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The Strange Recital receives Ben Jorgensen Memorial Fund Award

The Dactyl Foundation is pleased to announce that Brent Robison and Tom Newton, producers/hosts of The Strange Recital, have received a grant  from the Ben Jorgensen Memorial Fund in recognition of the work they have done creating their high-quality literary podcast.

The Strange Recital is an audio anthology of short fiction that “questions the nature of reality” and has been in continuous production since 2016 with over 130 episodes.

Each podcast episode features one writer and runs about 20 minutes. It includes a story reading – the Recital, a brief musical interlude, and an author interview with a twist – the Post Recital.

Brent Robison lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York with his wife, a maker of fabulous masks, and their wisecracking teenage daughter. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen literary journals and several anthologies, and has won the Literal Latte Short Short Award, the Chronogram Short Fiction Contest, a Fiction Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. His collection of linked short stories, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, and his new mystery novel, Ponckhockie Union, are available from booksellers everywhere. He blogs occasionally at ultimate-indivisibility.com. His second novel, now in progress, threatens to take him to the grave.

Tom Newton is the author of Warfilm (Bloomsbury 2015), Seven Cries of Delight (Recital Publishing, 2019) and Voyages to Nowhere (Recital Publishing 2021). He has spent many years working in the film industry as a prop man, while pursuing a parallel existence as musician, sound engineer and mastering engineer. He was a participant in London’s punk music scene in the late seventies. He lives on a mountain in Woodstock, New York with his wife and daughter.

About the Ben Jorgensen Memorial Fund

Ben Jorgensen was an award-winning actor who worked on television, stage, film, and audiobook productions.  This fund was set up by his mother to honor his creative and generous spirit.

With this award, we hope to encourage great artists to continue producing great work, and we hope more listeners will subscribe to free podcast via email at TheStrangeRecital.com or on the app The Podcast Source or at  iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play Music, Facebook, TuneIn, YouTube, Spotify and iHeart Radio.

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The 2016 Dactyl Literary Fiction Award goes to Sea of Hooks by Lindsay Hill

seaofhooksSea of Hooks (McPherson & Co) was nominated by Barbara Roether, author of This Earth You’ll Come Back To. In her review of Hill’s unusual novel, Roether writes, “There is a paradox that floats through the Sea of Hooks, which is that the experience of reading it is almost the opposite of how it is written. That is to say, while the story is told in its short collage-like segments, their effect is an almost seamless classical narrative. The way sections move from multiple perspectives, dreamtime, real-time, then meld together with such cohesive and penetrating storytelling, is a testament to the author’s insightful eye for detail and character.”

We can say that Sea of Hooks  is a long narrative prose poem, which may be the essence of what it is to be a literary fiction novel.
Continue to Dactyl Review.

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Dactyl Foundation Literary Awards Announced

December 23, 2013

In the past three years, Dactyl Foundation has concentrated on developing the literary fiction community, which has dwindled over the past twenty years as publishing houses began to focus on big sellers ignoring the niche market of fine literature.

In 2010, we launched Dactyl Review, a community of literary fiction writers who review literary fiction and nominate works for Dactyl Foundation’s $1000 annual prize.  The contest is open to any living literary fiction writer, regardless of date of publication or type of publication. We are especially interested in books that came out some time ago and have not yet received the recognition they deserve.

This year we decided to award two prizes.  We are pleased to announce that the first award goes to The Double Life of Alfred Buber by David Schmahmann, published in 2011 by The Permanent Press.  The second award goes to Cocoa Almond Darling by Jeffra Hays, self-published in 2011 on Kindle.

Support this worthy project now by becoming a member or renewing your membership. Click here. We’ve got a lot of interesting and important work ahead of us. We can’t do it without you. Thanks in advance for your support. Dactyl Foundation is a 501 c3 organization, and your donation is fully tax-deductible.