PodCastle 463: A Dozen by Dunsany
Show Notes
Rated PG
A Dozen by Dunsany
by Lord Dunsany
read by Wilson Fowlie, Setsu Uzume, Graeme Dunlop, Eric Luke, Matt Dovey, Aidan Doyle, Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, Cheyenne Wright, Tina Connolly, Steve Anderson, Jen Albert, Amal el-Mohtar.
- The True Story of the Hare and the Tortoise
Chosen by Samantha Brandt (Talia); Read by Wilson Fowlie
Note: “I enjoyed the rather dark interpretation of a fable generally considered benign.” - The Sphinx at Giza
Chosen & Read by Setsu Uzume
Note: “I love that the sense of doom and futility in all three, and the juxtaposition of eternal forces with finite human experience. It speaks to the artist’s experience, trying to capture something eternal in mediums as finite as smeared oils and chicken scratch.” - The Song of the Blackbird
Chosen & Read by Graeme Dunlop
Note: “I love it for this line: “It was new then.” As in, everything old is new again.” - The Tomb of Pan
Chosen by Raj K. Gopal; Read by Eric Luke
Note: “There is something beautiful to me about the holiness of joy and hedonism and humanity somehow managing to survive the holiness of sobriety and rigidity and ideology. “ - A Moral Little Tale
Chosen & Read by Matt Dovey
Note: “I don’t believe personal happiness can ever be an evil. There is an infinite pool of happiness to go around, if only we’d let each other share in it without judgement.” - Death and the Orange
Chosen & Read by Aidan Doyle
Note: “I’ve had to deal with some strange fruit in my travels and I appreciate the description of “a small orange which had an evil laughter in its heart.” - Alone the Immortals
Chosen & Read by Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali
Note: “I was intrigued by the title and the melancholic/dark feel of the tale.” - Time and the Tradesman
Chosen by Krystal Claxton; Read by Cheyenne Wright
Note: “So the personification of Time showed up in a lot, A LOT, of these and I liked “Time and the Tradesmen” best. The Roman god pettiness of Time smiting a human merely to state that he is not to be fucked with left me oddly satisfied.” - The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts)
Chosen by Peter Wood; Read by Tina Connolly - The Return of Song
Chosen by Peter Wood; Read by Steve Anderson - Charon
Chosen & Read by Jen R. Albert
Note: “It’s oddly sweet and I’ve always liked the whole boatman thing.” - After the Fire
Chosen by Troy Wiggins; Read by Amal El-Mohtar
Note: “I like to think that mankind’s great ideas will outlive us even when everything that we know is destroyed. Also, we’re a lot more awesome than mammoths.”
About the Author
Lord Dunsany
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (24 July 1878 – 25 October 1957) was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist; his work, mostly in the fantasy genre, was published under the name Lord Dunsany. More than ninety books of his work were published in his lifetime, and both original work and compilations have continued to appear. Dunsany’s oeuvre includes many hundreds of published short stories, as well as plays, novels and essays. He achieved great fame and success with his early short stories and plays, and during the 1910s was considered one of the greatest living writers of the English-speaking world; he is today best known for his 1924 fantasy novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter.
About the Narrators
Amal El-Mohtar
Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author and critic. She is the science fiction and fantasy columnist for the New York Times Book Review and the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of This Is How You Lose the Time War, which to date has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for Best Novella. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Ottawa, and you can find her on Twitter @Tithenai or subscribe to her newsletter at amal.substack.com.
Eric Luke
Eric Luke is the screenwriter of the Joe Dante film EXPLORERS, which is currently in development as a remake, the comic books GHOST and WONDER WOMAN, and wrote and directed the NOT QUITE HUMAN films for Disney TV. His current project INTERFERENCE, a meta horror audiobook about an audiobook… that kills, is now a Best Seller on Audible.com. His website for creative projects is Quillhammer.com.
Cheyenne Wright
Cheyenne Wright is the color artist on the Hugo Award winning graphic novel series Girl Genius. A freelance illustrator of many fine table-top projects; Like “Deadlands Noir”, and the “Professor Elemental” edition of the “Pairs” card-game. He is NOT the Lord of a subterranean colony of Mole-people bent on world subjugation. Such claims are libelous and unfounded. As is the ground beneath those who repeat them. [You have been warned sun-sucking dirt walkers]. More info about Cheyenne’s current plans for a better world [all of them… better worlds] can be found at www.ArcaneTimes.com.
Aidan Doyle
Aidan Doyle is an Australian writer and editor. He is the co-editor of the World Fantasy Award-nominated Sword and Sonnet and the author of The Writer’s Book of Doubt. He has visited more than 100 countries and his experiences include teaching English in Japan, interviewing ninjas in Bolivia, and going ten-pin bowling in North Korea. Follow his exploits at http://www.aidandoyle.net
Aidan joined PodCastle as an Associate Editor in 2016.
Steve Anderson
Steve Anderson has narrated stories for all three Escape Artists podcasts (including a Parsec Award-winning story for PseudoPod). He narrates audiobooks and produces online videos out of a home studio at SGAcreative.com, and he writes and performs live history programs on tour at GreatTalesLive.com
Tina Connolly
Tina Connolly’s books include the Ironskin and Seriously Wicked series, and the collection On the Eyeball Floor. She has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Norton, and World Fantasy awards. She co-hosts Escape Pod, runs Toasted Cake, and is at tinaconnolly.com.
Matt Dovey
Matt Dovey is very tall, very English, and most likely drinking a cup of tea right now. He has a scar on his arm from a ritual performed unto the Watchers Just Beyond, imploring them for the boon of great knowledge, but all he got were the lyrics to Dashboard Confessional’s album The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most stuck in his head forever. He now lives in a quiet market town in rural England with his wife & three children, and despite being a writer he still hasn’t found the right words to express the delight he finds in this wonderful arrangement.
His surname rhymes with “Dopey” but any other similarities to the dwarf are purely coincidental. He’s an associate editor at PodCastle, a member of Codex and Villa Diodati, and has fiction out and forthcoming all over the place, including all four Escape Artists podcasts, Analog, and Diabolical Plots. You can keep up with it all at mattdovey.com, or find him timewasting on Twitter as @mattdoveywriter.
Wilson Fowlie
Wilson Fowlie lives in a suburb of Vancouver, Canada and has been reading aloud since the age of 4. His life has changed recently: he lost his wife to cancer, and he changed jobs, from programming to recording voiceovers for instructional videos, which he loves doing, but not as much as he loved Heather.
Graeme Dunlop
Graeme has been involved with Escape Artists for many years, producing audio, hosting shows, narrating stories and keeping the websites going. He was born in Australia, although people have identified him as English, American and South African, amongst other nationalities. He loves the spoken word. Graeme lives in Melbourne, Australia with his wife Amanda, and beautiful boy dog, Jake.
Summer Fletcher
Summer Fletcher (they/them) has written for major and indie games, and narrated over 30 short stories for various fiction podcasts. More at summerfletcher.com
