Storytime: Chris Orcutt Reads “The Magnificent Murphy,” His Homage to The Great Gatsby

THE_GREAT_GATSBYRecent­ly I did a radio inter­view with Stephen Camp­bell, the ter­rif­ic host of “Mur­ders, Mys­ter­ies and May­hem” on the Authors on the Air Glob­al Radio Net­work. The inter­view went very well, and it is slat­ed to be avail­able as a pod­cast some­time in the next few weeks. I will of course post an update about the inter­view the moment it becomes avail­able.

The rea­son I men­tion this inter­view is that it got me think­ing about how all sto­ry­telling was orig­i­nal­ly done oral­ly. I also had an excel­lent micro­phone my friend loaned me just sit­ting around, and I thought about my new short sto­ry col­lec­tion, The Man, The Myth, The Leg­end, and how some peo­ple might enjoy hav­ing one of the sto­ries from it read to them.

One of the prob­lems with the “Look Inside This Book” fea­ture for Ama­zon Kin­dle books is that we authors can­not offer read­ers more than a few pages of a book as a free sam­ple. I real­ly wish they’d allow us to give read­ers more—especially in the case of my sto­ry col­lec­tion, since read­ers can’t get a very clear idea as to what the book is about on the basis of half of one short sto­ry.

I thought about sim­ply post­ing anoth­er sto­ry from the book on this web­site, as a means of giv­ing you more of a sam­ple, but then I thought about read­ing the sto­ry to you.

Read aloud, the 5,000-word sto­ry is about a half-hour in length. I record­ed it on my iMac, using Garage­band soft­ware, and since I know noth­ing about audio pro­duc­tion, and since I am not a pro­fes­sion­al voice artist  (like a friend of mine, Jill Cas­sidy), there are some small glitch­es in the record­ing and occa­sion­al hitch­es in my voice.

But the sto­ry itself is pret­ty damn good, and if you have half an hour to sit back and have a sto­ry read to you, maybe you’ll think so, too.

If this works out, I might record an excerpt from the cur­rent Dako­ta Stevens work in progress. We’ll see. For now, I hope you enjoy “The Mag­nif­i­cent Murphy”—my homage to one of my favorite nov­els, F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s The Great Gats­by.

 

Postscripts:
1. Soon after I posted this audio story, The Man, The Myth, The Legend was voted by IndieReader as one of the Best Indie Books of 2013.
2. If you are someone who prefers to read stories before listening to audio versions of them, I strongly suggest that you not play this. Buy the book first—about the cost of a Starbucks latte—and listen to my reading of the story later.

 

“The Mag­nif­i­cent Mur­phy” by Chris Orcutt—read by the author:

Chris_Orcutt_Reads_The_Magnificent_Murphy

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By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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