Laurie Jacobs' flash fiction piece "The Call" is a MuseFlash selection from The Drum's Third Annual MuseFlash contest, recorded at Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace conference earlier this month. "The Call" is an early morning phone call that alters the life of Jacobs' college-student narrator. The brevity of the piece belies its dense emotional impact and its moving tone. [...] more

Wendy Wakeman's "Identity Theft" was a selection from The Drum's Third Annual MuseFlash contest at Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace conference earlier this month. Financial dire straits and the pressures of college and work form the setting for the piece, in which a ten dollar bill and a grandmother's handwriting come together to alter the narrator's life. [...] more

In Marcia Douglas' "Boy With a Watergun in His Schoolbag", a boy finds power and poetry in something so basic as the multiplication tables. The number seven becomes the source of discovery of his own greatness and of his identity in the face of the confining world of school and a teacher with a ruler in her hand. "Boy With a Watergun in His Schoolbag" was The Drum's selection from our Third Annual MuseFlash contest, recorded at Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace conference earlier this month. [...] more

Kelly Robertson's "The Characteristics of Dirt" is one of The Drum's selections from our Third Annual MuseFlash contest, recorded at Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace conference earlier this month. Robertson's piece takes an intriguing and almost eerie look at a woman with an intense need to dig. This short work brings the listener in close, focusing on vivid sensory details of the loam the character sifts through. [...] more

L. E. Miller's "The Sea Gives" begins with a shard of china floating in the water off Plum Island and ends with a young girl questioning her place in an older woman's life. Along the way, in a brief 500 words, Miller depicts a bond between the two women, a coming together of two different worlds, and the fragility of that relationship. The prompt for this round of Zip-Code Stories was an opening line of "She saw something at the water's edge and. . . ". Listen to hear [...] more

The narrator of Kim Savage's "The Fells" tells the chiling story of her abduction from this remote part of Winchester, Massachusetts (01890). Describing a routine fells run turned dangerous, the story hints at the complicated relationships between the abductor, the intended victim, and the girl who took her place. "The Fells" is the featured Zip-Code Story for June 2012, as part of The Drum 's project with WBUR's Radio Boston. [...] more

The Drum's Stories on the Street project brings Shakespeare to Coney Island. This place of temporary pleasures was a fitting location for Sara Fetherolf to record visitors reading Prospero's well-known speech from The Tempest . This recording may be the only time that "our revels now are ended" is captured with the ambient sounds of a roller-coaster. To read along from Shakespeare's text, click Project Gutenberg here . [...] more

Stories on the Street went underground in April to record Dante's Inferno. Dante's journey through the underworld begins at the gateway warning of the horrors awaiting within. The Drum's Sara Fetherolf went into the New York City subway to ask ordinary people to read from this classic text. Click here to read along on Project Gutenberg. [...] more

Daniel Roberts' story "Sandwich" is our Zip-Code Stories winner for this month--and our first piece of fiction to win in the Zip-Code Stories project. "Sandwich" is set in the eponymous Cape town, where Eugene's wife Jan has decided to take him to resolve certain issues in their long marriage. Is Eugene a victim of hypochondria, or an aging American man plagued by the standard ills of body, mind, and psyche? In Sandwich, he takes matters into his own hands. Listen to the piece to see if you think it's a lighthearted or [...] more

Stories on the Street gives several voices to three poems by Emily Dickinson, read aloud near the national-debt clock in New York's Union Square, by New York's Con-Ed building, and in front of the Waverley Social Security office. Click here and here to follow along as you listen to passersby recite the poems "'Remember me' implored the Thief! ", "There's a certain slant of light," and "I'm Nobody! Who Are You? ". Stories on the Street intern Sara Fetherolf recorded and [...] more

To celebrate Valentine's Day, The Drum 's Stories on the Street project presents Andrew Marvell's 17th-century poem "To His Coy Mistress," read aloud by the denizens of two East Village singles bars on the weekend before the notorious holiday. The first reader fights off tears in his eyes; the second is the bartender, who brings drama and emotion to the text; all the readers offer a contemporary take on Marvell's poem about love, lust, and desperation. This audio of "To His Coy Mistress" was recorded and produced by Stories on the Street intern [...] more

Lisa Roger's "Off the Map" is our selection for the January round of our Zip-Code Stories project with WBUR's Radio Boston. Rogers' "Off the Map"--about Wellesley's 02482--plays with the very idea of zip codes, describing the ways in which Morse's Pond transcends categorization, connecting two towns, and multiple communities, especially in winter when the ice forms a beautiful link. [...] more

James Joyce's "The Dead" takes place on or around the New Year and Epiphany, January 6, and that is when The Drum ventured into Times Square to record Joyce's story for our Stories on the Street Project. Listen as passersby and New Year's Eve revelers take their turn reading Joyce's prose aloud, each one in his or her own unique accent. This Stories on the Street audio of the final paragraphs of "The Dead" was recorded and produced by Sara Fetherolf . [...] more

Liz Moore's "The Start of Something" is our featured Zip-Code Story for the month of December. Moore's piece about Framingham's 01702 captures that feeling of being pulled into new experiences and new places even as we yearn for what we know. As she contemplates her own relationship with her hometown through adolescence and young adulthood, Moore gives us a vivid sense of the excitement and wistfulness in realizing that there's always the start of something new. [...] more

Vanessa Tardiff's "Brookline Night" was one of our featured stories for the October round of Zip-Code Stories . "Brookline Night" describes just that. A story of a mother and a daughter, Vanessa's piece explores the connection between place and person, and the shifting between the familiar and the strange. To hear more Zip-Code Stories submitted by listeners to WBUR and fans of The Drum , listen to our playlist on Broadcastr , an innovative platform for sharing geo-tagged audio. [...] more

Daniel Gewertz' "Revere, 1972" is one of our featured stories for the October round of Zip-Code Stories . "Revere, 1972" involves a carnival game, a revelation, and a stranger's kindness. To hear an interview with Daniel in which he talks about the motivation behind the story, click here and listen to the Radio Boston program for October 10, 2011. To hear the other Zip-Code Stories submitted by listeners to WBUR and fans of The Drum , visit The Drum's playlist on Broadcastr . [...] more

Jennifer Haigh's short story "Bent" takes place in Cape Cod's Provincetown (02657), where Kip's family has vacationed every summer he can remember, renting the same house by the shore. He's always brought along his neighborhood friend Fanelli, but this year, he's added his college buddy Jean-Luc, a Frenchman whose exoticism and way with girls Kip envies. "Bent" portrays the subtle dance of allegiance and rivalry between these young men, as it studies Kip's first true experience of regret. [...] more

The opening to Roland Merullo's 2003 novel In Revere, In Those Days sets us squarely down in Revere (02151), and in the mind of a narrator for whom the city of his childhood is more than geographical location. For Anthony Benedetto, Revere is a place outside time, a world full of blue-collar families dreaming for something bigger. He looks back on the "ordinary heroism of the household, the factory, and the street" and reflects on those who are able to transcend the bitterness and hardship of their lives. [...] more

Fifteen years old and educated beyond his years, beset by the chaos of his family and a possibly pregnant girlfriend, Jonathan Levy Wainscoting IV narrates Askold Melnyczuk's novel-in-progress Excerpts from SMEDLEY's Secret Guide to World Literature . Woven through with literary, philosophical, and cultural references, Jonathan's narrative muses on his parents' and his friends' complicated lives on the eve of his forced summer's-long departure from his Cambridge home. Excerpts from SMEDLEY's Secret Guide to World Literature first appeared in the June 2011 issue of The Drum , and [...] more

Daphne Kalotay's "Sunshine Cleaners" takes place in a laundromat in Brookline (02446), where cultures tumble together in misunderstanding and miscommunication. Sergei ponders the mysteries of America in everything from simple signs to interactions between men and women, while the Tall Girl struggles to make herself understood as her transactions in coins and language repeatedly fail. All the same, the tiny world of the laundromat offers a sweet and surprising payoff. [...] more

Fifteen years old and educated beyond his years, beset by the chaos of his family and a possibly pregnant girlfriend, Jonathan Levy Wainscoting IV narrates Askold Melnyczuk's novel-in-progress Excerpts from SMEDLEY's Secret Guide to World Literature . Woven through with literary, philosophical, and cultural references, Jonathan's narrative muses on his parents' and his friends' complicated lives on the eve of his forced summer's-long departure from his Cambridge home. Excerpts from SMEDLEY's Secret Guide to World Literature first appeared in the June 2011 issue of The Drum , and represents 02139 [...] more

Who better to read aloud Kenneth Grahame's famous passage about the delight of "messing about in boats" than the rowers and staff at Boston's Community Rowing, Inc. ? The Drum stopped by the boathouse early one morning last week and found a group of willing--and even enthusiastic--participants just coming off the water. Community Rowing is one of the largest public boat clubs in the United States, introducing people of all ages and all abilities to the sport of rowing. Visit their website for more info. [...] more