This is a special episode of "The Lonely Voice." Hosts Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner welcome guest host Alex Gordon to discuss "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson — and the Oscar-nominated film adaptation of that novella.

Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner discuss Roberto Bolaño' short story " Gómez Palacio." A young writer travels to a desolate northern Mexican town to interview for a teaching position during a particularly grim period of his life. Telling the story in hindsight allows us to see the ways the place was actually unforgettable.

Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner discuss "Berries" and other stories from Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov. The author underscores the horrors of totalitarianism and the will to survive of the characters in the stories that are based on all-too real events and situations that the author himself experienced.

To celebrate the fiftieth episode of "The Lonely Voice" podcast, Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides discuss the four stories in the "Edouard, Juliette, Lena" story cycle — "A Recollection," "The Colonel's Child," "Rue de Lille," and "Lena."

Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner discuss “Out with the Old” by Richard Yates. The setting is a tuberculosis ward in a veterans' hospital on December 31,1950. Dreams have faded for these patients whose best years seem to be behind them. For the character of McIntyre something miraculous happens. This is a powerful New Year’s Eve story.

In Grace Paley's "The Loudest Voice," a young Jewish girl from an immigrant family is chosen to narrate her school's Christmas pageant. This is an open-hearted story — just right for us now during the holidays — or any day at all.

Miss Snell isn’t as fun as other third grade teachers. Come the last day of school before the Christmas holiday, she holds a regular class day. There are no treats to eat and no presents. What can the students learn from their disappointment? What are the larger lessons for the rest of us? Yvette Benavides and Peter Orner discuss “Fun with a Stranger” by Richard Yates.

On this episode of "The Lonely Voice," Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides discuss the story “Love” by William Maxwell. A man recalls his fifth-grade teacher—a young woman who was kind and thoughtful. She becomes the center of a very hard lesson the protagonist learns in childhood about the impermanence of things.

Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides discuss two stories by Lucia Berlin— "Panteón de Dolores" and "Emergency Room Notebook, 1977." In these stories we find family dysfunction and tragedy set against the backdrop of another country and its culture and rituals — or in a hospital, another place with its protocols and routines. Except within all that is expected in these settings there is something totally new to make us pay attention to situations and people to whom we might never have given a second thought.

Nicholas Regiacorte joins Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides to discuss two poems by Zbigniew Herbert.