Episode 56: What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw by Leah Stewart

04/04/18 • -1 min

What you don't know about Charlie Outlaw, the actor, star of a hit TV show, is that he's been kidnapped. You don't know he was taken while vacationing on a remote island where he hoped for anonymity, a chance to re-evaluate his newfound celebrity and recent heartbreak. You don't know that his kidnappers don't know that he's famous -- that they value him only because he's American. You don't know, and he doesn't either, if his fame will doom him or save him or not matter at all.

What you don't know about Josie Lamar, the actress, former star of a cult TV show, object of Charlie's recent heartbreak, is that she's struggling with what it might mean to be washed up and in love with someone whose star is just beginning to rise. You don't know -- or maybe you do -- that she spent her formative years as a superhero, and that this is the person her fans still see when they run into her at the airport, the coffee shop, the doctor's office. Who is she if not the person others believe her to be? Where does acting end and reality begin? And can the superpowers that propelled her to fame help her to save Charlie -- or does real life not work that way?

Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Leah Stewart about her "thematic preoccupation" with identity and gender, writing at the border of genre and literary fiction, and the influences of the 17th-century novel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer on this novel.

Guest readers Tui Sutherland, Brian Slattery, and Alfie Guy join Oppenheimer to discuss love, fame, and the hero's quest.

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Guest readers Tui Sutherland, Brian Slattery, and Alfie Guy join Oppenheimer to discuss love, fame, and the hero's quest.

Order today!

Available from:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound

Previous Episode

Episode 55: The Gunners by Rebecca Kauffman

The Gunners is the name that Mikey, Sally, Alice, Jimmy, Lynn, and Sam give themselves, the name spelled out in stickers on the mailbox of the abandoned building they claim as their clubhouse the summer they are six and seven. The six of them are each other’s friends, cheerleaders, fans, family. Inside that circle of friendship, each of them can be who they are, without question, without judgment. Until the year they turn 16, when Sally suddenly, inexplicably, turns her back on the group, and the rest of them, shattered by her abandonment, splinter, going off into adulthood alone. Years later, Sally kills herself, and the group comes back together for her funeral, seeking answers, reconnection, absolution.

Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Rebecca Kauffman about change and the passage of time, the infinite complexity of the human heart, and the importance of allowing ourselves to be seen and to be known.

Guest readers Annie Thoms and Jessica Sager join Oppenheimer to discuss wood frogs and grackles, quicksand and bridges, blindness and seeing.

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Next Episode

Episode 57: Stray City by Chelsey Johnson

Portland, Oregon, 1999. It's a city of strays, the place where people who are outsiders everywhere else come to find belonging. Andrea came, she tells us, at seventeen,"from rural western Nebraska, where adulthood came hard and fast and narrow, and queers kept quiet or met violence." She thinks she's found her people, the Lesbian Mafia: they have family dinner and play music together and date each other, break up, and date each other in new configurations. But it's not that simple. Things get complicated when Andrea starts a secret affair with a man, Ryan -- a move, she tells us, that at that time, for the Lesbian Mafia, was as good as treason. And things get more complicated when Andrea gets pregnant and a relationship that was supposed to be all about space suddenly isn't anymore. Shifting perspective between Andrea, Ryan, and their eventual daughter, Lucia, this is a novel about identity and community, about the family we're given and the family we choose, about the ways we try to protect the people we love, the ways we hurt them anyway, and the ways we keep on trying.

Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Chelsey Johnson about being a rock'n'roll flutist, learning to love plot, and how to write an ending.

Guest readers Emily Moore and Jennifer Eng join Oppenheimer to discuss records and oceans, mothers and daughters, and strays and strayings.

Order today!

Available from:
Amazon
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