The Strange Recital

Mar 09 2025 100 ep. 27 mins 53
The Strange Recital Podcast artwork

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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The House of Wisdom

Mar 09 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 exac

Fabian

Feb 02 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 he

Etidorhpa

Jan 05 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

Shadow

Dec 08 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 h

When I Saw the Animal

Nov 03 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 chan

My Past is Mine

Oct 06 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 worl

Richard and Klokko

Sep 08 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.

The Tunnel Diner

Aug 04 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

Stories in a Clouded Mirror

Jul 07 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 unconscious act

Malarkey and Abdul

Jun 02 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