The Talking Book

09/30/2025

Huuuge congrats to on her wonderful new audiobook, “Dispatches From the Couch,” dropping! The TB team feels so very honored to have been a part of it. ❤️

Make sure to go pick this up ASAP.

Stacey is living exactly the right life before she hits the psychological equivalent of a patch of black ice.

As Professor Hettes, her classes focus as much on neuroscience’s beauty and wonder as its facts and theories. Fellow faculty members see her as a fair but outspoken leader on a campus steeped in the blended patriarchies of academia and southern gentility.

At an emotionally charged forum on s*xual violence, she takes a stand against a colleague’s reckless verbal assault, outing herself as a s*xual abuse survivor in the process. Professor Hettes must continue her work even as Stacey finds herself resubmerged in the sights, sounds, and smells of her memories with Mr. Jay, a Pentecostal church deacon.
With exceptional candor, Dispatches from the Couch invites readers to take a seat beside her in the office of her new therapist, Piper. This debut memoir reveals the laborious, complex, but promising work of revisiting the past in order to extract its remnants of shame and loneliness from the present.

09/29/2025

Just wrapped up the audiobook recording of Melvin AC Howell’s new book “From A Nobody To The Somebody.” Great stuff. Can’t wait to get this one out for everyone to hear. Special thanks to for lending her lovely voice.

The print drops Oct. 15th with the audio to follow shortly after. Stay tuned.🔥

09/03/2025

Orison Books is pleased to announce the results of The 2025 Orison Prizes in Poetry & Fiction. POETRY RESULTSPhillip B. Williams has selected "Request to the God Trinket" by Craig Beaven as the poetry winner from a pool of anonymous finalist manuscripts. Beaven will receive $1,500 and publication by...

06/05/2025

New episode with two readings from ! Seven years after its most recent release, You Private Person now returns in a brand-new edition by With an X Books. Named one of Publisher’s Weekly’s 10 Essentials Books of the American West, these stories are sharp, romantic, and heartbreaking to the core. A beloved collection, a cult classic, and a perfect pop song, You Private Person is your favorite writer’s favorite book.

06/02/2025

Please help this independent author get their audiobook produced if you can!

Hi! I've dreamed of being a published author since I was five years old and now, at 45, … Jill Chafin needs your support for Back the SHAKEN Audiobook Project

04/23/2025

9 years of Talkin & Bookin. Here’s to 99 more 🥂

11/20/2024

NEW READING on the pod! VIVIENNE by .russo ❤️ “Did Vivienne Volker Kill Wilma Lang? This question has dogged Vivienne ever since Wilma jumped from a window to her death shortly after Volker stole her lover, the visionary artist Hans Bellmer, in the 1970s.”

Set over the course of a fateful week, Vivienne deftly weaves surreal prose with a Greek chorus of internet comments and text messages, to ask the questions: what is the cost of vision, what is the price of art? What connects creation and procreation, a life and an afterlife?

09/24/2024

NEW READING 💕 NDA is a collection of revealing poems and exchanges between and their clients as they navigate the dark bohemia of NYC and LA as a nonbinary s*x worker.

Spiral upward, downward, and side to side. From the safe words of New York to the alleys of Los Angeles....and all the flights in between.

www.farwestpress.com/far-west-books…/nda-lily-lady

07/19/2024

The TB gang had a great time hanging with our editor this week. This is the woman that makes sure all your audio is perfecto! 🍸🦢👄

07/12/2024

HAPPY 3 YEAR ANNIVERSARY to audiobook SLEEPOVERS! We had such a good time producing this with the author Ashleigh Bryant Phillips and ♥️ You can get this timeless recording by following the Come to Asheville to record your audiobook!

“Hailed by Lauren Groff as “fully committed to the truth no matter how dark or difficult or complicated it may be,” and written with “incantatory crispness,” Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain.“

07/06/2024

New interview and reading with and his new YA novel The Sword and the Sophomore! Narrated by the great Out July 9th⚔️ 🦢 “Arlynn Rosemary Banson is an atypical sixteen-year-old—the cool, popular outsider, effortlessly straddling the line between divas and dorks. Her forever young mother, Jennifer, is dedicated to making her life awkward by trying to be her friend. Her father, Alan, is a workaholic history professor who barely acknowledges his family’s existence. Her boyfriend, Benz, the quarterback and homecoming king, has just broken up with her, while her best friend, Joslin, bears reluctant witness to Rosemary’s romantic drama. But nothing prepares any of them for a Welsh foreign exchange student named Emrys Balin. Emrys looks like a teenager, but he seems to act much, much older.”