Two stories about passionate pursuits—cerebral and visceral.   

In Daniel Kehlman’s “The Mathematician”, a young math wizard grapples to understand the world on his own brilliant terms, alternatively dazzling and alienating his mentors along the way.  Kehlmann was born in Munich and lives in Vienna.  The story is derived from his novel Measuring the World, about the eccentric 19^th-century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, and was translated by Carol Brown Janeway. The reader is the multiple award-winning Broadway actor and television star, B.D. Wong. 

The late food writer M.F.K. Fisher, was celebrated for her lavish descriptions of favorite foods and meals, and none can rival this epic memoir of a perfect meal taken at a French country inn, “I Was Really Very Hungry.”  Fisher’s other gourmet writings include The Gastronomical Me; Serve It Forth; and How to Cook a Wolf.  The reader, at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, was five-time Emmy nominee (“St. Elsewhere”) Christina Pickles, and you can hear her relishing every bite.

“The Mathematician” by Daniel Kehlmann, read by B.D. Wong

“I Was Really Very Hungry” by M.F.K. Fisher, read by Christina Pickles

The musical interlude is Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit Symphony Space

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

Listener’s choice!

On June 9th, 2010, SELECTED SHORTS at Symphony Space in New York will feature stories selected by our nationwide audience.  Go to http://www.symphonyspace.org/shorts/audience_picks

to submit your suggestions for a published story you think we should read.  Then in the spring, you’ll vote for your favorite from among the final contenders.

Chance encounters and improvisation characterize the two stories on this program.

First, Miranda July’s “Roy Spivey” plays on a common fantasy—its heroine is seated next to a Hollywood star (“Roy Spivey” is a pseudonym, she insists coyly) on a plane flight. Miranda July’s story collection NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU won the Frank O’Connor International Story Award in 2002.  She wrote, directed, and stared in her first feature film ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW in 2005, and this won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival as well as four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival.  The reader is Oscar nominee (“Gone Baby Gone”) Amy Ryan.

 Our second story—from a program celebrating the film-noir tradition presented at The Getty Center in Los Angeles—finds the late crime-story master Ed McBain in a darkly playful mood. In “Improvisation,” a man picks up two girls in a bar—with unforeseen consequences.  McBain’s long career included dozens of gritty novels set in the fictive big city 87^th precinct.  In 1986, the Mystery Writers of America awarded him its Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement.  “Improvisation” is read by SHORTS host Isaiah Sheffer, who likes to dust off his tough-guy accent once in a while.

  “Roy Spivey” by Miranda July, read by Amy Ryan

“Improvisation” by Ed McBain, read by Isaiah Sheffer

 The musical interlude is Jon Mercer’s Mambo Fever, from the album Hooray forHollywood.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

 For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit Symphony Space

 We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

Listener’s choice!

On June 9th, 2010, SELECTED SHORTS at Symphony Space in New York will feature stories selected by our nationwide audience.  Go here.

to submit your suggestions for a published story you think we should read.  Then in the spring, you’ll vote for your favorite from among the final contenders.

When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.” –Joan Didion, “John Wayne, A Love Song.”

Three of the four works you’ll hear on this program were read at Symphony Space on an evening we put together in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum in connection with their retrospective exhibition of the works of the artist Richard Prince, “Richard Prince: Spiritual America”.  They represent the American psyche in fact and fiction.

The first offering is Beat Generation writer Neal Cassady’s wry recollection of his youthful car stealing days, “Adventures in Auto-eroticism.”   The reader is SHORTS regular Ted Marcoux.

 Our second story is by Tim O’Brien, whose powerful fictions, based on his Vietnam War experiences, have been featured on a number of our programs, including a recent special celebrating the 20^th anniversary of his collection The Things They Carried.  In this short but compelling  tale a father who is a Vietnam vet is asked by his child “Have you ever killed anyone?”   “Ambush” is read by John Shea.

Our next piece of Americana is not a story, but a combination essay and memoir.  In “John Wayne: A Love Song,” Joan Didion writes about her lifelong fascination with iconic Hollywood star John Wayne.   Didion’s many novels and cultural essays include The Year of MagicalThinking and We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction.

The final story on this program is a vintage John Updike story, which, like the three tales inspired by the Richard Prince Guggenheim exhibit, deals with life-altering decisions.  In this case, a successful sculptor contemplates with alarm the artistic tendencies of his own children. Updike calls this story “Learn a Trade.”  Imagine how many fathers have inflicted this instruction on their sons and daughters.  The reader is Paul Hecht.

 “Adventures in Auto-eroticism” by Neal Cassady, read by Ted Marcoux

 “Ambush” by Tim O’Brien, read by John Shea

“John Wayne: A Love Song” by Joan Didion, read by Kathleen Chalfant

“Learn a Trade,” by John Updike, read by Paul Hecht

 The musical interlude is “Incoming,” by Phil Kline, from the album “Zippo Songs..” The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

 For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

 We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

Four stories about families and children by classic and contemporary writers make us laugh, cry, gasp, and cringe.  

"Charles” is a surprisingly light hearted tale by Shirley Jackson, author of the much anthologized “The Lottery” which paints a dark picture of American rural life and mores.  However, like the more famous work, it packs a punch at the end.  The reader is the distinguished stage and screen actress Lois Smith.

Israeli writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret is also a master of the unexpected, as we hear in this tale of the toll a childhood prodigy takes on his parents in “Pride and Joy.”  The reader is Tony Award- winner Robert Sean Leonard (“The Invention of Love”).

Writer Jeanne Dixon had an idyllic childhood in the American West, and her charming story, “Blue Waltz with Coyotes,” in which a brother and sister have an adventure in the wild—and get to know each other.  The reader is SHORTS regular Mia Dillon.

We complete this program with Rick Moody’s poignant story, “Boys.”  In a style reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s The Years it uses stream-of-consciousness and repetition to chronicle the life of two brothers from birth to adulthood in a brief but rich narrative.  The reader is Broadway and television star B.D. Wong.

 “Charles,” by Shirley Jackson read by Lois Smith

“Pride and Joy,” by Etgar Keret read by Robert Sean Leonard

“Blue Waltz with Coyotes,” by Jeanne Dixon read by Mia Dillon

“Boys,” by Rick Moody read by B.D. Wong

The musical interlude is “Thumbelina,” by Mark Isham.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

 We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

The two stories on this program deal with bizarre behavior in the workplace, and are read by two VERY funny guys, the writer and public radio personality David Rakoff, and the eponymous host of late night television's political send-up, THE COLBERT REPORT. 

The stories were read at a SELECTED SHORTS program devoted to goings on at the office—that hotbed of intrigue and thwarted ambitions.  First, Lydia Davis's "Alvin the Typesetter" chronicles the travails of one office worker.

 Our second story of office life is T. Coraghessan Boyle’s devilish tale, “The Lie.”  “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” cautions Sir Walter Scott, and in this story the web gets hysterically tangled, even to the point of strangulation.  Stephen Colbert gives this moral tongue twister a zestful read.

“Alvin the Typesetter,” by Lydia Davis read by David Rakoff

“The Lie,” by T.C. Boyle read by Stephen Colbert

The musical interlude is “Day is Done” by Brad Mehldau.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

A quirky odyssey, and memories of a father, in two stories by the late, great, Grace Paley. 

Grace Paley can be said to have been the Founding Mother of SELECTED SHORTS, allowing her work to be featured in our earliest programs, hosting short story evenings at Symphony Space, and introducing us to new and still unsung writers.   Paley influenced a generation of young writers in New York and at the Provincetown Fine Arts Workshop, and her many literary honors, in a writing career spanning more than half a century, included the Rea Award for the Short Story. 

In a number of her works, which include the collections Little Disturbances of Man, EnormousChanges at the Last Minute and Collected Stories (a Pulitzer Prize nominee), Paley writes in the voice of a fictional alter ego, Faith.  Both stories on this program—which is our hail and farewell to our old friend and colleague—are Faith stories.    First Laura Esterman reads “The Long Distance Runner,” a fantastical account of Faith’s encounter with the people who now live in her old apartment.

Another recurring theme of Paley’s fiction was her loving but challenging relationship with her émigré father, and our second work, “A Conversation with My Father,” has Faith’s feisty parent scolding the author for her non-traditional narrative style.   The actress who starred in the Broadway drama “Night Mother,” Anne Pitoniak, treats us to Paley’s attempts to “just tell a simple story.”

“The Long-Distance Runner,” by Grace Paley read by Laura Esterman

“A Conversation with My Father,” by Grace Paley read by Anne Pitoniak

The musical interlude is “Paper Planes” from the soundtrack for Slumdog Millionaire, performed by M.I.A.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

 We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

Two stories written by American women about really wild guys are the focus of this program.

The first, Louise Erdrich’s story “Gleason,” may remind listeners of the Coen Brothers movie “Fargo,” though without the gore.  Its faux murder plot leads to mayhem and complications in a similar vein.  Louise Erdrich is the author of twelve novels, including her most recent, Shadow Tag, The Antelope Wife, and Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.   Her short fiction collections include The Red Convertible.   She is a member of the Native American Chippewa Tribe and much of her work explores the western plains of North Dakota, and the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, where she grew up.  “Gleason” was part of a program of mystery fiction SELECTED SHORTS presented with The Getty Center in Los Angeles.  The reader is Robert Sean Leonard, whose many credits include a Tony Award for “The Invention of Love” and a featured role on the television series “House.”

Our second tale, also read on one of our annual visits to The Getty is by Maile Meloy, who was named one of Granta magazine’s “Best Young Novelists.”   She is the author of the story collections Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It and Half in Love, and the novels Liars and Saints and The Family Daughter. In “Red,” a disillusioned WWII soldier, waiting to ship out, picks up a girl and finds a moment of connection.  “Red” is read by the veteran television and stage actor Keith Szarabajka.

“Gleason,” by Louise Erdrich, read by Robert Sean Leonard

“Red” by Maile Meloy, read by Keith Szarabajka 

The musical interlude is Music for Prepared Piano, by John Cage.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

A summer vacation, a romantic tryst, and a key business trip don’t turn out the way the characters in these two stories expected. 

In Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People,” the “people” in question cross an invisible line when they decide to stay on in their summer cottage past Labor Day—with harrowing consequences.  Jackson is best known for the eerie “The Lottery,” and this little tale partakes of some of its sinister imaging of the hidden lives of small communities. The reader is the stage, screen and television actor Rene Auberjonois.

“Luggage tends to look alike,” as a woman traveling to meet her lover, and a man plotting to bring down a business rival, discover when they wind up with each other’s in Maeve Binchy’s “The Wrong Suitcase.”  And that’s not all that’s wrong, as you’ll hear in this lively read by Sex and the City alum Cynthia Nixon.

“The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson, read by Rene Auberjonois

“The Wrong Suitcase” by Maeve Binchy, read by Cynthia Nixon.

The musical interlude is Some Connections, by James Willey, played by the Esterhazy Quartet.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

This program has the provocative title “Let’s Not Talk.” That's because a longing for silence plays an important part in both of this week's featured stories.

Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Year of Silence” was included in The Best American Short Stories2008. The story speculates on what it would be like if all the noise, all the sounds of civilization and daily life, were to fade to an auditory stillness. Brockmeier lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, and is the author of such novels as The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia. Reader Anthony Rapp appeared on Broadway in the musical “Rent” and as Charlie Brown in the Broadway revival of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Selected Shorts Host Isaiah Sheffer likens our second story, Ring Lardner’s “Liberty Hall,” to the traveling game of “Conversation Stoppers” in which players vie for the honor of making the most boring observation. In Lardner's tale, first published in 1928 in a magazine with the fitting title Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan, a sophisticated show business couple gets trapped in a ghastly chatter-filled weekend and takes extraordinary measures to escape. Five-time Emmy winner and screen actor Christina Pickles reads the story.

The musical interlude in this week's episode is The Unavailable Memory of, from Music for Prepared Piano, by John Cage.  The Selected Shorts theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

We’re interested in your response to these programs. Please post a comment below!

“Women On A Mission”—that’s the theme of this program’s two short stories, both read at The Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. One is a crooked mission, the other a noble one.

The first story, Carlton Stevens Montanye’s “A Shock for the Countess,” is about international jewel thieves. It was originally published in the pulp fiction magazine Black Mask in March 1923, and is filled with the luscious, overwrought language that characterizes great pulp writing. The story's reader is Dublin-native Fionnula Flanagan, who is much celebrated for her annual reading of Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy at Symphony Space’s annual “Bloomsday” reading of James Joyce’s "Ulysses." Her many stage, television and film credits include “Some Mother’s Son;” “The Others;” and “Transamerica;” and a recurring role on “Lost.”

Our second story is Mark Helprin’s “Katherine Comes to Yellow Sky.” The English-born heroine of this story was raised in a grim Massachusetts mining town. In the story, she is on a life quest that takes her to the unsettled American West. As she tries to break away from the confinements and restrictions of life as a 19^th-century woman, she has “a vision of clouds and yellow sky” that sustains her throughout the long train trip West. Helprin is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and has written the novels Winter’s Tale and Freddy and Fredericka, among others. The reader is Lisa Gay Hamilton, whose many television appearances include roles on “Law and Order SVU;” “Without a Trace;” and “ER.”

The musical interlude is “The Pink Panther Strikes Again” by Henry Mancini, from his score for the film. The Selected Shorts theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

We’re interested in your response to these programs. Please leave us a comment below!

The funny, or funny/sad, side of life is offered up in tales by three masters of the form.

To create a program of funny tales, we invited the wonderful humorist and journalist Ian Frazier to host a program at Symphony Space made up of selections from his new anthology, entitled Humor Me.  From that evening we’ll hear first a wonderful reminiscence by the late Grace Paley, who as a Vietnam War protestor was sentenced to jail time at the now defunct Women’s House of Detention in the heart of Greenwich Village.  As one of the lively characters she profiles in “Six Days: Some Rememberings,” notes, “that was a good idea, a prison right in the neighborhood.”  Bringing the late, great Grace to life is Dana Ivey.

Next up, a transgressive favorite of SHORTS host Isaiah Sheffer, who says he enjoyed reading Ian Frazier’s own “Dating Your Mom,” because of its “sincere innocence.”

And what would a humor program be without something from the inimitable David Sedaris?  This time, we offer up obsession/compulsive disorder as only Sedaris could imagine it, in “A Plague of Tics.”  No doubt reader Robert Sean Leonard’s long run on the television series House gave him just the right sense of empathy with the beleaguered narrator.

The musical interlude is “Red Hot Mama,” by George Clinton, from the album Standing onthe Verge, and the SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

"Six Days: Some Rememberings," by Grace Paley, performed by Dana Ivey

"Dating Your Mom," by Ian Frazier, performed by Isaiah Sheffer

"A Plague of Tics," by David Sedaris, performed by Robert Sean Leonard

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

In Tolstoy's most famous short story, a stranger on a train reveals himself to be a wife murderer, and unravels for his companions a complex tale of jealousy and obsession.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Count Leo Tolstoy.  This prodigious writer and social reformer penned dozens of stories, essays, and plays, in addition to his two great novels, "War and Peace," and "Anna Karenina."

Completed between 1887 and 1889, "The Kreutzer Sonata" caused both a private rift and a public scandal. Tolstoy's wife, Sofia Andreyevna, with whom he had thirteen children, saw the novella as an exposure of their difficult relationship, while its combination of sexual frankness and physical violence made it the subject of a banning order by the Tzar. Today, "The Kreutzer Sonata" is treasured as a complex example of Tolstoy's own struggle between passion and reason, and his conflicted attitude towards women and intimate love.

The "Kruetzer Sonata" of the title is a well-known work by Ludwig von Beethoven, and was actually played in Tolstoy's own home. In this excerpt, the narrator recounts his meeting with the musician who he comes to see as a rival, his growing obsessive jealousy, and his conviction that music somehow acted as an erotic catalyst.

A couple with a rocky marriage learn a life lesson when their home is invaded, and a whole community disappears in a powerful story about the Japanese internment, leaving their bewildered, or blinkered, neighbors behind.

Our first story is Nahid Rachlin’s “Strangers in the House,” in which a prosperous couple who have drifted apart find their holiday home filled with slackers. Iranian-born Rachlin is the author of the memoir Persian Girls, four novels--"Jumping Over Fire," "Foreigner," "Married to a Stranger," and "The Heart’s Desire," as well as the short story collection Veils.  Reader Freda Foh Shen’s theatre, film, and televison credits include Genet’s “The Balcony,” “Crossing Delancey,” and “Basic Instinct,” and roles on shows such as “24” and “Boston Legal.”

Julie Otsuka has carved out an American subject—the displacement and internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II—and treated it masterfully in her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, from which we have broadcast several excerpts. These have all been written from the point of view of the Japanese-Americans themselves as they try to cope with the catastrophe befalling them. In the work you are about to hear, “A Disappearance,” the point of view is that of their neighbors, the white Americans they lived among. “A Disappearance” is part of Otsuka’s new novel, and she discusses her work in an interview with Isaiah Sheffer. Listen to the full interview here:

The reader is Jane Kaczmarek, a star of the popular television series "Malcolm in the Middle." The musical interlude is “Chidori,” from The Ongaku Masters, and the SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, click here. We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org.

WEB ONLY SPECIAL! 2010 is the 100th anniversary of the death of Leo Tolstoy.  Go to the link below to hear SHORTS host Isaiah Sheffer read from one of this most powerful works, "The Kreutzer Sonata."

Each of the three works on this program, by masters Tennessee Williams, Edna O’Brien, and Flannery O’Connor, offers us intense and provocative close-ups of its main characters. 

First, the ironically titled, “Life Story,” is a very short prose poem by Williams—who will be remembered in history as the playwright who created such works as “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streecar Named Desire,” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,”—when he was still young Thomas Lanier Williams.  Its premise: what you talk about in bed with your partner, once the love-making is over, and why it may not be a good idea.  The succulent read is by Mia Dillon.

We continue our program of personal close-ups with the great storyteller Edna O’Brien’s story, “Violets,” which is really a dramatic monologue.  A woman sits at her dressing table, looking into the mirror, and awaiting the arrival of a potential lover.  Will he come, or will he stand her up?  What will she say to him if he does appear? Will she have the courage to say what she feels?  The reader is Fionnula Flanagan, an old friend of O’Brien’s.

From an Irish musing to a Southern comic fable by the writer who brought us “Everything That Rises Much Converge,” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  In this wry tale of  Flannery O’Connor’s a woman and her somewhat peculiar daughter are settin’ on the front porch on a dusty hot summer day, when up the dirt road comes a one-armed tramp whose name turns out to be Mr. Shiftlet, just one sound away from “shiftless”.  The story’s provocative title is “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” But whose life gets saved here, mother, daughter, or tramp?  The reader is Lois Smith, recent star of “True Blood” among many film and television appearances.

The musical interlude is “Nightnoise,” by the band of the same name, and the SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

 We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

On this program, stories about apartments and neighbors take a strange turn.

Our first story, “A Woman at the Window,” by James Lasdun, could be considered a cautionary tale for men who want to rescue damsels in distress.  London-born Lasdun now lives in upstate New York.  The reader is cabaret artist Leenya Rideout, whose credits include featured rolls in Symphony Space’s political cabaret The Thalia Follies.

Next, an extraordinary story about a man with a shape-shifting apartment, by the Ukranian-born Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, who died in 1950.  Krzhizhanovsky created philosophical, satirical, and fantastical tales that ignored the Soviet government mandate to portray the state in a positive light, and for this he remained unpublished for decades.  This story, “Quadraturin,” about the changing, evolving dimensions of its hero’s living space—and his mind—and is read by author/actor David Rakoff.  Rakoff is the author of the collections “Fraud” and “Don’t Get Too Comfortable,” and has just published a new book, “Half Empty.”

This program concludes with the winner of the annual Stella Kupferberg Short Story Prize contest (see below) which asks writers for original short shorts on an assigned topic.  The subject for 2009 was “neighbors,” and  Deborah Joy Corey’s winning entry, “Flight,” was inspired by her neighbor, an Alzheimer’s sufferer.  Corey was born in Canada, and lives in Maine.  “Flight” is read by Leenya Rideout. 

The musical interlude is Igor Stravinsky’s “Tango for Violin and Piano” from “Histoire du Soldat, Premieres & Rarities.” Mark Peskanov & Doris Stevenson performers.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

Announcing the 2011 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize.  This year's theme is stories set in restaurants and bars.  The judge is the author Jennifer Egan and the deadline is March 1, 2011. 

Neighbors and other strangers in four diverse tales.

We’ll begin with Krista MacGruder’s “Not Quite Home Alone,” in which a solitary woman is surprised by an intruder—and a sense of grace.    The reader is Jacqueline Kim.

In the second story, by the film-maker and performance artist Miranda July, “The Shared Patio,” a woman takes her right to share a patio with her neighbors to extremes.    The reader, at The Getty Center in Los Angeles, is the wacky comic star of the television series “Criminal Minds,” Kirsten Vangsness.

Our theme of threatening and bizarre situations that can come upon you at home is continues with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Sphinx,” in which a hypochondriac beholds a monster in Poe’s “The Sphinx.”  The part of the nervous narrator is performed by Kathleen Widdoes.

In this program’s final story the novelist and story-writer Richard Ford tries his hand at a popular theme—observing the neighbors unobserved.  In this case, a failing novelist becomes briefly obsessed by an unknown woman at the window opposite.  Ford’s “Privacy,” is read by Rene Auberjonois.

“Not Quite Home Alone,” by Krista McGruder,  read by Jacqueline Kim

“The Shared Patio,” by Miranda July, read by Kirsten Vangsness

“The Sphinx,” by Edgar Allan Poe, read by Kathleen Widdoes

“Privacy,” by Richard Ford read by René Auberjonois

The musical interlude is Symphony No. 1,” by Ned Rorem.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

 Announcing the 2011 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize.  This year's theme is stories set in restaurants and bars.  The judge is the author Jennifer Egan and the deadline is March 1, 2011. 

Two tales of urgency and change, inspired by music.

We think of this program as a literary “mix tape,” featuring two stories mingling with the music that inspired, or played a role in them. “Milestones,” by Miles Davis was the inspiration for Hannah Tinti’s story of the same name.  In an interview with SHORTS host Isaiah Sheffer, Tinti says the story, constructed meticulously while listening to Davis’ edgy, buoyant piece, was inspired in part by the events of 9/11.  Tinto is also the editor of One Story magazine.  “Milestones” is read here by the performance artist Laurie Anderson.

Listen to Isaiah Sheffer’s interview with Hannah Tinti here: 

In our next story, Carson McCullers’ touching “Wunderkind,” Beethoven’s dreamy Piano Sonata Number 12 is featured.  The story, in which a young pianist fears that she is losing her gift, is from McCullers’s story collection The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.  It is read by the prodigious Kelli O’Hara, who won acclaim as Ensign Nellie Forbush in the Lincoln Center revival of the musical “South Pacific.   

The musical interludes are from live performances at Symphony Space. “Milestones” is performed by Brandon Lewis, with David Frazier on drums and Michael Forzano on bass.  Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata Number 12” is performed by Derin Oge     The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

Announcing the 2011 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize.  This year's theme is stories set in restaurants and bars.  The judge is the author Jennifer Egan and the deadline is March 1, 2011. 

On this program, remembering the ‘60s, and an uncanny go-to guy.

This program includes two stories featuring improbable events.  The first comes from an evening at Symphony Space devoted to the legendary 1960s.  Author Joyce Johnson published “The Fall of Texas” in The New Yorker years after the moment in 1962 that it chronicles, when both the terrestrial world and the personal life of the heroine seemed about to collapse. 

Johnson is the author of Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir, which remembers her years as Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend, and she spoke about the era, which she describes as characterized by “an enormous amount of self-destruction, and a kind of promise that was never quite lived through,” with host Isaiah Sheffer, after the reading by stage and television star, Cynthia Nixon.

Continuing the theme of the 1960s, activist poet Staceyann Chin reads a work by ‘60s poet Sonia Sanchez, “Personal Letter #2.”  You can also hear a poem of her own, here:

Sheffer takes center stage for the second story on this program, Percival Everett’s deceptively humorous “The Fix.”  The story’s central character can fix anything—anything.  Toasters; love affairs; lives.  Who is he?  Percival Everett is the author of such SELECTED SHORTS favorites as “The Appropriation of Cultures,” and his novels include American Desert, Wounded, and

I Am Not Sidney Poitier.  His story collections include: The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair and Damned if I Do.

Listen to Isaiah Sheffer’s interview with Everett here:

The musical interludes are from “Twist and Shout,” performed by Isley Brothers, and “After the Rain,” by John Coltrane.

The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.symphonyspace.org/genres/seriesPage.php?seriesId=71&genreId=4

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

Announcing the 2011 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize.  This year's theme is stories set in restaurants and bars.  The judge is the author Jennifer Egan and the deadline is March 1, 2011. 

Two gripping short tales about the power of love.

The Hungarian author and political activist Tibor Dery experienced mixed fortunes throughout his life.  He was the recipient of Hungary’s highest artistic honor, the Kossuth Prize (in 1948) but was also imprisoned twice, once in 1936 for translating Andre Gide’s diary of his journey to Russia, and again twenty years later for his writing and actions during the Hungarian revolt against Soviet occupation. He died in 1977.  He must have drawn on those experiences when he wrote “Love,” which powerfully depicts a political prisoner’s return home.  The work is the title story from Dery’s collection Love and Other Stories, and is read by SHORTS regular Keir Dullea.

The second story on this program, Amy Bloom’s “Silver Water,” is a very rare work in the way it actively combines hilarity and heart-breaking sorrow in portraying a family with a schizophrenic daughter.  The reading at Symphony Space brought audience, actor Linda Lavin, and host Isaiah Sheffer to tears, and Bloom talks about her subtle crafting of this piece with Sheffer as part of this program.  She admits that “love, death, sex, and family,” are at the heart of many of her works, which include A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Love Invents Us, and Normal.  Her newest book is called Where the God of Love Hangs Out.  She is currently writer-in-residence at Wesleyan University.

Listen to Isaiah Sheffer’s interview with Amy Bloom here:

The musical interludes are from Michael Torke’s “Corner in Manhattan,” Gavin Bryar’s Sleeping Beauty No. 17, "Panorama", and Franz Schubert’s “Schlummerlied.”  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, click here.

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit www.selectedshorts.org

Announcing the 2011 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize.  This year's theme is stories set in restaurants and bars.  The judge is the author Jennifer Egan and the deadline is March 1, 2011. 

In this week's episode of Selected Shorts, we have three stories to offer that center around the theme of parental expectations—two by outstanding American short story writers, and one by a leading figure in the new generation of Israeli writers.

The first is Mary Robison’s “An Amateur’s Guide to the Night,” the title story of her most recent collection of stories. Earlier works include Believe Them and Tell Me Thirty Stories. Robison teaches at the University of Florida, and was the winner of the 2009 Rea Award for the Short Story. The telescope in “An Amateur’s Guide to the Night” is used to bring in far-off images of The Little Dipper and the planet Jupiter, but the story itself looks deeply into the cosmic realities of a family. The reader is Patricia Kalember, familiar to television viewers from shows like “Thirty Something,” and “Sisters.”

We turn next to a piece by the master American storyteller and chronicler of inter-family relations, John Updike. It’s entitled, “Learn a Trade,” a phrase used by many American fathers either as practical advice to their children or in exasperation when they feel those children are wasting their lives. The story also takes up the question of whether the artistic life is, in fact, a respectable, or even a viable way of earning a living. The reader is SHORTS regular James Naughton.

The program concludes with a whimsical story by the Israeli writer and film-maker Etgar Keret. Its central character is a young student who is the “Pride and Joy,” of his doting parents—so why are they shrinking? “Pride and Joy” was translated by Sondra Silverston, and is read by Tony winner and “House” star Robert Sean Leonard.

The musical interludes are from the song “Zinc,” by Zoe Keating. The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please click here. We’re also interested in your response to these programs. Please comment on this site or visit the Selected Shorts Web site.

We'd also like to announce the 2011 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. This year's theme is stories set in restaurants and bars.  The judge is author Jennifer Egan and the deadline is March 1, 2011.