All Stories Are Fiction: Just as the Light Fails

Mike Daisey is a fierce storyteller, one minute hilarious, the next minute sweet, with a fine-tuned ear for digression. He circles in on his uneasy subject matter, closer and closer, until he exposes the raw heart. The New York Times calls him "the master storyteller" and he has been compared to Garrison Keillor, Spalding Gray, and David Sedaris.

In these seven monologues, recorded before live audiences at New York's Performance Space 122, Daisey tells true stories from his life that range from the terrible beauty of his rural Maine hometown, to shipping weapons to the Middle East, to the unintentionally hilarious dangers of defending free speech.


in Just as the Light Fails, Mike explores his obsession with light bulbs and their constant replacement when an uninvited visitor wreaks havoc on his home. A lecture at the International Rescue Committee leads to surprising conclusions about the nature of lunch, and an old job illegally smuggling missile triggers to the Middle East is described with unsettling honesty.