The Strange Recital

"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.

Something different for this episode! What kind of strange correspondence comes in to The Strange Recital mailbox? Here's a sampling. But wait... is there a story here somewhere?

"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!