Free Daily Podcast Summary
Fictionable: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Fictionable
Interviews, book chat and everything about the short stories and graphic fiction from all around the world appearing in Fictionable. "Storytellers, readers and creatives alike will love" – The Independent
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- Yesterday13 min
Laura O'Meara: 'If you want to run and scream into the sea that's probably not very practical, but you can write a story'
We began this Autumn series of podcasts with Mark Haddon, who spoke about the tension at the heart of fiction. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from tony lashden, Rolli and James Young, but this time we welcome Laura O'Meara and her short story, Monolith/Stone Teal/240×340cm.The monolithic rug is "an off-white oblong that covers half the room", a lush, woollen accessory that forms the centrepiece of this unsettling story. But according to O'Meara it doesn't actually exist."The rug is a fictional construct," she says. "I've never had a rug that nice in any of my houses."But despite her plush furnishings, O'Meara's main character doesn't really feel at home."Eleanor is doing everything that modern life says you should do," the author explains. "You should be going to pilates, you should be doing your skincare, you should be buying your organic veg. And she's still, like, my life is awful and my boyfriend's on the floor fingering a rug and I don't know what's happening."Even though both Eleanor and her partner know there's something wrong in their relationship, they can't do anything about it, she continues. "Chris is trying to fix something, but he's fixing the wrong thing."For O'Meara, stories are a way of "exploring possibilities"."If you want to explore an emotion or a reaction to something that you can't do in your own life," she says, "you can explore it through fiction. You can make a character do it." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 1 weeks ago21 min
Mark Haddon: 'So much about writing, so much about art in general, is about solving a paradox'
The storms are barrelling across the Atlantic, the nights are drawing in, so it's time for some more exclusive short stories and another set of podcasts. We'll be hearing from tony lashden, Rolli, Laura O'Meara and James Young in this Autumn set, but we start with Mark Haddon and his short story The Vickers House.Haddon explains that this story came from "a fascination with houses"."My father was an architect," he says, "and houses are a way of thinking about the world for me."As a boy, the author remembers spending time alone in his room."Because that room was very much mine," he recalls, "the thinking seemed to happen within the room, rather than in my head. Rooms now are not just physical spaces, they are ways of thinking."The Vickers House returns to a time when friends were "almost given to you on a geographical basis," he continues. "If someone lived a few doors away and you went to the same school and you were in the same year, you had to be friends. It was a curse. Or a blessing, depending on who that person was."For Haddon, the constraints of village life make it the perfect setting for fiction."Being painted into a corner is a very good way of generating stories," he says. "If you can say at any point during a story 'And with one bound, I was free,' then you don't really have a story."Tension and paradox are at the heart of fiction, Haddon argues, from the state of mind he falls into just before sleep which is "both very loose and very precise" to the combination of "grandiose self confidence" and "savage self criticism" which the creative project demands.Writers must be as specific as they can, he continues, but they still "have to tap into something mysterious and strange, and make connections which are weird and unexpected, but nevertheless right". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Aug 27, 202623 min
Elaine Vilar Madruga: 'I’m always thinking about Kafka when I write'
This Summer series we've already heard from Will Boast, EC Osondu, Robin Munby and Zhenya Oliinyk. But we bring it to a close with Elaine Vilar Madruga and her short story Wild, translated from Spanish by Samantha Luna.Wild is not only a story about vengeance, Vilar Madruga says, it's also "a story about hope"."It's about sisterhood and it's about resilience," she continues. "It's about the possibility of survivors telling their own stories. Having their own agenda, Having our own words."Women have always spoken about male violence, Vilar Madruga explains, but it's always been behind closed doors."Now we don't have any whisper of fear," she says, "we have a screaming voice. And that screaming voice allows us to share with the world what we are thinking and what our great-grandmothers and our grandmothers thought in their own lives."Vilar Madruga cites the Cuban saying "pueblo pequeño, infierno grande" – a small town is a large hell. Even though her stories are fantastical, unmoored in time and place, she's still exploring the shared experience of "the woman in the street"."My reality, my space, my spiritual biography, the territories where I live are not only mine," she says. "It's a human experience. It's not a Caribbean experience, or a Cuban experience or a Latin American experience, it's a human experience."The themes that run through Wild – male violence, motherhood, sisterhood – echo through her latest novel, La piel hembra (The Female Skin). And Vilar Madruga also returns to the idea of metamorphosis, with Kafka's story of a man who becomes an insect always at the back of her mind."I'm always thinking in all my novels how men and women – the fictional characters – become monsters." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Aug 22, 202617 min
Zhenya Oliinyk: 'Drawing and writing comics is more like journalism to me'
We've heard from Will Boast, EC Osondu and Robin Munby already in this Summer series of podcasts, and Elaine Vilar Madruga is lined up next. But this week we welcome Zhenya Oliinyk and her graphic short story A Night in Kyiv.This story is short and made up of unsettling images, but Oliinyk tells us it's "not exactly fiction"."It is a documentation of one particular night," she says, "in terms of the numbers, because the numbers are real."Oliinyk charts the night in a series of alerts as the ballistic missiles come down, the hits are confirmed and the death toll rises. And through it all runs the struggle to get some sleep."This is pretty much how it is happening," the author explains. "It happens on a regular basis now, in Kyiv and in other big cities as well."Making art under Russian bombardment may be something of a challenge, but Oliinyk is resolutely practical."It is my occupation," she says. "It is what brings food to the table. So I would be insincere if I'd say that it's just my way of copying with the situation, it's just how my artistic spirit needs to manifest itself. But no, it's just what I do for a living."Of course it's still meaningful and inspiring to share her work, she continues, but the brute realities of life remain. "Surprisingly, when the war starts you still have to pay rent and buy food. This is probably one of the biggest disappointments of the full-scale invasion."With the news full of long-range strikes on oil refineries deep in Russian territory, it's tempting to imagine the war is at some sort of turning point. Retaking Crimea may feel like a distant dream, but "it still feels empowering to know that we're not helpless," Oliinyk says, "that we're not weak, that we can actually make some impact." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Aug 15, 202620 min
Robin Munby: 'You're always writing in some sense for yourself'
This summer we've already heard from Will Boast and EC Osondu, and we'll be welcoming Elaine Vilar Madruga and Zhenya Oliinyk on to the podcast over the next few weeks. But this time we're heading north with Robin Munby and his short story Of All Who Sorrow, Joy.Munby's narrator is adrift in language, an experience the author says is drawn from his own life."This is especially about that early phase of learning a language or living in a new place," he explains, "when you have some proficiency, but things are still a struggle."At this stage, Munby continues, comprehension is often a matter of guesswork, but it's only a more extreme version of something that happens in your mother tongue. "You're half hearing what the other person is saying and filling in the gaps, which is often something we naturally do in conversation."The narrator's blanks and missing pieces are echoed in the construction of a story built from fragments that cuts between a discussion about a journey and the journey itself. But it's no accident."I, as a reader, do very much enjoy writing that is ambiguous in that way," the author says.As a translator from Spanish, Russian and Asturian, Munby's day-to-day tussles with language are very different from his narrator's. But translation itself is still something of a mystery."A lot of people invest a lot of time in explaining how to do it and analysing how it's done," he says, "and I find all of that fascinating. But I still find myself lost for words in terms of trying to describe how I do it." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Jul 31, 202614 min
EC Osondu: 'The writer is also a strange animal'
Will Boast kicked off this Summer series of podcasts, discussing the bureaucracy and hostility that immigrants face all around the world. We'll be hearing from Elaine Vilar Madruga, Zhenya Oliinyk and Robin Munby over the next few weeks. But this time we welcome EC Osondu and his short story Uber Chat.Osondu explains that he didn't start using Ubers because they were convenient. As a Black man in New York City, he was struggling to hail a cab until a passer-by told him about Uber."In less than five minutes," he says, "I got a ride."He discovered that Uber drivers were often more interested in conversation than people driving cabs, and started to enjoy the strange intimacy of an app throwing you together with a stranger."It's highly unlikely that you'll meet that person again," Osondu explains. "There is some kind of freedom that comes with that, a certain lack of constraint. You don't censor yourself."Even though he's been living in the US for more than a decade, the author still doesn't feel at home."The longer you live in America," he says, "the more conscious you are of your foreignness."It's no surprise that American life is appearing in his fiction, Osondu continues. "Every writer who finds himself in any environment, you're like a sponge."But an author isn't bound by their immediate surroundings. No writer "has ever been to Mars," he adds, but they've been "writing about Mars since the beginning of science fiction". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Jul 23, 202620 min
Will Boast: 'You almost have to make your characters feel interestingly doomed'
The heat is on in London, so it's time for another set of exclusive short stories and another series of podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Elaine Vilar Madruga, EC Osondu, Zhenya Oliinyk and Robin Munby, but we launch into Summer with Will Boast and his story The Line.Boast explains that this story came out of his own family's struggles with the US immigration system in the 1990s, after they moved from the UK when he was a child."We would get to the Federal Building in downtown," he says, "and literally if you didn't get in line by a certain hour you were not getting in the building."The Line started off with a family much like his own, Boast continues, but as he thought about the "hierarchy of immigrants" he started making his characters "less comfortable in the English language"."Polish immigrants are not thought about as much, I guess," he says, "and they are often more politically conservative than some groups. So I thought it would be interesting to take a character who has more conservative, right-leaning views on migration than I do and put that character in this scenario."The long line stretching around the Federal Building is just the visible end of a figurative line stretching all around the world, Boast adds. "Behind the line of people actually there physically waiting to get their papers, their green cards, eventually their citizenship, of course, there's a huge line of people applying for visas, hoping and dreaming to get that chance to be in that physical line."Even if his characters find a way through the bureaucratic nightmare, the west's ever-increasing hostility towards migrants is sure to exact some cost. But according to Boast, there's something about short fiction that makes them doomed from the start."Because of its formal rigour and its un-open-endedness as opposed to novels, which can stretch," he says, "a short story really won't work unless its ending is satisfying and feels fated in some way,"We'll be tempting fate next time with EC Osondu and his short story Uber Chat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- May 16, 202619 min
Takiguchi Yūshō: 'When I’m writing fiction, I have very little sense I’m the one inventing the story'
We've already heard from Diana Evans, Bruna Martini, Joel Cox and Holly Edwards in this Spring series of podcasts. Now we bring it to a close with Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood.Takiguchi tells us that the wandering narrator in Peppermint is following the same method as his author."It's when things start heading somewhere unexpected and when unexpected things begin to happen that it really starts to feel like the novel is working properly," he says.Just as in life, Takiguchi continues, "even if you don't want to go off track, you end up doing so. Things never quite unfold the way you intended, and you still have to keep moving forward in some way."And it's no good looking back. Memory may be "always with us", he explains, but it's also "profoundly unstable". So whether we reach for prose or images, it's impossible to capture the past."No matter how many photographs we have, no matter how much we try to preserve something in words, it's never the same as the thing itself."That gap between words and the things they represent is familiar territory for the translator, Kirkwood adds. But you can start to solve the puzzle when you focus on the voice."Once you have that voice," Kirkwood says, "a lot of your other decisions become very easy, because you just listen to the voice."It's an echo of the way Takiguchi writes his fiction. Instead of coming up with his stories, it's a question of paying attention to what his characters are telling him."What matters more," he says, "is whether I'm able to listen well to someone's story."That's the last of these Spring podcasts. We'll be back with another season of stories for Summer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Get Fictionable summaries in your inbox
Free AI-powered daily recaps. Key takeaways, quotes, and mentions — in a 5-minute read.
Get Free Summaries →Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
You Might Also Like
Listeners also like.
Table Read
Hollywood actors perform acclaimed screenplays with cinematic sound design and immersive audio.
The New Yorker: Fiction
A monthly reading and conversation with The New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman.
Small Fictions
Small Fictions
Imaginary Worlds
Explores the creative process behind sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction across books, TV, film, games, and fandoms.
The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker
Fiction writers from The New Yorker read their own stories.
Fortunately... with Fi and Jane
Broadcasters Jane Garvey and Fi Glover interview media figures who share candid, off-the-record stories from their careers.
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing
A writer and two agents share practical advice on craft, publishing, and query letters for emerging authors.
A World With
Futures In Draft & Storythings
Selected Shorts
Actors perform live readings of short fiction, blending literature and performance to explore the human experience.
Shelf Respect
Three friends analyze and critique books with humor and insight, focusing on both content and cover design.
Creative Entrepreneur: A Podcast For Business Growth and Trending News
Examines how entrepreneurship, creativity, and media trends shape modern business and personal branding.
How I Write
A weekly look at the creative processes and habits of top writers, revealing how they turn ideas into finished work.
Customized Recaps
AI-powered recaps with compact key takeaways, quotes, and insights.
Straight to Your Inbox
Get key takeaways from Fictionable in a 5-minute read.
Save Hours Every Week
Stay current on your favorite podcasts without falling behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Podzilla's Fictionable daily summary?
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of Fictionable as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
How does the Fictionable podcast summary work?
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official Fictionable product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by Fictionable.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts, any in the catalog. Basic raises that to 15, Pro to 40 and Max to 100. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
How often does Fictionable release new episodes?
Fictionable publishes weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does Fictionable cover?
Fictionable covers topics including Fiction, Arts, Books. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting Fictionable summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.