miette

Miette has been podcasting the best of world literature's short fiction since March 2005, when she was just a pup.

The Little Woman From Lancashire

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In my ongoing efforts to impress upon you my unparalleled prowess at podCASTrophilia, I’ve spent the evening downloading all these applications that allow one to do things like “Normalise” and “Reduce Peak” and “Remove Hiss” and “Shift Frequency,” all of which I, with my many skills, understand perfectly well and can do with ease, while sipping tea with one hand and scratching my head in the other.

Saviour John

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Nothing says Eve of The Second Coming of Christ like a longish existential short story by a forgotten Swedish Nobel winner (repeat: not nepotism) about a delusional old urchin who lives and preaches as the saviour of man.

I don’t know where you can find this in print– Jesus knows, I’ll bet. I have it in a tattered dimestore paperback anthology called The Existential Mind, Documents and Fictions,

The Betrayal

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Is it a revelatory outpour of inner monologue detailing one man’s confusion on racial, political, and sociological identity, leading to violence and resignation? Or could it be just another day at the office? We should all listen, briefly, then settle up and cose together for a nice long nap.

The Story of an Hour

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It was only a matter of time before we get here, deep unsettling irony, psychosexual abandonment, romantic antipathy and just a soupcon of background traffic. A passing bus, a ghetto lowrider, a few dollups of plaster falling from the ceiling, and if you listen very intently, introspection.

The Story of Federigo’s Falcon (Fifth Day, Ninth Tale)

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Much as I would love to read the entire Decameron, and one day maybe I will (when the sound quality is improved to the point where I no longer sound like a podcastrati… and yes I am working on it!), for now, here’s enough of an excerpt to give you pleasantest of dreams of romance in the time of plague. Besides, it doesn’t get much more hypercritically metatextual, reading a bedtime story that is a bedtime story being read.

By The Water

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If I were a more professional podCASTresse, I might have added a subliminal background track to this story, and if that were to have happened, you might have finished listening to tonight’s bedtime story thinking one thought: Paul Bowles Can Be Touching and Humanistic. But, I’m not a professional

Something Special

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It’s true, it is, that Miette has bought something special to aid in her PodCASTing, though in the true ghetto style she so cherishes, she (or rather, I, Miette), didn’t do much to prevent the background sounds of discs spinning up, or dogs turning to dervish, or other random technospatter.

Second Best

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It’s a lovely springtime afternoon, and you should be outdoors, at the park lazing about, not cramped inside looking for the cheap thrill of an afternoon bedtime story. Go on, go to the park now, and come back and listen later.

But I can only hope you’ve taken my advice, and I’ll assume that it’s later. So here’s a little Lawrence, replete with lovely Lawrencian descriptions of lovely springtime Yorkshire afternoons

An Ideal Family

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Am almost too beat to read this evening, but like dear Mr. Neave, I press on. Enjoy a crackling, hoarse, stammering attempt to clamber through Katherine Mansfield’s An Ideal Family, one of the great short stream-of-conscious experiments. Some nights, when I can sleep, I have clay-puppet-wrestling-match dreams of Mansfield and Va. Woolf, and if only I had a television and

A Beautiful March Day

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Crikes, in the haste of a working week I’d completely forgotten that despite not wanting to go straight to Calvino (because let’s face it, everyone expects Miette to read Calvino, and when have I ever met something so vile as an expectation?), I had mentally dog-eared this one for yesterday. And yes, I could wait a year, but in another year, who’s to say we’ll still be podCASTing at all?