Going Public…in Shorts – 6/10

Another double feature today! Dick Hill offers Two Illuminating Tales, by Mark Twain, and is featured at Jenn’s Bookshelves, and Paul Michael Garcia offers The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe, and is being hosted by SFF Audio. Be sure to check them both out!

Listening & Downloading 

Two Illuminating Tales is offered in full for online listening through June 16th. You can also purchase a download of this story via Downpour, with proceeds going to Reach Out and Read.

 

 

Two Illuminating Tales: The Story of the Bad Little Boy and The Story of the Good Little Boy

In two short sketches, The Story of the Good Little Boy and The Story of the Bad Little Boy, Mark Twain shows that life doesn’t always turn out as the Sunday School parables would have you believe.

Winner of three Audie awards, and he’s not sure how many Earphones awards, Dick Hill has recorded somewhere around 800 audiobooks, and has been named a Golden Voice by AudioFile Magazine. He works from a home studio, with his Audie-winning wife Susie Breck directing and engineering his projects.

   

 

Listening & Downloading

The Pit and the Pendulum is offered in full for online listening through June 16th. You can also purchase a download of this story via Downpour, with proceeds going to Reach Out and Read.

 

The Pit & the Pendulum 

Our story begins with our narrator being sentenced to death during the Spanish Inquisition. Upon hearing the sentence he faints but slightly comes to while being carried down some interminably long passage way.  He awakes to find himself lying on the floor of a pitch-black cell. Faced with uncertainty of time or place or fate, he sets about to learn of his dark surroundings before being carried off to whatever end is in store… Little does he know, death is only a small part of the Inquisitions plan for torture.  An accident brings his blackened surroundings into sharper focus, as the horrible fates entombed in the dark cell become more psychologically torturous with every discovery; rats, looming death, the passage of time, THE PIT, and THE PENDULUM…

 

Paul Michael Garcia is a five-time AudioFile Earphones Award winner. Some of his audiobooks include Survivor and Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuck and The Tin Drum by Günter Grass. Paul received his training in theater from Southern Oregon University, where he studied as an actor, director, and designer. He spent three seasons in the acting company at the world famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

 

Today’s Blog Hosts:

I’m a full-time working mom with an amazingly supportive husband, John, and two boys John-John (13) and Justin (7). We live in the DC metro area.

I’ve been reviewing books for around 14 years now, but decided to take the plunge and create a blog in March of 2008. Reading has always been a big part of my life. Since I can remember, I’ve always had a book nearby or a book in hand. I began blogging about books because I love to discuss and recommend books.My oldest son was/is an reluctant reader, so blogging has actually improved our relationship because I’ve been able to discover books that interest him.  My youngest, on the other hand, has been a reader since birth and devours books just as quickly as I do!

In addition to reviewing books for my blog, I also contribute to Quirk Books Blog and I am a founding member of Bloggers Recommend. Additionally, I assist various public library systems in creating reading group resources and discussion topics.  Finally, I lead a healthy and active fiction book club at my home away from home, One More Page Books in Arlington, VA.

If you have any questions about my reviews, the books I blog about, or about me in general, please stop by my Contact Me page or email me at jennsbookshelf@gmail.com.

 

SFFaudio was created in 2003 by Scott Danielson and Jesse Willis. Our goal was to tell the world about the cool stuff we were listening to. Since then we’ve added a bunch more contributors, reviewers, and even an editor!

We think audio is the best medium for Science Fiction literature and drama. We’re not against the dead tree, cathode ray, and celluloid versions, we just know them to be the inferior medium for transmission of story, mood, and ideas.

Before the creation of printed books, stories were told by the Greek aoidos, the Celtic bards and other poets of the human voice. After the printing press allowed for greater numbers of “novels” to be written, the families and friends in all the households that could afford to buy them would gather together and spend their evenings reading books aloud to each other. In the late 1970s the audio cassette allowed for the creation of a new industry, a new medium, the audiobook. Over the last three decades new technologies, CDs, MP3-CDs, and especially the portable MP3 player have made the audiobook even more popular.

Audio drama, too, is our passion. It goes by many names: audio theatre, audio cinema, and of course “radio drama” – the name of the place where it got started. We love this stuff. And if you’re reading this, we bet you do too.