Ravi Mangla is one of my favorite flash fiction writers. His work is usually very offbeat and weird and fresh that I have no problem comparing him to the likes of Ben Loory and Etgar Keret. His collection of microfiction, Visiting Writers, came out this past year from Uncanny Valley Press. He wrote one of my all-time favorite flash pieces (which he reads in the podcast), and has also helped out with the Wigleaf Top 50. We talk about all these things and more -- like Michael Cunningham's take on The Pale King. Really, is this line the greatest thing ever written?
Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.
Near the end of the podcast there's a cut and we start talking about TV shows. So give it a listen. And also keep an eye out for Ravi's Blurb coming soon from Artistically Declined Press.