...
DiGrasso
January 06, 2010 14:00 - 14 minutes - 6.6 MBOh, aren't we lucky!? A double-bluffed, double-dipped, double-headed dose of Isaac Babel. When you've had a listen here and discover that you're still running low on your recommended daily serving of Babel, you might head here to find a new recording of an old reading of another one.
On Hope
December 23, 2009 01:15 - 10 minutes - 4.83 MBI can think of nothing more apt for the rounding-out of a year than a fleeting little fable on outplaying inevitability. If you're anything like me, Inevitability is one collector you've managed to send off-course at least once this year, and that itself is cause for champagne. Happy New Decade to all, but especially to those who continue to believe relentlessly in the potential of literature.