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
October 4, 2026 • 28 mins
"Quitting cocaine was easier than quitting beer. It sounds like a faulty comparison, but it was true for me. Addiction affects individuals in different ways depending on their physiology. Even so, I was on the verge of turning my nostrils into Cream of Wheat, aka "nasal collapse." Incidentally, Cream of Wheat was my favorite wintertime comfort breakfast as a child, with a pat of butter and a splash of maple syrup."
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September 6, 2026 • 35 mins
"One rarely mentions them separately. They are practically a unit, Eustace and Parmenides. The pair rose to fantastic renown, their souls steeped in the labors of their calling. But what may have begun as fickle adventures in nocturnal prowling and curiosity about a bracing mystique hatched into a fateful career."
It seems that human nature has always included the urge for destruction. In a century long gone, ...
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August 2, 2026 • 32 mins
"Inside the Girlie Playhouse white afternoons are still discreetly extinguished in candlelit rooms, while outside the demonstrators have begun their second week. The street is lined with sleeping bags and coolers. Activists hoot and holler muddled slogans."
A newly published literary novel...but it's about strippers. Challenging genre stereotypes via nuance and complexity is always good. And what about feminism? He...
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July 5, 2026 • 21 mins
"How's your IPA?" "Not bad." "So...are your classes going okay?" "Well, yes and no. Are you finding that these students think differently than we did? It's like they take everything literally." "No sense of poetry or metaphor, you mean? I see the same thing with the math students. For instance, the idea of imaginary numbers."
Two men talking...but this is no normal conversation. Too many heady ideas. It's...
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June 7, 2026 • 33 mins
"Vera is losing her grip on time. She's been driving all night, for days even, she can't say. She pulls over onto the shoulder of road next to the creek, her wheels rumbling across a muddy lump of plowed snow as she comes to a stop."
To be young forever...is it really what you want? In this excerpt from a new novel, a woman born in the Catskills over two hundred years ago returns to her home, seeking...
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May 3, 2026 • 28 mins
"I don't remember how I heard about the burned girl. Probably it was my new friend Scot, with his spiritual leanings and whom I was seeing a lot of at that time, who told me. A new friend is useful in the kind of crisis that ensues when you are cutting your old life loose, or have had it cut loose for you."
A woman's intimately-told meditation on how empathy for another's suffering may be crucial in weatherin...
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April 5, 2026 • 30 mins
"Affecting lightheartedness, I trod the moist pavements of the narrow streets. As though in tears and veiled, the lamps glimmered through the chill gloom and sucked their reflections slowly from the wet ground. The forgotten years of my youth came back to me. How I used to love the dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter...."
In this excerpt from a literary classic, a man meditates on his own nature and h...
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March 1, 2026 • 35 mins
"The month was October, the day brilliant. Bareheaded, bald too young but well-bearded, a man not long past his youth strode along Bleecker, his comfortable shoes belying the business-like focus of his venture. His water-flow way of dodging fellow walkers was well-practiced, a city-dweller's skill used even as he hunted."
Three lives intersect for reasons unknown. One has a strange gift: a poet who may be a seer. D...
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February 1, 2026 • 30 mins
"I saw that Constance had emailed me suggesting we meet. She was embroiled in a mystery and needed my help. She would tell me more in person. We met on a bench in a park. The mystery was complicated. It involved two or more people who appeared to be one..."
A man accompanies his friend to Paris to solve a mystery. But is it really a mystery, or something else? This is a story that challenges the very nature of stor...
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January 4, 2026 • 33 mins
"The last time I saw my father I barely saw him. Now that morning seems sharp as shears but I know it wasn't. I was half-asleep. I think I made my way to the kitchen. I think my father was already starting to leave. We may have hugged."
An enigmatic young woman tries to make sense of her life alone in an unnamed city full of demolitions and abandoned buildings. This metaphor-driven new novel from an award-winning a...
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December 7, 2025 • 33 mins
"For three years, we knew Dad had a lump in his throat. He had trouble swallowing, and several times a day, he would be possessed by a mad coughing fit that would leave him clutching the furniture for support."
In this opening from a highly-praised novel, an adult daughter begins to face her father's chronic pain, his impending death. How will she respond to his request for a merciful release?
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November 2, 2025 • 31 mins
"The scent of cardamom wafted from Father. Mother wore a liripipe of azure silk that drew out her narrow chin, hazel eyes, and the grey streaks in her hair. I watched Father's gaze dart among the hills. Columns of smoke crept through a windless sky."
In this novel excerpt, a young man feigns madness, trades vision for vision amongst ruffians in a dark tavern, and meets his raven companions. But is this really his l...
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October 5, 2025 • 20 mins
"'Listen to this,' he said. What sounded like a wind chime filled the room, a wind chime on a farmhouse porch, restless in a shifting tempest. I could feel a change in barometric pressure and a subtle increase in humidity as the sound floated on the breeze. The feeling was vast and lonely as though isolated on an American prairie."
A recording engineer explores amazing new techniques. Can we capture the ...
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September 7, 2025 • 38 mins
"The crowd that had gathered on the quay to watch the departure of Shadow Rose held no collective opinion as to whether she would return. Now that the chronology of those events has become so jumbled, it might be said that she never left."
A sailing ship, a sunlit city, a young man's search. This reading, excerpted from a new collection of richly atmospheric short (and very short) stories, suggests unknown historie...
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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 do? A possib...
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July 6, 2025 • 38 mins
"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, from angle...
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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 riverside man...
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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."
Th...
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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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