Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter, Read by Chelsea Stephens

Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens.

Host Jo Reed and AudioFile’s Michele Cobb discuss Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a collection of Katherine Anne Porter’s fiction that brings three of her novellas to audio. Until now, her only fiction on audiobook has been Ship of Fools. Chelsea Stephens gives this matchless storyteller her due in a precise, subtly nuanced performance. These three novellas, among the best in American literature, live as vibrantly here as they did 80 years ago. Porter’s Pulitzer prize–winning story of the 1918 flu pandemic gives the collection its title, and that somber image links the very different “Old Morality” and “Noon Wine.”

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