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

Recently 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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