I 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.

Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast

A Little Cloud, by James Joyce

Much 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.

A Mother

In 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 […]

Counterparts

Hello 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 […]

The Housekeeper

I’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 […]

A Painful Case

In 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:

Water Liars

A 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.

Strawberries

I'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.

While the Women are Sleeping

When 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 […]

Houses (Guest narrator: Patrick Scott)

In 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 […]

Clay, James Joyce

It’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 […]

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

If, 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 […]

Breaking Camp (from Danvis Tales)

Sometimes 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...

The Night of the Ugly Ones

Sometimes 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...

Illusion by Jean Rhys (Redux)

You'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...

Indiscretion

Curl 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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Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast

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