The Audio Series: Carissa Halston

Oh yeah, baby! We've cooked up a new feature for the blog.

Our brand new audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.

Last week we kicked things off with the author who inspired it all, J. Robert Lennon. Check it out if you missed it. 

Today, we're opening our ears to Carissa Halston. She is the author of A Girl Named Charlie Lester and The Mere Weight of Words. Her short fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Curbside Splendor, TRNSFR, The Collagist, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. She currently lives in Boston where she runs a small press called Aforementioned Productions, edits a literary journal called apt, hosts a reading series called Literary Firsts, and is at work on a novel called Conjoined States.

The Mere Weight of Word released this June by Aqueous Books

Carissa and I came *thisclose* to meeting each other a few weeks ago when she read at the Moravian Bookshop in Bethlehem, PA. And I'm sorry I missed it because her book is unlike most others. I wish I could be all you-heard-it-here-first with this one, cause you know, she's been touring this book like mad and doing readings since its release, so there's a good chance you may have already seen or heard bits and pieces of it. But in a way I think I'd be partly right because today, she's sharing a specially-recorded-for-us excerpt:

Click here to experience The Mere Weight of Words read by Carissa Halston.

The word on The Mere Weight of Words:

When Meredith hears her estranged father has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she says nothing. When Eliot, a long-time friend of her father’s, calls and asks her to see him, she hangs up. But once she runs out of ways to say no, Mere agrees to visit her father, reasoning that he’ll soon lose all memory of their estrangement. He’ll forget her paralysis. He’ll forget their fights. He’ll forget that he ever stopped loving her mother and be the person Mere adored. She leaves her house certain she’ll say something she can’t take back and arrives at his knowing he’ll someday forget she visited at all. In language honest and heartfelt, Carissa Halston presents Mere’s life with and without her father, and shows how Mere fills his absence with worry, wit, and words.

*lifted from goodreads, with love