Talk To Me From Wnyc

The theme for the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series at Joe's Pub in March was Strange Places. Listen to the extraordinary — and absurd — environments that authors Jessica Anthony, Amelia Gray and Heidi Julavitz conjured up their readings. Host and curator Amanda Stern was fighting through a migraine. Author Jessica Anthony had a chest cold. And half of the musical duo Kaiser Cartel, Courtney Kaiser, went into labor the day of the show, leaving Benjamin Cartel to perform on his own. Regardless of these challenges, Anthony, along with the two authors Amelia Gray and Heidi Julavits, were in the house, reading from their work as well as performing their one-thing-they'd-never-performed-on-stage-before for the audience, which is one of Stern's requirements for participating in the series. Gray, an author who funded her current book tour via the popular web site Kickstarter, read a story about a date gone horribly, viscerally, wrong: larynxes fall out of the daters' throats, arms land on the floor and "flesh