from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Don O'Briant
September 2, 2005

Audio magazine gives voice to classics, new work
Hundreds of literary magazines crowd the market, but a new one being launched Sept. 10 is bound to be heard loud and clear.
Verb, an audio literary quarterly, features Walt Whitman, James Dickey, Robert Olen Butler and other writers reading their works.
Yes, that Walt Whitman. Verb Publisher Daren Wang got permission from the Whitman Archive to use a wax cylinder of the 19th-century poet reading "America." And the recording of Dickey reading "The Wayfarer" and "The Sheep Child" was made by Wang two months before the poet and author of "Deliverance" died in 1997.

Other works on the two-CD edition of the inaugural Verb include a 13,000-word excerpt from an unpublished novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler; a new recording of National Book Award winner Ha Jin's story "In Broad Daylight," read by Jennifer Deer; a new short story from Edgar Award winner Tom Franklin; and poems from South Carolina Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth.

Wang, a Decatur resident and producer of "The Spoken Word" on National Public Radio, came up with the idea of an audio literary magazine when he was on a long road trip and heard a short story being read on the radio. Although he had been producing book-related programs for public radio for 15 years, he was tired of the limitations of radio and traditional audiobooks.

"We can do things that no one else does," Wang says. "Twenty-five years ago, Stuart Dybek, who writes great poetry and fiction, wrote a song that was a response to a Thomas Lux poem. But he could never find a way to release it until now. We have the poem and the song back-to-back in the first issue. Where else could you do that?"
Published quarterly, Verb is distributed by the University of Georgia Press and will be available at bookstores for $19.95 or for downloads at www.audible.com. For more information, go to www.verb.org.