My Favorite PodCastle Stories of 2013

These are by no means an assessment of talent or value, merely my personal favorites of the stories we’ve run this year. If you don’t know about my involvement with PodCastle, you can read this Medium post to find out just what this organization means to me.

This year was the year of really long titles, as my first favorite is episode 248, a story by Claire Humphrey titled “Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot”. Coincidently, my second favorite story is also by Claire Humphrey, “Nightfall in the Scent Garden” which we ran as episode 271. You can probably start to get a sense of the type of fantasy I lean toward by these choices. Both of these stories have only the slightest hint toward the fantastic and depend more on character and poetry to carry the reader into the stories. This style is also evident in Kenneth Schneyer’s story—the second really long title of the year—,“Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer”. I do not pick this story because I narrated it, but because I love its subtlety and the way Schneyer blends joy and pain together in his descriptions of Latimer’s paintings.

In September we ran a lovely story by Amal El-Mohtar with a perfectly matched narrator, Tina Connolly. “A Hollow Play” not only has a John Cage joke, but is an understated and terrific meditation on love, friendship, and desire. Finally, with only a couple of weeks left in the year, we ran a haunting story by Ken Liu called “Maxwell’s Demon”.

So there you have it: my personal favorite stories from this year. I hope you will give them a listen if you haven’t already. Of course, we have plenty of other great stories at PodCastle, from Conan to L. Frank Baum, to kick-ass, warrior teddy-bears for you to enjoy.