Today the podcast goes Left Behind, but instead of awful evangelical propaganda, we're bringing you two variations on ~*pseudocide*~ with faked deaths, fantasized escapes, and specious raptures. Elizabeth Greenwood reads from her forthcoming book, Playing Dead: The Art and Folly of Pseudocide, and Katie Coyle reads the opening of her novel, Vivian Apple at the End of the World.

CatapultReads.com // @CatapultReads // The Trebuchet

Do you need to go somewhere new in order to find yourself? If you go somewhere new, can you even help learning more about who you are and what you want? This episode brings you two writers exploring these questions in very different ways: Kyle Chayka's essay, "Art Youth," explores expat and hipster culture in Beijing, and Helene Wecker's reading from her novel, The Golem and the Jinni, shows a lost, lonely Golem in 1899 New York trying to understand herself and her new world.

CatapultReads.com // @CatapultReads // The Trebuchet

Happy new year! What are your positive resolutions? What do you want more of in your life? Did you answer "more of the Catapult live show"? Well then boy are you in luck! Here is part two of The Catapult Live, with Nicole Steinberg and Gabriel Roth. Nicole reads poems inspired by Lucky Magazine and internet thinkpiece titles, and Gabriel reads footnotes and a several-years-old restaurant review. This little blurb does none of it justice. 

ALSO: sign up for our new weekly newsletter, The Trebuchet. 

Happy 2015!

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On this episode we bring you part 1 of our live show, recorded November 3rd, 2014, at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York City. For part 1, we have Kevin Nguyen reading an essay about names, culture, and the internet, and Alan Hanson reads an amazing new set of poems. Plus: What is the best emoji? (And is the singular of "emoji" "emojo"? Can it be?)

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Time works in strange ways in both pieces on this episode. Shelly Oria reads a short story from her new collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, about measuring love, distance, and loss, and Bijan Stephen reads an essay that tells the story of one night in fragments, but decades and centuries are tangled up in those moments.

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Today we've got two nonfiction pieces that show the power of sharing experience through writing and reading. Meaghan O'Connell (Longreads, The Billfold) reads from her honest, funny, and generous recounting of her son's birth, and Miranda K. Pennington (The Toast, The American Scholar) shares a glimpse of how her life has been changed by decades of reading and re-reading the Brontës.

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On today's episode, the perils and thrills of being a woman or girl navigating a world full of men's bodies. But maybe not quite how you expect. Elisabeth Geier reads an essay about art, music, love, and penises, and Marie-Helene Bertino reads a short story about a woman caught in a sort of deluge of the past.

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The Pleiades, love poems, lava tubes, and porn. Rome and dark-sky mountaintops. An essay, "We Never Looked at the Stars," from Ben Lillie and poems by Dorothea Lasky from her new book, Rome. 

Also announcing The Catapult: LIVE, 11/3 at Housing Works Bookstore in NYC. (And to be distributed by podcast thereafter.) More info here.

CatapultReads.com // @CatapultReads

Today we've got readings from two amazing short stories: Alice Sola Kim reads from "Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying" and Dolan Morgan reads from "Infestation." Alice's story appears in the new issue of Tin House (#61) and the anthology, Monstrous Affections. Dolan's story is in his new collection, That's When the Knives Come Down. 

You could call this episode "Ghosts and Goats," but that's so dumb that I hid it here at the bottom.

CatapultReads.com // @CatapultReads

On this episode, we've got stories of children trying to make sense of the world... and adults trying to do the same. Figuring out the unspoken rules, trying to get the answers they want, a little lost, a little hopeful, a little strange. Julia Pierpont reads her short story, "Times For Us Alone," and Gabriel Roth reads from his novel, The Unknowns.

CatapultReads.com // @CatapultReads