The Strange Recital

The Strange Recital

The Strange Recital is an audio forum for short fiction. We delight in perceptions of reality that twist and fold in unexpected ways.

Episodes

August 3, 2025 35 mins
"In a world of comfort and infinite abundance, Valentina Briggs was sitting quietly, doing nothing, trying to detach... kneeling on the floor, her buttocks resting on her upturned feet, hands forming an oval in her lap, thumbs ever so lightly touching, trying her best to think of not thinking. Thoughts were racing through her mind."
 
If meditation isn't working, what's a Variant-Positive Normal woman to ...
Mark as Played
"The zodiacal light is very faint and so are we, from hunger, a hunger for the stars, the stars we can never reach. Yes, it is faint and so are our hopes, but that doesn’t matter if we enjoy the standing and reaching, on the shoulders of our friends, on a ladder, on chairs piled on chairs. We are nearer the stars that way."
 
Like a few gems in one's palm, here are several very short fictions that explore...
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June 8, 2025 32 mins
"For what must have been the hundredth time that long day I studied the second hand of my watch, a heavy blue-faced Bulova that my wife had spent way too much on for our first wedding anniversary. It had outlasted our marriage and was still keeping perfect time, which was no small comfort."
 
As this novel begins, a divorced, depressed architect is about to embark on a life-changing project. A crumbling r...
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May 4, 2025 31 mins
"When the bombing started, J.T. Carter was deep in the bowels of a bank in Baltimore with a video camera on his shoulder, capturing, cinema verité, the mundane fate of everyone’s rent check."
 
Desert Storm, 1991. And more foreign wars to follow. At home, we live our safe American lives full of domestic tedium and drama. Here is one man's story.
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April 6, 2025 27 mins
"The Floressas Des Esseintes, to judge by the various portraits preserved in the Château de Lourps, had originally been a family of stalwart troopers and stern cavalry men. Closely arrayed, side by side, in the old frames which their broad shoulders filled, they startled one with the fixed gaze of their eyes, their fierce moustaches and the chests whose deep curves filled the enormous shells of their cuirasses."
 
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March 9, 2025 28 mins
"Ibn Zakarya was born in the western mountains of Persia, when silk merchants from the east still plied their trade. Even as a half-naked child playing in a dust, he proved himself a prodigy, scratching the shape of the moon in the yellow earth."
 
A tale of ancient deserts where the boundary between science and magic is blurred. A young man's genius is not always valued. What exactly is "wisdom"?
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February 2, 2025 29 mins
"When he was fifteen Fabian saw the film The 39 Steps, which had just come out. He liked to say that this film was a turning-point in his life. It was an epiphany for him. As he left the cinema he knew that he wanted to make films."
 
An excerpt from a new novel in which characters invent other characters, and events are both magical and real. What is authorship? Who's in charge here, anyway?
 ...
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January 5, 2025 30 mins
"More than thirty years ago occurred the first of the series of remarkable events I am about to relate. The exact date I can not recall; but it was in November, and, to those familiar with November weather in the Ohio Valley, it is hardly necessary to state that the month is one of possibilities."
 
The gloomy beginning of a strange Victorian novel...a man alone in a lamp lit room on a stormy night. But i...
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December 8, 2024 33 mins
"Last night I took the riverside walk for the first time in longer than I care to remember. Nothing much had changed. Homeless men and women were still spending the night on municipal benches. Some were asleep; they breathed noisily, or moaned."
 
Who is this person who walks in the dark hours? Is his city the same as yours? In all temporal planes, humans carry on with lives both harsh and gentle.
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November 3, 2024 28 mins

"The first time I saw the animal, I’ll admit I was tired. It was late at night and I had been drinking at a moderate pace for several hours. The animal could have been anything, the way it flashed across the room, and I was too slow to get a good look at it."

Something has invaded your home. Yes, it's real. Surely you can trust your own perceptions, right? But...is the thing changing?

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October 6, 2024 27 mins

"The voice asked at Eddie Tomlinson's elbow, 'Is this seat free?' Eddie nodded, and hardly looking around, picked up his hat which he had carelessly put on the seat at his side. Then he went back to his contemplation of the wooded hills through which the train was threading its way."

In the 1950's, two men meet on a train...are they strangers or friends? One day, each of their worlds had drastically changed. So much was lost. Are t...

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September 8, 2024 39 mins
"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.
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August 4, 2024 24 mins
"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?
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July 7, 2024 41 mins
"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 unc...
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June 2, 2024 38 mins

"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 safet...

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May 5, 2024 34 mins

"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...
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April 7, 2024 32 mins
"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?"...
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March 10, 2024 44 mins
"'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 ne...
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February 11, 2024 33 mins

"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 discuss...
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January 7, 2024 27 mins

"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.
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