It’s story-telling time from Third Man Books. Ever dream of flying around your room or dipping your hand in a cloud? In Pinckney Benedict’s short story Joe Messinger is Dreaming, the dream might come true ...“Captain Messinger will free-fall for four and one-half minutes. He will fall eighty-five thousand feet during that time. He will reach speeds of over six hundred miles per hour, nearly the speed of sound. Without an airplane, ladies and gentlemen!” We’ve excerpted the story from Language Lessons and even have Pinckney reading his tale for you. Download the mp3 to hear!

For more about Pinckney Benedict, here's a recent interview from r.kv.r.y quarterly with writer Kristiana Kahakauwila. Also check out this trailer for the movie based on Pinckney's short story “Miracle Boy."

Pinckney Benedict grew up on his family’s dairy farm in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. He has published a novel (Dogs of God) and three collections of short fiction, the most recent of which is Miracle Boy and Other Stories. His work has been published in, among other magazines and anthologies, Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, the O. Henry Award series, the Pushcart Prize series, the Best New Stories from the South series, Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days, The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, and The Oxford Book of the American Short Story. Benedict is the recipient of, among other awards and honors, a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fiction grant from the Illinois Arts Council, two Plattner Awards for fiction from Appalachian Heritage magazine, a Literary Fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, and the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award. Benedict serves as a professor in the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and on the core faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. “Joe Messinger is Dreaming” originally appeared in Miracle Boy and Other Stories.