The Strange Recital is an audio forum for short fiction. We delight in perceptions of reality that twist and fold in unexpected ways.
Each podcast episode runs about 30 minutes and includes a story reading (the Recital), a musical interlude, and an author interview (the Post-Recital)... with a twist.
Subscribe to get a new episode once a month.
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"Everyone just wants to be loved a bit more than everyone else. See me and not my brothers, my sisters, my bandmates. Love me and not my kid. Feel my sadness."
A dead rock star faces his life on a journey home. A lonely fan from the mountains does the same. Paul Smart reads from his novel OVERLOOK, and talks about its origins.
"Lightning flashed, thunder cracked, and the diner was instantly in utter blackness. There was a palpable sensation of absence in the air, a sort of death as all electrical vibration in the city ceased in one instant."
A nighttime commuter encounters a hitchhiker in a New Jersey diner, but it's no ordinary meeting. Who is this odd traveler, and what changes will be wrought by his hypnotic powers?
"Valentine Basilevich Glass, native of Vyborg, accountant in the bureau of administration of the Leningrad Parks of Culture and Rest, led a number of unrelated lives. Whereas most people were trapped by the web of Soviet bureaucracy, he reveled in its complexity and quirkiness, finding in the course of his work numerous loopholes which he impressed in his memory, an unconscious act much like anticipating an annoying scratch on a phonograph record."
Two very short stories about unusual men. Or are they stories about the culture? Or are they stories about you and me and the ways we make meaning? This episode may or may not have the answers. Also, have you ever broken the fourth wall?
"Their flight was routine, cruising at forty thousand feet, at a speed of five hundred and eighty miles an hour with the wind behind them. There was some turbulence as Malarkey began the descent and Abdul switched on the seatbelt signs. They pierced the clouds and lost visibility. Then they lost radio contact."
Two friends face an inexplicable situation. How did they arrive in this primitive place? Can they bluff their way to safety? Maybe they're actually facing themselves.
"Elzy woke to cold, the scent of cold, of snow, of tent fabric. The coldness felt good on her hot skin. Confusion. She wasn’t in her room…? The child fell asleep again before she could figure it out. Nothing seemed worth thinking through. Her head hurt. Her chest hurt."
As a child, she survived a world-changing event. As an adult, is it time for her to leave isolation behind, to more fully join the new society? An excerpt from a new novel about a potential future.
"Cheek to the cold floor, thick sole on my back, I began to sense my place in this moment in history. I had thought I was playing the hero, arriving just in time to save my mom, when I was put in a chokehold, thrown to the ground and tasered in the groin."
A young Winston Smith faces a dramatic cultural shift: lockdowns, masks, surveillance, riots. "How did we get here?" he wonders, in a new satirical novel that looks back at the last four years. Can this story end more happily than Orwell's?
"'Like life, a watch provides complications to keep it interesting.' Watanabe sat cross-legged on a low stage while we sat packed around him, students at the feet of a high-art Socrates, all leaning forward to hear his surprisingly delicate voice."
A luxury accessory that might, or might not, kill its owner. Does high risk mean high status? How does an ad man sell such a thing? Or is it all a hoax? A new novel explores the dark side of wealth culture.
"The heat had been painfully oppressive all day, and it was now a close and sultry night.... It was nearly midnight when the servant locked the garden-gate behind me. I walked forward a few paces on the shortest way back to London, then stopped and hesitated."
Who is the mysterious woman encountered on the road so late at night? Here's an atmospheric introduction to a classic Victorian novel, followed by a discussion of its author.
"A.J. Campbell lowered the folded newsprint to his lap. His heart fishtailed and he struggled to breathe. This thing he had just read was an impossibility."
A man discovers that private episodes from his life have been published as fiction by a stranger. Who is this story-thief? And what can be done to make it stop? Listen to this sample of a new novel called A Book with No Author.
"I have endeavoured to present the public with accounts of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, and of his singular intelligence, his vigour and his courage. He often joked with me that his great fame was due solely to my embellishments..."
Dr. Watson at last reveals a never-before-told adventure in which Holmes faces a challenge he couldn't have imagined. What are the limits of the world's most logical mind?
"Ed Marks woke from another dream about his wife. She’d been standing in front of him, wearing a white gown that rippled in a breeze he couldn’t feel. In her arms she held a baby, too small and raw-looking to be alive."
A man can't sleep. He's alone in the night. What is that sound, forever repeating from the dark woods? It has to be silenced at all costs.
"Wheels of a Delta 88 spin fast on winter-ravaged Upstate roadways. Fallow fields, half-encrusted in snow, the rest furrowed in frozen field-rot and iced-over mud, unfurl themselves on either side of a moonlit ridge."
March 1986. Richard Manuel of The Band doesn't know he's dead. His double drives the lonely Catskills backroads. What are they seeking? Will they come together in Woodstock?
"The beautiful girl, my own girlfriend, lay on her back, needle in her hand. Her arm tied up with her underwear, pulled tightly with her teeth. She was unconscious."
What if art in a gallery could show us a dying person's inner experience? Would we learn anything? A photographer who chases death tells his story.
"The first time Ava saw Angelo naked was on their wedding night (11 May 1860) when he strode into their bedroom, accidentally revealing to her startled eyes that from the waist down he had the hindquarters of a stallion."
How should a young woman feel about her new husband's true nature? Horses are good! This excerpt from an award-winning novel uses warmth, humor, and magic to launch a multi-generational saga about a free-thinking artist.
"Everything was perfectly swell. There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers."
How to make our future a paradise! In 1962, Vonnegut applied his double-edged imagination to the challenge. Does this story still apply today?
"She ran through the neighborhood; she had to find Ivan. She entered the synagogue, quickly covering her head. Instead of going directly up to the balcony she disobeyed the mechitza law that men and women should be separated, and went straight to the main floor of the sanctuary and stood beside him."
A young woman faces life in a new land. What does it mean when she experiences strange visions in an odd, forbidden structure?
"Nathan Byrne walked up the steps of the police station and stopped before the polished steel and glass doors. An icy wind swept past him, sending debris flying down the street."
A detective is facing a major life change, but he doesn't know it yet. Sometimes a mystery goes much deeper than just catching a killer.
“'I don’t know, Goddamnit!' It’s the only thing Willy’s sure of, and he keeps shouting it at the cop. In the dark room, a spotlight is burning his eyes down to the sockets. It’s a basement of sorts, the ceiling a crisscross of piping and duct work, industrial grey and dark green."
Where memory should be: a black hole. Is there any hope? A man's struggle with addiction can't be kept secret when it threatens to destroy his family.
"Propelled silently by his frog feet, the diver floated toward his destination. There was no light, except for the murky beam from his waterproof torch. He couldn’t be sure he was going the right way."
A late-career secret agent... is this his last mission? Is he expendable? And who are these mysterious enemies anyway? What would you do if you had a chance to make a new start?
"The pack had quickly come to feel like part of her body. She could forget its weight, take its contents for granted, and if she wanted to bushwhack up an interesting-looking ridge, or hop into somebody’s horse cart at a road crossing, everything she needed simply came with her automatically. She and her teacher were free as turtles, needing nothing for shelter but their persons."
The future. A young woman travels with her mentor through a time when ninety percent of humans are gone, yet nature thrives. What will she learn? Can a new world be a better world?
"Snorri cackled and sucked at his teeth. The wind blasted across the lake, cutting the snow into sharp ridges. He hurled instructions at me as if he were whipping a husky, and I spun the wheel according to Snorri’s command. Our tires rolled off the beach onto the thick ice cap that froze over the lake in winter, clods of snow drumming the floorboard from underneath like the rapping of the dead."
A Scandinavian murder mystery... but much more. A rollicking ride with vividly-drawn misfits through wintry desolation, quirky cop-work, and postmodern Viking derring-do!
"It was on my last shift cleaning bathrooms at the Pizza Port, just before I told the manager I was quitting, when I found the wallet in one of the stalls... The picture on the license was exotic. He wore a turban, had thick tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and sported a flat gold chain with an amulet. Some kind of Arab sheik with Mafia ties?"
A hapless ex-real estate agent stumbles into an adventure that might be life-changing... if it's not life-ending. An excerpt from a new collection of novellas and stories.
"'Are you serious?—do you really believe that a machine thinks?' I got no immediate reply; Moxon was apparently intent upon the coals in the grate, touching them deftly here and there with the fire-poker till they signified a sense of his attention by a brighter glow."
A prescient nineteenth-century classic explores topics that are timely today, and even ventures into timeless questions about life and consciousness, all with a dark Gothic atmosphere. The story is followed by a discussion that veers into murky depths!
"Ahhh, the soothing sounds of the Chainsaw Americans. You can hear them, less than a quarter of a mile away, marching up the avenue. Thousands of them, buzzing in unison. Louder than a flock of Harleys."
Doesn't it feel great to be part of a movement? To wield a noisy power tool with wicked steel teeth? You can join the march as soon as you walk the dog!
"Someone had once said that it was the hour when God walked in the garden. It was at any rate the time when everything begins to breathe again after the long hot hours in which life is suspended...."
An eccentric elderly woman hires a younger man to tend her wild Greek garden. Here's the opening chapter of a compelling, intelligent novel about relationships, aging, and nature -- plus a great discussion afterward.
"Reverend Halvar Ingegaard rose to begin his sermon. In a shot, he was off in his maniacal style, telling of the giant skeletons and the Truth of Salvation apparent all around us. He spoke quickly then slowly, but always loud, loud, loud, thumping the pulpit, his blows deadened by the weight of the Bible beneath his fists."
A boy's life is changed when something strange is found on the family farm. Is "truth" just another belief system? Maybe we need to examine our own.
"A mutilated beggar appeared at my taxi window. He seemed no more than a teenager, but it was hard to see past the heavy scarring on his face. Half his lower jaw was missing, teeth exposed. Both arms ended like sausages just below the elbows. His voice was slurred, but youthful and polite. 'Excuse me, sir. I am crippled. Please help.'"
A young man encounters worlds he's never known. How does a venture into a foreign culture send your life on a different track? Do you have a choice? Maybe there's no going back.
"Morning came like any other. Alphonse was awake, uncertain if he had slept. He could hear the lonely song of a bird as the sky filled with gloomy light and the few remaining splintered trees were revealed, beautiful as the skeletons of ghosts."
Two men whose fates are entangled in someone's story, but whose? What events lead us to where we are now, and to the self we have become?
"As the applause that had accompanied the hero to the podium began to fade, he lifted a hand to stop it. 'When you're making up your narrative as you go,' he began humbly, 'you may develop whole sections of action and dialog for one purpose, only to change your mind later on...'"
Two very short stories... do they share a common theme? Where do stories come from, anyway? Can creativity be accidental?
"Henry mashed his cigarette into a tinfoil ashtray. It was full of tar-stinking butts. He crumpled the ashtray closed and, squirming against the passenger door, stuffed the smoldering lump into his jeans like a carcinogenic pocket warmer."
Three guys drive into the mountains. Then they dig a hole. Why would a young man flirt with death? Where will it lead?
"The trouble started when he went for a walk. Or perhaps it had started earlier with the cup of coffee he drank just before going out. It wasn’t so much the coffee as the milk, but that had not seemed important at the time."
A chilly walk in the woods... an unusual stranger... has something gone wrong with time, or is it always like this?
"Howling and half-naked in his torn and bloody clothing Fargo is a desperate man and dangerous to himself and others. He ricochets around his kitchen, heaving furniture into the street."
What does a man do when he reaches the very limit of himself? Can there ever be a way back? New York City or the world, livin' ain't easy.
"Isobel Harper wakes to the dream. The images come back in her waking hours like still frames of cinema noir, the camera shots collapsing and superimposing upon each other: A girl’s silent scream caught in the glare of a street light. A man’s fist poised at a door."
A child's mind captures snapshots of trauma. What are the long-term effects? Does memory turn our lives into movies?
"I’m dreaming, was my first thought. My body had risen weightless into the air, helped by the movements I’d made, like swimming; the cold night air blew chill on my cheeks and ruffled my hair."
Is it a story about poverty and brutality, or about magic and wonder? Wartime Athens gets a unique treatment in this excellent translation from Greek.
"When Arnie Beers woke one morning to find a sign planted on his front lawn, he was amused. He chuckled as he pulled the sign’s flimsy posts out of the ground and held it up for his wife to see from the picture window."
Sometimes, unknown beings do inexplicable things. Who? Why? What happens inside yourself when you have no answers?
"Chopped into triangles by the superstructure of the bridge, the sun strobed as he accelerated across the span. On and off the sun flashed; the sunlight splintered and exploded."
If you're driving with eyes closed, steered by a psychic, what's your story? Will love last? We may never know.
"Whenever I arrive, it’s the wrong time. No one has to tell me. The right time is a few minutes earlier or later. Invariably I arrive at the wrong time in the wrong place. Wherever I am, it is the wrong place."
Whose voice is speaking? Is it yours? Mine? In the real world, can anything ever be just right?
"Sophia parted the curtains of maroon velour and ducked into the room... She was greeted on the other side by Françoise, whose stout hand proffered a glass of hot tea... It was brewed from a blend of black leaves and mushrooms, picked under the light of the full moon by Françoise’s gnarled fingers, somewhere outside Paris, or so it was said."
A young woman takes a life-changing journey. Where is this place? Is it really a place, or is it something else?
"In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery. Naturally they could only say that when I was in Paris or in London."
A woman's lone voice speaks to us from a house on a remote beach. Is she mad, or is she really the only person left on earth?
"The world’s greatest magician did not like Cherbourg, and he did not like waiting. Huddled beneath his woolen overcoat, Perjos stared at the gray English Channel awaiting the blast that would announce the first boarding call for the S.S. Rotterdam."
It's 1922, the era of Houdini and Conan Doyle. Where are the boundaries between mind, body, and spirit? Sample a novel that asks "What is magic?"
"Luck has bad breath. That's what the Schwartzbear said, before they carried him out feet first. Billy was still on his feet the day he got out. He'd done hard time and more solitary than most and had no luck."
Prison life is cruel. Then you're out on the hard streets of the city. What's next? Can you let friendship change your world?
"I could see Dubček up there on the stage, lolling back in his chair, his cello leaning against one knee. It was not the posture one would expect from a professional musician. His cello gleamed white in the stage lights. Suddenly there was a shout from somewhere in the audience. 'Rubbish!'"
Two witnesses to a wild melee at an odd orchestral performance tell their stories. What is the provenance of the cello... and its mysterious power?
"Do I mythologize Lincoln? Certainly. But he was mythic. Abraham led the nation into a vast fratricidal war—a Greek myth multiplied by 500,000. He spent most of his Presidency wondering why the gods had cursed him, like Oedipus."
A chiropractor thinking about a President... why not? Past and present mingle in a man's journal. Is this a novel or something else?
"Outside in the street, it was cold and damp. The fine wind-driven rain needled her exposed flesh. It was a foul day but it didn’t bother her, as she was alive with inspiration...."
Art and dreams in surrealist Paris. Journeying to the deep interior can be dangerous. Will she return?
"As you drive northeast through Dutchess County in upstate New York, farm scenes strike calendar poses: leaning barns, well-tended white Victorians, winding roads tunneling through overhanging maples."
A pastoral paradise... but is there something dark under the surface? Troubles in America manifest in the personal. Let Hamlet tell you about it.
"I hope you've not taken cold with the doors open, Doctor. The wind was blowing harsh on the heath. I'd forgotten how mortally cold wind can make you."
A riveting dialogue between the dying Sigmund Freud and a blind prophet from ancient Greece, a key player in the drama of Oedipus. What happened, and what does it mean?
"It was Christmas ’37 when the ship docked at Piraeus and disgorged me and my trunk onto the quay of the commercial harbor.... I was now just like the immigrants you’d sometimes see on Ellis Island, back in my own country."
An injured detective flees New York to land in Athens at the dawn of war. He'll face desolation, oppression, music, magic.... Sample the first English translation of an acclaimed Greek novel, plus an author interview.
"In some old magazine or newspaper, I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man—let us call him Wakefield—who absented himself for a long time from his wife."
An odd little character piece about the inexplicability of human behavior... was this long-dead author ahead of his time?
"By the time the next tsunami hit, at dawn, Father Flanagan's main concern was for the nuns. Their children's mission, on another island miles away, was at risk."
A moral dilemma on which hangs the fate of humanity... what would you do?
"I was sitting on the ground, straight up against something rigid, my head was hanging, my chin on my chest. I smelled smoke and heard the snap and hiss of a fire."
A woman wakes up, struggling to remember... was she once free? How do you face a future in captivity? A novel set in the past but timely for the present.
"It took much convincing to get Zeitzer to don his hiking boots, dig out his metal detector, and accept the premise that there was a treasure trove stowed somewhere in the woods based on the word of a spook."
Two guys with unlikely names, Coot and Z, hike up a mountain. They encounter travails both physical and mental. Why ask why?
"John Eldritch woke up in the middle of the night to find himself pinned down in his bed, a knee on his chest and his arms grasped firmly below the elbows. 'Just tell us where it is and you won’t get hurt.'"
A secret plan... an invisible city... a cryptic journal. Is it possible in today's world to be a great explorer of unknown frontiers?
"'Do you ever think about old Jonny Swiggert?' Bobby asked me. We were standing under the awning of Sam’s All-Night Coffee and Donuts, sipping hot coffee from polystyrene cups. Light rain was falling and the autumn air had a winter chill...."
London cabbies must know the city, but maybe the old ones know something more. When a dark mystery pulls you like a magnet, do you follow?
"The 1 mg. tablet of clonazepam needs thirty minutes to kick in so I take that first. Then I put on a polyester shirt and my tan leisure suit, and load up the VCR."
A new twist on time travel, but also an investigation of self. Can perseverance overcome fate? What would you do to save a life?
"Energy was all ours and we burned it. We’d run down the beach, us girls, until the jagged water-edge turned us back. We’d hop stairs to the roof and scream until a flashlight halted us."
Two vignettes from a woman's life. Welding torch, highway, tattoos, dusty junk... Can we make judgments? What have we learned?
"It hadn’t rained yet, so Ket looked out at the grey morning and limped out to join the rest. He had to lean on the old stub of a spear he’d carried since the hunt that had made his reputation."
Life is more than the struggle to survive. What might have been the origins of art in our prehistoric ancestors?
"The truth is, things were not working out well. Cate and I had been fighting a lot lately, and at the root of it was the cliche I hated to admit: money."
A man looks back to the dawn of his marriage. Was their union doomed by esoteric mysteries? Perhaps he needs to see through her eyes.
"She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter."
A strange little vignette by the lauded (or is that laudanum?) master of romantic gloom. And an attempt to interview the author. What were we thinking?
"It was early fall, 2001, and I was at the Rosebud Indian reservation to teach a class in Non-Violent Civil Disobedience."
Tobacco offerings, a sweat lodge... a young man not only meets a different culture, but experiences something beyond explanation. Can you ask for what you need? What dark future approaches?
"'It was the girl.' The old man leaned forward, bracing against the worn-out armchair as though he were trying to escape its grasp. 'April Cooper. She was the real killer.'”
A podcast about a podcast about a long-ago murder spree. Crime ripples across generations. Can a broken family be mended? Can we ever really know someone?
"Meno had been turning his mind over with a spade for weeks. Nothing. He was done. He was ready to retreat into the soft bosom of admitted failure...."
What is the power of this thing called "chance"? Can it create anything truly new? After all, meaning always changes with your angle of view.
"George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects running in and out of imaginary cracks in the ceiling plaster."
A Pulitzer-winning novel about generations of New England men begins with a death, then spirals backward in time. Fathers, sons, lives lived, the richness of language.
"The room had been ransacked, the dressing screen knocked over, Marni’s wigs tossed askew. Her collection of carefully ironed cocktail dresses had been torn from the pasteboard wardrobe. The yellowed lingerie of a bygone era was cruelly scattered across the floor."
A faded B-movie star goes missing... but is that really the story here? Who's in charge, the programmer or the software?
"Two men. Orson Welles and Marlon Brando. They veered off road somewhere in the Sonoran desert. South of the border. They crashed into a saguaro cactus. The top swayed and dropped like an alien green chandelier. The rooftop buckled. The windshield cracked. Orson’s silver hair was askew as he stumbled out of the baby blue Coupe DeVille. He shouted out into the desert plain. 'Kiki!'"
It begins at lunch. An epic struggle of giants, or a pathetic spat between has-beens? Only the desert stars will tell, or the tiny poodle. And what was in that cactus sauce, anyway?
"The air hung heavy on a cold morning or night in mid-July, depending on whether or not you were able to sleep. Most people had stopped a few years back, instead choosing to watch the news channel, which ran twenty-four hours a day."
Journalism goes underground... can it survive? This smart dystopian tale by a high school student suggests a future that might be all too near.
"It was on May Day, feast of spring, that Eleanor first entered the tomb which later became known as the tomb of the two goddesses. Outside the hillside was green and golden, the sea below was sparkling in the sun, life in all its forms was burgeoning."
What happens when you come face to face with ancient myth? Will your life ever be the same?
"He did not remember walking to Way of the Flesh Tattoos and Piercings. All he knew for certain was that he had failed to find his lover last night at the club where she danced for a lounge full of other men."
What is the power of ink on skin? Maybe the artist is a magician. But can love survive the pain?
"Around 10 a.m. my journalist friend Paul called and asked me to meet him at the mortuary in Woodstock, and to be prepared to view a corpse. He wouldn’t say more."
The intertwining of past and present, a recurring pattern of dates... what is coincidence and what is synchronicity? Has an old threat returned?
"On the fateful day he got up, threw away his remaining shoes, the ones he hadn’t eaten—just two pairs, chewed the last strip of leather he had been saving for that day, followed by a slice of toast, and then went to work."
Why would Luis Moreno eat his shoes? Because he'd been planning to for twenty years, of course. Isn't that what real artists do?
"He looked at me. And, at last, I was certain of what I somehow felt I had known all along: this man, seated at the table in front of me, was no man at all. For these were not the eyes of a human."
Among medieval documents, an encounter with a mysterious being.... Who is he, and where will it lead?
"I mixed my first martini at five. The morphine was taking its toll. The ceiling receded and the window looked out over the sea. The nurses appeared to be made of wire, sculpted..."
An artist trapped in a desert town in wartime. Or is it hospice? Pencils, doors, bottles, an ancient brass lamp... and the high cost of immortality.
"The apartment brought her a new sense of calm. She thought of it as her cocoon. Her husband's death had now moved into her back brain and settled down."
She is frozen, hurt by deaths of various sorts... until one becomes the door to a life change. Listen... do you hear the colors?
"There is no future. This is not pessimism but the borderland of science, where time is only the present tense."
A man's voice deep in the night... is anybody listening but you? City streets at dawn... those other humans... apostasy, enigma. Are you as real as you think you are?
"For 24 hours after his world imploded, Nate lay in a St. Vincent’s Hospital bed, alternating between moaning like a homeless lunatic over Sheila and swearing at various masochistic Attack on America marathons..."
The world looks bleak after September 11. New York is more toxic than ever. Can a man's life take a new course?
"He has always hated that jewelry store, but something catches Marshall's eye as he passes by on his walk home from the Gray Panthers meeting...."
A man's gift to his wife marks the days, and the cycle of life continues. In this jewel-like story, perhaps birds are symbols of some ultimate freedom.
"Ron says to Harry, 'This guy inherits an island from some benign son-of-a-bitch.' Harry presses his palms on the cement, adjusting his butt against a piece of insulation, his daybed. He watches forms passing in the street, the dusky light slanting. 'Must be six by now.'”
Two stories in one: a cold alley, a tropical island... is either more real than the other? A death wish can be expressed in many ways.
"There was another table by a door, in another place at a different time. Along with the letters there was a newspaper. The headline glared at him: MAN KILLED IN A CROWD WITH POISONED UMBRELLA."
Can effects precede causes? Maybe, but what does that have to do with spies in London, a Zapotec witch, and a secret basement room?
"The moon cast eerie shadows over the body. Moonlight filtering through the shifting sycamore branches created the illusion that he was moving. Father Daniele knelt next to the man, who was lying in a pool of blood. 'Can your hear me, my son?'"
A murder in an Italian village... did the priest do it? Or is this mystery novel really about something else entirely?
"The initial sight of the living room was always a shock, as if she’d forgotten how she’d left it.... Years’ worth of ephemera and objects were stacked in overflowing boxes that lined the perimeter of the room...."
What changes inside you when a loved one disappears? Do you become a different person? Maybe this novel is all a metaphor.
“Have you ever touched a really old person? I don’t mean just their hand or kissing their cheek or anything, I mean their naked skin, have you ever handled an old person?”
What happens to sensuality with age? Can minds connect? This thoughtful story explores the bond between two women, almost strangers, young and old.
"Neal reached into his jeans pocket and touched the screw cap on the little glass vial he’d brought back from that old Cajun witchee-woman.... Okay. Almost showtime."
What steps would you take to protect your family pride? Down in the Irish Channel, things get a little rough.
