Showing titles in Storytelling

Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story has toured to the Mount, the stately and elegant home of the great American writer Edith Wharton, for the last several summers, presenting Broadway and Hollywood actors reading stories by Wharton and other writers. Selected Shorts now presents a collection of four of Edith Wharton's short stories, recorded live at the Mount, and featuring acclaimed actresses Kathleen Chalfant, Christina Pickles, Maria Tucci, and Brenda Wehle.

New American Stories presents diverse stories of contemporary American life and dreams lost and found, by four of the best young contemporary writers - Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Aleksandar Hemon - as performed by terrific stage and screen actors. All four writers have a unique perspective on the American experience, which is reflected in their work.

In one year Julia Sweeney got a divorce (amicable), bought a small bungalow in Hollywood, and looked forward to a life that said, "Here dwells a happily single young woman!" But then the axe fell. Her younger brother, Mike, was diagnosed with terminal cancer and moved in with her. Her parents came to be with Mike and moved in with her, too. Julia was now on seriously intimate terms with the people she had spent half a lifetime growing up away from.

When his son gets a school assignment on heroes, John seizes the chance to teach him all about the great figures of the Latino world. But once he sets out on his irreverent crash course across three continents and 3,000 years of history - from conquistadores to cumbia, Montezuma to Menudo, and taking on the characters in all of it - he uncovers provocative truths that shock even him.

An Edward G. Robinson Festival is a collection of tributes, parodies, and rarities of the great film actor-written, produced, and performed by Joe Bevilacqua. Bonus tracks feature remastered classic radio dramas. This set includes "If We All Talked Like Allen Jenkins", "Murder is a Merry-Go-Round", "The Reflection", "Hobo Hawk", "Willaby Meets the Godfather", "The Man who Wanted to be Edward G. Robinson", "The Trap", and "Key Largo".

The acclaimed British novelist and short story master who "recruits admires with each book" (Hilary Mantel) discusses her latest novel with fellow author Colm Tóibín (House of Names). Ingeniously moving between past and present, Late in the Day exposes how infinite alternate configurations lie beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives. With a reading by Rita Wolf (An Ordinary Muslim).

We've all seen that lone shopping cart sitting on the edge of a parking lot. Who goes and gets it and brings it home? The cart wrangler, of course.

Brimming with easy humor, fantasy, and wisdom, David Ossman - of Firesign Theatre fame - gives the performance of a lifetime in this theatrical full-length monologue backed by a crack Kansas City jazz trio and recorded before a live audience at the Brick in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, on June 6, 2018.

Mixing voice, eclectic jazz, and sound effects, this performance breaks sound-art boundaries and may even break your heart.

Drawing upon his childhood memories of West Texas, artist, musician, and writer Terry Allen has created this magical, multi-layered evening in the tradition of Southern story-telling. As Allen explains, “Dugout is a love story; an investigation into how memory is invented."

This is the fourth and final Tim Sample album to be originally released on the Bert and I label. Recorded before an enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd on the opening night of the brand new Caribou, Maine, Performing Arts Center in 1989, this is classic Tim Sample humor. If you want to introduce your friends to Maine humor, this is an excellent place to start.

Grown up comedy. Kristin continues to tour comedy clubs and colleges nationwide. Her newest recording, Where the Cab Takes You, is a journey of collected experiences, including two Waffle House stories that only Kristin could tell.

In Lunchroom Tales, Bill Harley and his band - the Troublemakers - return to the Delaware Trails Elementary School where Bill once roamed the halls as a student. They kick off their show with the song "Everyone's a Little Bit Different" - but soon, memories get the best of Bill, and he begins to recount adventures and disasters from his former days of glory (or was it torture?). Meet Mr. Hambleman, the custodian (not janitor!) and Mrs. Nottingham, the terrifying 3rd grade teacher (are teachers human, or are they a different species?), explore super cool places like the back of the bus, and enjoy Harley's engaging recreation - through song and story - of what it feels like to be a kid in school.

Over the years, this has proven to be one of Tim’s consistently best-selling audios. This material was recorded on tour in 1992, and Pumping Irony was the first release on Tim’s own record label. The first nine stories were recorded at the University of Maine in Machias; the rest was captured while Tim was touring “out west”, specifically at The Lebanon (N. H.) Opera House. This recording includes the first mention of Tim’s real-life band from the 1970s, The Dubious Brothers.

Recorded at The State Theatre of Maine at Lakewood in the spring of 1983, footage from this performance became the basis of Tim’s first prime-time TV special on Maine PBS. Released on vinyl LP in the fall of 1983, Downeast Standup was the first of four Tim Sample solo albums to be produced on the Bert and I label in the 1980s. Now widely considered a classic of 20th century Maine dialectal storytelling, this recording contains Tim’s signature story "Saturday Night at Moody’s Diner".

Mike Daisey is a fierce storyteller, one minute hilarious, the next minute sweet, with a fine-tuned ear for digression. He circles in on his uneasy subject matter, closer and closer, until he exposes the raw heart. The New York Times calls him "the master storyteller" and he has been compared to Garrison Keillor, Spalding Gray, and David Sedaris.

Everybody knows an Aunt Edith - picky, disagreeable, animal-hating, who couldn't possibly ever have been a kid herself. Well, if you know that Tricky is Jack's escape-artist hamster, you can just imagine the fun in the story "Aunt Edith Meets Tricky." This is just one example of the potential for silliness loaded in this engaging collection, in which master storyteller and songster Bill Harley presents originals, as well as his own, unique takes on old favorites. Others include "Wacka Wacka Woo," "Soap Soap," "Is Not, Is Too," "Tara and the Magic Sack," and "Aiken Drum."

Bloomsday on Broadway celebrates June 16, 1904, the most famous fictional date in literature, when Leopold Bloom walked around Dublin in the pages of James Joyce's Ulysses. Since 1981, hundreds of acclaimed actors have joined avid Joyceans, writers, critics, and scholars on stage at Symphony Space to read selections from the book that heralded the birth of modern literature.

Solutions, Inc., Vol. 1 is a paranormal comedy set in Boston, and produced by the award-winning Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air.

Recorded at a show celebrating the sesquicentennial of the town of Brooklin, Maine, this 1999 audio features Tim exploring his roots in growing up in Maine (including Brooklin, where Tim’s mom was born in 1923). This album includes the amazing-but-true story of Tim’s 1956 Chevy - "The American Flag Car" - which sparked a media storm when Tim was attending art school in 1970.

José Jiménez has often been described as an ethnic character. But José is the quintessential "little man". Featured in the movie The Right Stuff, and starring at President John F. Kennedy's inaugural ball, Bill Dana's José is a most memorable, classic, and original character.

When bad sex happens to good people, there is no recourse like full disclosure, is the motto of Worst Laid Plans, a collection of 40 probably-too-intimate, but shockingly funny, true-life tales of lust gone wrong. The stories are divided into themed sections including Foreign Affairs (When bad sex goes abroad), Self-Help (Love thyselfbut do it carefully), On the Rebound (The art of getting back in-and-out-there), Mob Mentality (People will do things in groups they would never do alone), and more.