On this episode, Madeline Felix reads from the smart, big-hearted book she is writing, Ways to Get Lost, about teaching in Vietnam, and Tobias Carroll reads two short pieces that exist in the overlaps of quotidian and surreal, comical and mournful.

Two notes on the opening:

• I realize that wanting nice clogs & $90 t-shirts is not a particularly nichey expression of consumer desire. I’m not even sure I want clogs. They seem heavy. 
• When I said “self-effacing,” I meant “self-deprecating.” Because self-deprecation is, at its heart, the opposite of the shying-away-from-attention that’s part of self-effacement.

Okay, glad we got that out of the way.

CatapultReads.com // @CatapultReads // The Trebuchet

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!

CatapultReads.com // @CatapultReads