Category: Funny & Fictional

And One Last Thing by Molly Harper read by Amanda Ronconi

The spunky wife of a floor licking, scum sucking, receptionist-nailing hack accountant discovers her husband’s infidelity and writes up the dastardly deed in his monthly newsletter which she emails to kith and kin and customers. She accumulates notoriety (“SCORNED LOCAL WIFE SUED FOR SCATHING E-MAIL”) , attracts the appreciation of a geek girl with a business in female revenge communications, takes inventory, takes a lover, eats.

Funny afterscenes include the interview with her mother, published in the local Gazette,

Unable to return to her marital home, Mrs Terwilliger is reportedly staying with her parents… When contacted by the Gazette, Mrs Terwilliger’s mother, Deb Vernon, insisted that many wronged wives would follow in her daughter’s footstops if they thought of it.

“Everybody thinks Lacy’s gone crazy but that’s not true. She knew what she was doing… She was just pushed too far. And yes she overreacted a little bit, it happens to the best of us, but I don’t want to comment. Of course, if Mike didn’t want to be publicly embarrassed he shouldn’t have run around town chasing some hussy like his pants were on fire, but I don’t want to comment. I just wish people would mind their own business, but really I have nothing to say.”

The Ex-Debutante by Linda Frances Lee read by Susan Bennett

The smart daughter of a beautiful mother comes back to her “godforsaken sheep-happy hillbilly town” to handle her mother’s fourth or fifth divorce, and finds herself staging the annual Debutante Ball. “Don’t the pilgrims make skin cream?,” her mother asks her before mentioning how hard she has worked on maintaining her own natural beauty.
Miss Carlyle Ridgely, daughter of the Daughters of Texas, assembles 7 indelicate but moneyed 17 year olds, definitely not Ridgely Wainwright Cushing Jamison Ladley Ogden Harper-approved material.

Calibre by Ken Bruen read by Gerard Doyle

He’d read up on noir and called it Nora.

Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me hard boils the story from the start: London as the small bad city with its own 87th precinct: Brant, who cuts a bit off the top of every drug bust, makes himself loved by women, plays laid back surfer dude cop but functions as the magus and manipulates everybody’s fate; Macdonald: the aged bully with the mean little soul and the overblown self-estimate; Porter Nash: the gay cop; W.P.C. Falls the bitch black psychopathic girlcop with the knuckle dusters in her purse; P.C. Lane: tall and lanky nerd cop who carries an umbrella and wears an “expression of friendliness, the very worst thing for a cop,”; Chief Inspector Roberts & more.
A silly accountant whose whore lives across the street decides to play Miss Manners with an edge, and finds he enjoys killing people who behave badly in public.

Slick with references that both emulate and parody the grittiest American fiction (Robert B. Parker, Karin Fossom, Ed McBain, Andrew Vachss, Elmore Leonard, Newton Thornberg, Mankell, Willeford, Joe Lansdale); this text is black with humor (“He’d read up on noir and called it Nora.”) and gorgeous with distemporal language (The drinks came and he hoped she wouldn’t say Bottoms Up. “Bottoms up” she said.”) Read it and smirk.

Started Early Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson read by Graeme Malcolm

Jackson slugs a bully and saves a small dog. Hence Jackson, ex military man, ex husband (twice), having been familiar with violence his whole life has now finally found a good use for it. Now on the other side of the law, but otherwise non-localizable: “when he stayed at a hotel, he knew who he was. A guest.”

Tracy is big, post-menopausal, plain, and so indistinct that qualifiers float over the surface of her identity, like flat swabs of paint on a blank canvas.

At school Tracy had always been wary of the domestic science crowd – methodical girls with neat handwriting and neither flaws nor eccentricities. For some reason they were usually good at netball as well, as if the gene that enabled them to jump for the hoop contained the information necessary for turning out a cheese-and-onion flan or creaming a Victoria sponge-sandwich mix.

After she pays $3000 for a small child being dragged around by a street-mother, Tracy buys the kid cotton clothes and uses thought to re-organize her life from the point of view of a small girl.

Two characters in an England out of time, make a decision that makes no sense, and thereby changes the sense of life and everything in it. Two characters that grip us by the throat, and leave us breathless, waiting for the real inside the fiction.

I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron read by Nora Ephron

Although I didn’t see her face, I knew that the woman in the coloring chair was beautiful. It wasn’t just because she had long, lush, gorgeous hair, but because she was tearing out a page of WWD, where she had eyed another beautiful woman with long hair. And beautiful women look at beautiful women.

“Can I see?” I asked. And then she turned in the chair and I saw a Vogue model, circa 1976, sans huge hat and cigarette holder. But she was still beautiful, sitting there having her hair colored and pointing to the woman in the ad with the big sunglasses and the thick brown hair, saying: “that’s not Jackie Kennedy but it looks like Jackie Kennedy. I’ve always loved that look.”

And then she told me that not only was Jackie Kennedy beautiful but she was a nice person. She knew this because she sat across from Jackie Kennedy’s chair at Kenneth’s in the city, which is where Jackie had her hair done when Jackie had her hair done. The beautiful woman in the coloring chair had worked for Glamour and Vogue for 25 years, and if we were still in NYC and one of us had been Nora Ephron then one of us might have discovered that her husband was having an affair…. But we neither of us were Nora, and this was not NY, and Jackie was dead.

Nora Ephron is writing about just this generation of women, who lived and worked and counted in NYC, and who are now oldish, or dead. Nora Ephron is not dead. But she is forgetting things, and what she remembers is not obvious. She remembers going to an anti-Vietnam protest but not getting to it because she spent the weekend in the hotel room having sex, she remembers trying to find the New York Post building, and getting lost on the George Washington Bridge, and not deciding to get a divorce, and not going to the front during the 1973 war in Israel, and not knowing anything, and believing in print. She remembers consciousness-raising meetings in the 60s and 70s with women who took themselves much too seriously, and she remembers writing scripts that she thought were funny that weren’t funny enough.

All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer-Fleming read by Suzanne Toren

At St. Alban’s Church there is a stained glass window picturing a Roman soldier with a halo dressed as a Priest. The Roman soldier was Alban. When the Priest who converted him was sentenced to death, Alban switched clothes with him and died in his place.

A soldier disguised as a priest describes in some sense the Rector herself, an ex-army helicopter pilot, who turns up at crime scenes, and helps the Chief of Police solves crimes in a small snowy parish about 2 hours drive from Albany.

Jan Karon: The Mitford Series

Read this series by Jan Karon about a diabetic Episcopalian rector in a small town in North Carolina whose fat happy female parishioners cant stop baking him pies cakes and cookies. Very very funny scenes with neglected husbands eating unthawed church sale  cakes the minute their wives aren’t looking, a big dog who settles down only upon hearing Scripture,  a bossy secretary with a drawer full of Little Debbies, a perky wife-artist who likes to move the furniture around, and a parish full of souls in need of interference…

The Deal: A Novel of Hollywood by Peter Lefcourt read by William H. Macy

L.A./Hollywood relived by a suicidal ex-husband ex-producer ex-Jew with a  screenplay.  The screenplay is  fresh off the bus from New Jersey, delivered to Charlie (post suicide) by his 21 year old nephew, Lionel. It is about Disraeli but that doesn’t matter.  The screenplay is his property, and all Charlie needs to make it (again)  in this town is one property.

The screenplay, nicknamed Ben and Bill, or Bob and Bill, somehow makes itself known to a studio,  an agent, a casting director,  who manage to get a black pro-Israel karate expert to play Disraeli, the Jew.

The characters are mimetic:

The  studio executive assistant has the unwieldy habit of walking to the nearest ladies room, locking the door, and screaming.   (It is always a mistake to actually read the screenplay.) We visit with her and her Beverly Hills therapist in intimate one hour sessions,  at which she arrives  hystericized with laughter. The therapist is straight out of DSM-V and full of noteworthy advice, relevant to any and all professional women over 35 who work among men. Cut out a small nook of rationality inside the chaos.

The director is paid in  dinar which have been blocked from leaving Yugoslavia, and doesn’t talk to the actors.  The actors are not worth characterizing.

Prepare to grow a dry grin and giggle while reading.

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larson read by Simon Vance

Quiet, patient, relentless intelligence spills over the pages of this story about a girl geek, a journalist, a news magazine devoted to the critique of corrupt Swedish institutions, and an odd assemblage of  Stockholm’s thugs, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and cops.   None are verbose. Men and women think. Thinking happens without talk, without sounds, without annunciation. It is sometimes   signaled  by cigarettes. Sometimes by a  walk.   Much goes unsaid, and unshared.

All the good guys use Macs. Some of them smoke.  The geek uses a powerbook, the journalist a Mac ibook, the magazine editor  an Airbook. The geekgirl (Salander) is  skinny,  occasionally violent,  abnormally intelligent, obsessively private. She does not emote; she enjoys:  mathematics, sex, hacking.  She has  lesbian girlfriends, bank accounts in the Canary Islands, lawyers in Gibraltar, and a local accountant. She buys a 2.5 million kroner flat with a view and decorates it in one day of shopping in Ikea,   for a total of 97,000 kroner.

Southern Living by Ad Hudler read by Cynthia Darlow

“Dear Chatter: To answer your question, when a Southerner looks at you with a blank smile and doesn’t answer you right away, it’s because he doesn’t trust you and he’s lookin’ you over and seein’ how much damage you can do as a human bein’…Have a nice day!”

Chatter is a kind of oral help desk published daily in Selby’s town newspaper: questions and complaints called in by local folks about Yankees and by Yankees about local folks.

Margaret Pinaldi, even tempered daughter of a militant feminist gynecologist from Buffalo, NY, transcribes the native messages with the sensitivity of an anthropologist and a degree in women’s studies. The combination of skirtiness and guile and slow, drawn out vowels describes a particular kind of Southern power with a female signature. When a Southern lady says: “Well, bless her heart!,” she means:

“she’s a bitch and I don’t like her and I’m fixing to say something awful about her. It’s like this: ‘Well, bless her heart! She’s got the fattest ass on the planet and her taste is all in her mouth but she does the best she can.’

Mothers, daughters, wives organize, decorate and manage Southern life from behind affluent decorating magazines and glasses of sweet tea.

A Yankee would call someone a fat slob. A Selbyite would say: “Now there’s a lady who likes her cheese straws and biscuits”.

Southern men can either accommodate them or be discontinued, like the dead appliances set on porches in South Selby “as if they’d been granted some (final) years in the sun after putting in all those years of work in the basement.”

The day’s Chatter is the popular subjective log of what people think in a class-conscious, gospelly mid-Georgia town. Meanwhile, the daily affairs of three women — a smart reporter, a poor, pretty, slightly scarred Kroger’s Supermarket employee, and a desperate, over-reaching, ‘old Selby’ wife — track what people say and how they behave. Cynthia Darlow piles on the twang and pulls out the drawl and turns simple sentences into terms of art. From red neck firemen, to poor white Southern good girls, to smart-ass Yankee reporters, to sensible daughters of militant feminist gynecologists, Darlow does Selby like Julia Child does sauces.

The roundabout way that most Selbyites communicate feelings and facts is not merely a matter of dialect or drawl. It is an altogether different way of being-with others. Consider, for example, the blunt, brutal directness of Margaret Pinaldi’s mother telling her daughter about her CATSCAN results:

Let me show you something.. She tapped the glass with the ball point pen… This is my left ovary… and this, this right here this white mass that looks like a supernova… this is a six cm necrotic mass with satellite lesions and I am totally, irrevocably fucked.

Finally, this is a manual for managers of feelings, a step by step guide on how to treat the truth differently, how to speak the truth, Georgia time.