I run an audiobook imprint on the down-low. The Bright List. Seriously, I can hook you up.
Here are my favorite productions I produced and listened to without ever tiring, Year 2018.
Prime Cut: Charles Bukowski
Or, got a minute? If you want a short story hit, check out:
Omg, no one can write about a shit-eating job like Bukowski. Welcome to my slaughterhouse.
And she was.
To die in LA County charity hospital, if charity is your idea of certain sadistic demise. Brutally accurate.
Best satire of Malibu EVER.
Unusual in that this isn’t Buk’s alter ego, but another desperate character altogether, who loves his daughter.
I got goosebumps.
Bukowski wrote in the 70s for The LA Free Press, a column called Notes of a Dirty Old Man (which did not disappoint) and a group of stories for Black Sparrow Press which would inspire novels when he hit the big time.
I would read NOADM in high school and pass it around with hushed tones to fellow stoners. You could find “Hank" at Papa Bach’s and down on Washington Blvd in the grimy room that was an AA meeting hub on every day except on Wednesdays.
On Wednesday nights it transformed into a Colt 40 poetry grind--- you tried out your new shit and no one said a fucking thing. Pop another tab. I first heard Bukowski and the baby Exene Cervenka in that same room and you can know everything about 14 year old me from one that fact.
Other Editions: City Lights Books.
I couldn't believe Ron Kovic's iconic memoir (made into the Oliver Stone movie with Tom Cruise) wasn't already an audiobook. How could that be?
Neither could Bruce Springsteen. I asked Bruce to read an introduction to Ron’s birthday anniversary edition and SNAP, Springsteen just opened his NJ studio door and CUT IT, one take, before he hopped on a world tour plane. Jesus, that voice.
Why so dedicated? Not for money of course, but for Ron, his 70th year. A man who was never expected to survive his spinal cord injuries from his second tour in Vietnam.
Did you know Bruce and Ron met in a laundromat?
Well, I know Ron from a similar situation. It was the 70s and we were both in the LA anti-war crowd which is kinda like being at a very busy, very dirty laundromat.
Ron is still alive and kicking and he wrote a sequel that just picks up right where he left off, Hurricane Street.
Kovic briefly writes about The Red Tide in it. I got a thrill, yes! RT was my old high school underground newspaper collective which is how we came to know the Vietnam Vets Against the War (VVAW), in protests on campus and on the streets.
Remember when Senator B-1 Bon Dornan came to University High in LA, and advocated bombing Hanoi on the girl’s athletic field? Ron and friends showed up, in their wheelchairs or with canes. Dornan’s lunatic WIFE (think Michellle Bachman) became utterly UNHINGED, and with her large ladies' patent leather bag, started beaning the crippled vets with, swinging her bag like a tire iron! Good times.
It wasn’t just Ron who I recall so clearly, but a whole group of defiant, insanely-pissed-off leftwing crippled Vietnam vets. The kind who would happily choke Alabama’s Roy Moore in his sleep.
Bringing Ron’s story to the studio, with great actor Holter Graham, after all these years... felt like justice served.
Yep, you'll die when you hear Bruce's heartfelt introduction. It was great to put together something because of comrades in arms who go back 30+ years.
How to explain in a moment? Xiu Miaojin, is like the butch queer Sylvia Plath of Taiwan. By that, I mean a martyred poet by her own hand and someone that everyone has read their own life into, a million times.
The heroine of Miaojin's roman a clef is “Lazi," which has become the slang-nickname for “lesbian, gay girl” all over China and Southeast Asia.
Finally, the book was translated to English by Bonnie Huie, published by New York Review of Books. I spent a while looking for the voice, and thanks to my colleague Sam Chan, we found a newcomer narrator, Jo Mei. I needed that 21st century sound, and a deviation from everything people think they know about Chinese heroines. Playful, devastating, and a heartbreak like a thousand cuts.
How many of you were reading The Paris Review a couple months ago and came across this opening line:
I went to first grade in Fort Worth with Lee Harvey Oswald. I went to second grade in Shreveport, where my dad had a gig in some Dixie greaser lounge, but we were moving up...
I had no idea that “Air Guitar” art critic enfant terrible turned elder crack-shot Dave Hickey, was once a teenager surfer on the beaches I know so well, due west from Pacific Palisades.
Hickey, currently fighting ephysyma, is one of the last renaissance thinkers fusing the personal, the political, and the arts. He grinds on American cool going all the way back to... George Washington. Yes!
From leaving Texas in the shadow of his narcissistic parents— to shooting the pier in permanent California sunshine on a board named Milton— Dave's memories evoke a palpable nostalgia.
His essay on William Claxton looks at freedom from someone who actually experienced it. "If the cars of that era resembled the cars of this one-- I wouldn't be an art critic."
His essay on William Claxton looks at freedom from someone who actually experienced it. "If the cars of that era resembled the cars of this one-- I wouldn't be an art critic."
Joe Barrett, the narrator: I had I cast Barrett because he is a dead mimic on Dave and i wanted to feel the unmitigated thrill. (Joe can do anything, as you fans know).
Yes, Dave still sounds like low sweet Texas no matter where he drifted for decades after. I had so much fun listening to Barrett’s performance, I'd be blindsided finding myself in tears. I didn't know the bombs were coming.
Perfect Wave is also in paperback from the University of Chicago.
There is no print version of this incantation. You will be inside Gary Snyder’s tone, his will, his eyes, which is a place you’ll settle in, like the bright white Santa Cruz sandhills, that iridescent prehistoric white powder with little sharks teeth.
Publisher and friend Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint Press provided the master recordings of Gary Snyder reading his beautiful poetry of his favorite California mountains and what happens when he wakes up every day.
Gary has been very kind to me since he met me as a sulky communist teen. (Ugh, just imagine). My father and he were close, exchanging beautiful letters about California indigenous language, geology, Zen Buddhism, Japan, translations, environmental hardcore. In 10th grade, I thought that was boring and we had to take it to the streets. Gary told me to go chop some more wood, goddamit.
Now I get it.
You can read volumes of Gary at Counterpoint Press, but you haven’t lived till you’ve heard Gary’s voice as your eyes are on the page.
Matt Weiner ran with O’Hara’s lunchtime genius for inspiration in Mad Men — and knew them like he wrote them himself by the end of the show's run.
How fortunate we were that he agreed to read Frank O'Hara's urbane, modern, gay-post-war-love poetry. When beauty really meant something.
The famous chapbook, from City Lights.
One day you will be blown away literally and metaphorically by Nova Scotia and this is the book that will explain what you can’t put into words.
Welcome to Frank Parker Day's novel of hardscrabble life on the unforgiving edge of the of a rocky, cold, and in- spoilable continent. Unforgettable. Never grim.
Actor James Banning, his tone and accent is exquisite. Homesick much?
Univerisity of Toronto Press, the original
Everyone from The People’s Republic of Madison knows community radio voice, Charles Monroe Kane, the Lake Mendota gift that keeps on giving.
What I didn’t know, and discovered in Kane's memoir, was that he wrote, he wrote OUT LOUD, his entire autobiography of religious brainwashing and bi-polar blow-outs, to hilarious proportions.
Is that cruel to say? I think Charles knows full well that his tragedy (and partial recovery?) is our comedy gold. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an author do such a “stand-up” narration and it’ because he wrote it this way, before it ever hit paper. Fantastic!
University of Wisconsin Press did the OG print.
I get a kick when authors vow, “You’ll never get my voice for the audiobook, no actor in the world talks like my people."
Go ahead, dare me.
This is a story of the Low Country, old Charleston, which strangely is a lot like New Charleston in terms of its racial and infinite linguistic divide.
I knew award-winning actor Robin Miles could do “Gullah." I knew it before I asked her, because Miles has devoted so much of her acting life to the Caribbean and South east migration of the African diaspora. It’s like cane magic listening to her storytelling, and here, in the old cigar factory, you will smell the tobacco and sugar....
Original paperback from University of South Carolina Press
Margaret Atwood:
Alias Grace, & The Special Edition of The Handmaid’s Tale
I came to know Margaret because of our mutual friendship with the late Jane Rule, who wrote Desert Hearts, and some of the first 20th century lesbian fiction that hit its mark. Jane and her lover Helen Sonthoff lived on Galiano island off of lower British Columbia and captured things about Canadian wilderness like no one else. (Read this, with Margaret’s forward).
Fast forward 100 years... it took a small army of sleepless audio pros to create an audio edition to meet the debut of the celebrated television editions of Atwood’s classics.
It is SO satisfying to feel like one’s aural edition is in a total groove with every other medium, the original word and the dramatization.
Actor Sarah Gadon is incredible playing all the parts in Alias Grace, not just “Grace” as she did in the Netflix series--- I listened to this, the final audio edition, coming home from Ireland and it just tore me apart.
For The Handmaid’s Tale, the special part (aside from Clare Danes’ tour de force performance) was that Margaret let us ask nosy questions about “what if and what might happen” — in the voice of Professor Pieixoto, making a most enticing epilogue.
Finis!
EXTRA SAUCE:
Audiobooks I wish I’d produced but instead I just listened to them a hundred times:
The Forensic Record Society, by Magnus Mills, narrated by Tim Bruce -
So. Fucking. Funny. Thanks, to Adrian McKinty for pointing it out.
White Trash by Nancy Isenburg, narrated by Kirsten Potter.
Rightly famous.
The Collected Whore Diaries by Tara Burns, narrated by Deanna Dailey
(Well, at least I encouraged this one... DO IT, TARA! She found such a great first time actress).
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