Seeing without sight, and an eccentric family upends a neighborhood.

This program features two stories in which houses figure, and represent more than just a domicile. In Yasunari Kawabata’s “Household,” a husband takes his blind wife to “see,” so to speak, a possible house where they might live. “To the blind, houses are alive,” she says. All the Kawabata stories we have presented as part of SELECTED SHORTS are terse, short, haiku-like gems, and this one is no exception. The reader is Fionnula Flanagan.

David Drury’s “What We Knew When the House Caught Fire,” is a provocative comic gem. A genteel California suburb is disrupted by the arrival of an untidy, disruptive family. In the voice of the child narrator, “They didn’t look the part, and it was our duty to make them aware of it.” In a conversation with SHORTS host Isaiah Sheffer, Drury says that he was influenced by a news item about a fire during which the firehouse door fails to open, but also by the parable of the Good Samaritan. The story was selected by Richard Russo for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2010. The reader is Keith Szarabajka, a Hollywood father, actor, and writer, whose credits include “The Equalizer,” and “Cold Case.

Listen here to Isaiah Sheffer's interview with David Drury:

The musical interludes are from “Dog Asleep,” by Peter Schickele, from Thurber’s Dogs, and “Rhapsody for Twenty-string Koto,” by Reiko Kimuta, on Music for Koto.

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 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.

Holiday cheer from three American masters featuring good families, good cheer, and a visit from St. Nick.

Our SELECTED SHORTS holiday season special begins with a tale of domestic bliss, Ron Carlson’s “The H Street Sledding Record,” a happy, un-sappy story about a family celebrating the Christmas season with fresh, intimate rituals. Carlson teaches at the University of California at Irvine, and is the author of five well-regarded collections of short stories, including "News of the World" and "Plan B for the Middle Class." His most recent novel is "The Signal" about a divorced couple’s adventures in the Wyoming mountains. His happy-marriage story is read by the Los Angeles-based actor Keith Szarabajka.

John Cheever’s “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor” paints a vivid picture of a certain kind of New York upper class, and its collision course with the doorman of the swanky apartment building where they all dwell. This hysterically funny tale of holiday charity gone wrong is read by the actor, author, talk show host, bon-vivant, former bar-owner and bartender Malachy McCourt.

This special holiday program closes with a literary stocking-stuffer: the great American humorist James Thurber got it into his head to re-write Clement Clarke Moore’s beloved poem, “A Visit From St. Nicholas” in the style of Ernest Hemingway. SHORTS host Isaiah Sheffer delivers a suitably manly reading.

The musical interludes in this program are from “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, performed by The West Coast Saxophone Quartet.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.” For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please 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: fairy tales revisited and canonizing John Lennon.

“Once Upon A Time” … The classic opening line of one of the oldest and most beloved sub genres of the short story, the fairy tale. Perhaps this program should be called “Twice Upon A Time,” because it offers attempts by contemporary fiction writers to take a second look at well-known, or not so well known, fairy tales.

Three of the stories featured on this program are from the intriguing anthology, intriguingly called My Mother She Killed Me My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer.  The first is the San Francisco writer and artist Jonathan Keats’s treatment of the Russian legend of Snrgurochka, the Snow Maiden, which he calls “Ardour.”  Keats’ re-telling focus on the idea of the heat of love and its desirable and undesirable consequences.  The reader is Lili Taylor.

Next, Russian-born writer Ilya Kaminsky tries his hand at the great Danish master Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Teapot,” in which a poor family’s wish for food gets out of control.  In Kaminsky’s multi-part tale the little pot links lives over time and space.

Kaminsky says he heard this story as a little child, read by his grandmother.  Coming upon it in print many years later, he was surprised to find it so different from what he remembered, “Imagination is just some remembering, from the other side,” he says.  “Little Pot” is read by an actress who is no stranger to make-believe, Sesame Street’s Sonia Manzano.

Our third selection from the anthology is Joyce Carol Oates’ new angle on Charles Perrault’s well-known “Bluebeard.”  This tale of a homicidal husband has been the source of operas and other musical compositions, ballets, and films.  Oates’ version is called Blue Bearded Lover and is a first person narrative by the latest of Bluebeard’s wives.   Oates writes “In my variant of this fairy tale, the young, beautiful, naïve bride is really not naïve, She is calculating and canny.”  She is brought to life by the voice of a beautiful young actress making her SELECTED SHORTS debut, Betsy Lippitt.

Our next story, “Relic,” by Robert Olen Butler is not exactly a re-told fairy tale, but we thought it belonged in this program’s assemblage, because it centers on a sacred, revered object, not unlike the Holy Grails, magic swords, Lost Arks, and magical stones that figure in many fairy tales.  Many of Robert Olen Butler’s short fictions deal with Vietnamese refugees who have found new homes in Louisiana and the first person narrator of this story is one of them, a successful businessman  who has acquired John Lennon’s shoe, and sees it as a link to his new, American, identity.  Ron Nakahara is the reader.

This fairy-tale laden program concludes with Richard Kennedy’s story, “The Porcelain Man.”   Humanoid creatures made of gingerbread, or straw often meet violent ends in fairy tales, but the pottery fellow who is the eponymous hero of this tale, is both protean and persistent.  The reader is the AcademyAward-winning actress, Estelle Parsons.

The musical interludes are “Dance on one spot,” from Bela Bartok’s “Romanian Folk Dances,” and the same composer’s “Bluebeard’s Castle.”

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. 

Travelling to find yourself in two stories by contemporary American writers.

In each of the two stories that make up this program, the traveller encounters someone completely unlike herself or himself, learns something about that person, and perhaps, learns more about themselves.

Julia Alvarez’s brief  tale “Neighbors,” is set in the  Domincan Republic, from which author hails.  Alvarez is the author of How theGarciaGirls Lost Their Accents, among other works.  The reader is Tony Award-winner Joanna Gleason.

In “Flight Patterns,” the wonderful story that makes up the remainder of this program, author Sherman Alexie’s protagonist, a middle class, business-suit-wearing Spokane Indian tribe member takes a taxi from his Seattle home to the airport.  His driver is an Ethiopian émigré, exiled from his country by violent choices made years ago.   In the course of their ride, the two non-white Americans make surprising revelations and discoveries about each other and their worlds.  This reading took place at The Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.   The reader, who has given powerful performances of other Alexie stories, was the multiple award-winning Broadway actor and regular star of “Law and Order SVU”, B.D. Wong. 

The musical interludes are from Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports,” and “Calunga,” from “The Caribbean: Island Songs and Dances,” in Nonesuch’s Explorer series.

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. 

A family’s trip to Africa changes everything in this excerpt from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Hollywood in the Serengeti: this entire program is given over to a single story, “Safari,” in which a very successful Hollywood record producer takes his young son and daughter along on an African safari, accompanied by his new young girlfriend and an assortment of other vivid characters.   In the course of the trip acts will be committed, and decisions made, that mark the characters for the rest of their lives.  “Safari,” is told from multiple points of view, notes author and editor Hannah Tinti (The Good Thief), who joins the SELECTED SHORTS team as Literary Commentator with this program.  “Jennifer Egan pulls it off fantastically because she stays on the shared emotional pulse that runs through all the characters.”  Tinti and host Isaiah Sheffer spoke to Jennifer Egan about the story; listen to that interview here: 

The reader is Hope Davis, who regularly adds her strong but delicate shadings to SHORTS fiction, and whose film credits include “About Schmidt,” “Hearts in Atlantis,” and “American Splendor.”   

The musical interludes are “Pokot Dance,” and “Funeral Dance,” Kenya, from “East Africa Witchcraft & Ritual Music” in Nonesuch’s Explorer series.

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. 

Chance encounters with unusual women in a provocative tale by Meloy and a darkly comic story by Ford.

SELECTED SHORTS tours regularly to venues around the country, and the two stories on this program were presented in Missoula, Montana.  The first, “Liliana,” is by Montana-born Maile Meloy.   Meloy, who is now based in California, told host Isaiah Sheffer and SHORTS literary commentator Hannah Tinti (in a phone interview) that the story’s unusual premise was the result of a comment by one reader that her fiction never included either ghosts or small boys.  In this tale of a glamorous grandmother briefly invading the painfully constructed normal life of the narrator, Meloy says she explores the power of money to stand in for love.  And Tinti comments that “Liliana” is larger-than-life, Auntie Mame-like creation.  Meloy’s story collections include “Half in Love: Stories,” and “Liars and Saints.”  “Liliana” was published in The Paris Review, and Meloy also contributes to The New Yorker and the New York Times, among other publications.

The reader is SHORTS regular James Naughton.

Isaiah Sheffer adds to his repertory of slightly besieged men with a virtuoso read of Richard Ford’s “Going to the Dogs,” in which the down-on-his-luck narrator meets two gun-toting broads who turn his world upside-down in a day.   Ford is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter and Independence Day among many celebrated works.

The musical interludes are from ““Bei Dir War Es Immer So Schön,” from the album Musik Der Stunde Null.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/

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. 

Family is our focus on this edition of SELECTED SHORTS.   One story, Peter Taylor’s “Porte Cochere,” is about an angry father, and his children and his house, and one story, Alice McDermott’s “Enough,” portrays a mother seeking to get the most out of life.

Peter Taylor’s “Porte Cochere,” was first published in The New Yorker in 1949, and this tale of an obdurate Tennessee father and his children still packs an emotional wallop.  As reader Leonard Nimoy commented, “this is a strong one.”   A “porte cochere” is a structure built onto the entrance of a building where vehicles stop and pass through. In this tale of an aging patriarch going anything but gentle into that good night, SHORTS Hannah Tinti literary commentator Hannah Tinti likens the image to Emily Dickinson’s famous poem “Death”:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

Leonard Nimoy’s moving reading brings to difficult life the emotional bafflement of a man abused in childhood who resents the very security he has created for his children.

In contrast, Alice McDermott’s luscious “Enough,” is all about embracing the pleasures of life.  Tinti comments:  “I love this story.  Especially coming from a Catholic background, the idea McDermott begins with—about a “good soaking” of dishes and also the soul—to make them clean and Godly, is something I’m very familiar with.  But McDermott turns this concept in a new direction, telling us that to live a good life, a full life, you also need to soak in life’s pleasures—love, sex—and especially (in this tale) ice cream!

Giving “Enough” its full due is Fionnula Flanagan, channeling, no doubt, her celebrated annual reading (for Symphony Space’s BLOOMSDAY event) the soliloquy  20^th-century literature’s most celebrated sensualist—Molly Bloom.

The musical interludes are from “Deep Listening,” created and performed by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, and Panaoitis.   The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/

 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. 

We indulge in a bit of word play with this program, a SELECTED SHORTS event featuring two stories about short(er) people, and two fractured fairy tales.

Kim Addonizio’s “Ever After” is a bitter sweet retelling of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” with the dwarves relocated to a five-floor-walkup, leading marginal lives and waiting until She appears.  Literary commentator Hannah Tinti notes that “this story could have been just a parody, but Addonizio takes it to a deeper level, with great resonance.”  There’s some adult content here, but all in the service of showing that the longing for “ever after” is in everyone, always.  The reader, making her SELECTED SHORTS debut, is “Grey Gardens” star Christine Ebersole.         

Dwarves are short forever, but boys are only short as children.  Our next story is Rick Moody’s beautifully crafted “Boys,” which traces the whole history of two brothers through the simple repetition of the phrase “boys enter the house.” Tinti comments, “’Boys’ is a story I have read many times, and every time I do I am wowed by the way Moody uses language and repetition to create a verbal pattern.  So that when that pattern is broken at the end of the story, the listener feels the blow of it.”  “Boys” is read by the stage and television star B.D. Wong, who is also a children’s book author.

Natalie Babbitt’s “The Fortunes of Madame Organza,” from her collection “The Devil's Other Storybook,” shares with Addonizio’s “Ever After” a somewhat wry perspective on fairy and folk tales.  In this case, what happens when the lame predictions of a completely hopeless fortune teller actually come true?  Well, there’s the Devil to pay, according to Babbitt.  “The Fortunes of Madame Organza,”  was read at The Getty Center in Los Angeles by Janel Maloney, a star of the long-running series "The West Wing."  Other television credits include appearances on “Law and Order: SVU”; “House, M.D.”; and “Life on Mars.”  And while we didn’t plan this as a family affair, Maloney is also Christine Ebersole’s niece!

The musical interludes are from Eric Coates’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and  “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” by Harold Arlen. The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/

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. 

Roberto Bolaño is best known to American audiences as the author of the prodigious novel "2666." But this cosmopolitan Latin writer, who lived in Paris, Barcelona, and Mexico City before his death at the age of 50 in 2003, also wrote short stories and had eclectic tastes ranging from hard-boiled crime fiction to the fiercely dreamy works of Borges. This program begins with Borges’ “The Shape of the Sword,” read by SHORTS regular Charles Keating.

SHORTS literary commentator notes: “What’s interesting about 'The Shape of the Sword' is that Borges wrote himself as a character in the story, hearing the tale, using his own name. In fact, the narrator even calls Borges his 'confessor,' making this story tread the line of non-fiction.”

Less well known than Borges, but also partaking of the Latin tradition’s admixture of fantasy and reality, is the Madrid born writer Javier Marias, whose “On the Honeymoon,” is a haunting tale of a powerful, and accidental encounter. Tinti notes: “Marias builds such a complex, emotional mood that by the end I was sure that anything could have happened between these two characters and I would have believed it.”  “On the Honeymoon” was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa and was read by Ivan Hernandez.

We complete this Roberto Bolaño program with a story by Bolaño himself. “William Burns” reflects the writer’s interest in crime fiction and the noir tradition. Tinti notes: “I think William Burns is a perfect combination of the first two stories we heard on the program. It brings the dream-like qualities of Marias’s 'On the Honeymoon' and mixes them with the hard-nosed action and story-within-a-story structure of Borges’s 'The Shape of the Sword.' Bolaño’s love of the detective novel also shines through, with a mystery presented but never quite resolved." The reader is Michael Stuhlbarg. 

The musical interludes are from “The Grifters,” by Elmer Bernstein and “Sunroof,” by Marcio Montarroyos, from “Brazilian Contemporary Instrumental Music” (Black Sun.) The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.” For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please click here.

We’re interested in your response to these programs. Please comment on this site below or visit the SELECTED SHORTS Web page.

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. 

Ultimate acts in stories selected by Colum McCann, and a sharp-edged fantasy by Molly Giles).

The novelist Colum McCann, winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, was the guest host for an evening of story readings at Symphony Space, and we hear two of his selections on this program.

The first is Nathan Englander’s harrowing tale, “Free Fruit for Young Widows.”  Englander is the author of the highly praised collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and teaches in the Hunter College, CUNY MFA Writing Program (as does McCann).   SHORTS literary commentator Hannah Tinti notes, “There are so many memorable scenes in this story, but what struck me the most was near the end, when Etgar realizes that Tendler is both a murderer and a misken. Unfamiliar with the word misken, I looked it up, and the definition I found said that it is a person who is poor or unfortunate, someone to be pitied.  This reminded me of the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” It’s no wonder, in the end, that Etgar becomes a philosopher—he is able to see the dark and the light in Tendler—and accept them both.  The reader is the actor and musical theatre star Michael Ceveris.

McCann’s second choice was by the Irish writer Anne Enright, best known for winning the Booker prize in 2007 with her novel, The Gathering. Tinti notes that Enright “was a student of Angela Carter’s at the University of East Anglia. Carter’s surreal, feminist influence is definitely seen here in “She Owns Everything.” What I love about this story is how Enright takes one physical object, the handbag, and uses it to develop the entire emotional world of her character. It’s also a great tribute to the handbag itself—that portable life-kit—and what choice of color, size, and design reveals about the woman (or man, these days) who carries it.”

The reader, making her SELECTED SHORTS debut, was Mary-Louise Parker, star of the television series “Weeds.”

The third story on this program, “The Writer’s Model,” is a provocative fantasy by Molly Giles, who teaches in the Creative Writing Program of the University of Arkansas.  Tinti comments: “Molly Giles is a wonderful writer, who won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. You can certainly see O’Connor’s influence here in “The Writer’s Model,” with the narrative bite and sharpness of the language. I found this to be a wonderfully funny piece. A great response to the mistakes male writers often make when writing about women, their inability, sometimes, to see us as three dimensional characters. There is a line at the end of this piece says it all: “I decided to quit before I became what they saw.”

The musical interludes are from “Eve’s Women, “Kingdom,” on Israel A World of Music, producers Dan Golan, Ishay Amir.  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

 For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/

 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. 

Holding fast. This program features two powerful stories about moral tests and holding fast to beliefs no matter what the cost.

The first story is John Biguenet’s “I Am Not a Jew,” in which a frightened tourist has a failure of nerve that resonates deeply. SHORTS literary commentator Hannah Tinti notes: “What makes 'I Am Not a Jew' so disturbing is how it dissects the ways we collectively excuse ourselves from standing up for what’s right.”  Biguenet's story is read by Denis O’Hare, who won a Tony Award for the play “Take Me Out.” He also stars in the television series “True Blood.”  The story was presented at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, which was sponsored by JustTheRightBook.com.

Our second story is by the award-winning novelist Colum McCann, who hosted an evening of his favorite stories at Symphony Space. In “Everything in this Country Must,” the rescue of an endangered horse is colored by the owner’s tragic past and the Irish “troubles.”  Tinti comments: “This is a gut-wrenching story, beautifully told. It starts right in the middle of the action as the narrator and her father try to save a drowning horse. Each step of the drama takes the reader further and further into these characters’ private world.”

The reader is Amy Ryan, who was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for her performance in “Gone Baby Gone.” Her television work includes roles on “The Wire,” “The Office,” and “In Treatment.”

The musical interludes are from Music from the Reed Bed by Bill Campbell, Contemporary Music from Ireland (Volume 5), and “I Could Have Done More,” from the score for “Schindler’s List” by John Williams. 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 the Symphony Space Selected Shorts page. Also, 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. 

David Sedaris learns French, and three other tales involving elaborate explanations that only make things worse.

This edition of SELECTED SHORTS offers four stories in which elaborate explanations make things worse.   We start with a piece by Dorothy Parker, the doyenne of the Algonquin Round Table of New York literary wits, and writer for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. In Parker’s “Just a Little One,” a friendly drink turns into an hilarious nightmare of recrimination.   It is read by the award-winning Broadway actress who most perfectly embodies Parker’s the saucy wit, the inestimable Dana Ivey.

The author of our next story, Jonathan Lethem, wrote the novels Chronic City, The Fortress ofSolitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He brings to “The Spray,” in which a husband and wife find out more about each other than they bargained for, the same antic imagination and sardonic sense of humor that characterize his novels.

The reader is Robert Sean Leonard, a Tony Award-winning actor (“The Invention of Love”) now best known for his work on the television series “House.”

This program’s third reader is Parker Posey, an actress celebrated for her roles in Christopher Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman,” “A Mighty Wind,” and “Best in Show,” among many other independent films.  Appropriately enough, her assignment was to read a work by the film maker, writer, and performing artist, Miranda July.  Miranda July’s story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and her first feature-length film “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d’ Or. In her bittersweet story “The Swim Team,” a lonely woman creates an unusual swimming class for seniors.

The program ends with David Sedaris’s “Jesus Shaves,” a characteristically hyperbolic description of his French class by the best-selling author of such engaging titles as Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and most recently, When You are Engulfed in Flames. Our reader, who found his own voice for this comical essay, is writer, film director, and noted Shakespearean, Tim Blake Nelson.

The musical interlude is from the Penguin Café Orchestra’s “Surface Tension,” and the SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/

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. 

A man’s past envelops his present in this eerie tale by Dan Chaon.

The story comes from the world in between nightmare and reality, and was inspired, Chaon tells SHORTS host Isaiah Sheffer in the accompanying interview, by the idea of exploring secrets in a marriage.  Michael Chabon, another SHORTS-featured writer, provided a catalyst when he approached Chaon to contribute to an anthology of horror stories by “literary” writers.  

Chaon is certainly that—his most recent novel, Await Your Reply, has been critically acclaimed, with The New York Times calling it “both a ghost story and a valentine.”  His work has appeared in many journals and collections including  The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize and the O.Henry Prize stories.  He is also the author of the novel You Remind Me of Me and the story collection Among the Missing which was a finalist for the National Book Award.  Chaon is a Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College.

This compelling and disturbing tale is read by four-time Tony Award-winner Boyd Gaines, currently appearing on Broadway in the revival of Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/

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

Praying to God, playing God, and mysterious ways in four tales comic and strange.

The first two stories on this program are from an evening at Symphony Space hosted by the comic writer Ian Frazier, drawn from his anthology Humor Me.  Chip Zien, who starred on Broadway as the Baker in Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods,” reads “A Prayer,” by Paul Sims.  Sims, a writer  for “Late Night with David Letterman” and other television shows, petitions God for a dignified death (i.e., not naked, not involving the union protest rat, not something your friends will laugh about at your funeral…you get the idea.)  Literary commentator Hannah Tinti says the story reminds her of the Darwin Awards, which are bestowed each year on those who shuffled off their mortal coil most embarrassingly.

Continuing in the vein of what host Isaiah Sheffer has dubbed “liturgical comedy,” is his own reading of Frazier’s “Lamentations of the Father,” with the simple but hilarious premise that the average suburban Dad is a worthy counterpart to the Almighty, with many commandments—most ending, “But not in the living room.” 

In a switch of mood and time period, the third story on the program is by the 19^th-century master of scientific adventure, Jules Verne.  But unlike the robust novels for which he is best known—20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, The Mysterious Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth—this haunting tale, “The Storm,” is a surreal supernatural and psychological episode that Hannah Tinti likens to Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.”  The translation from the French is by the anthologist Alberto Manguel, and the reader is the Broadway and film star Tony Roberts.

The program finishes up with a story that is both melodramatic and comical, Ellen Currie’s “Robbed,” read by Christina Pickles.

The musical interlude is from Elmer Bernstein’s score for “The Ten Commandments.” The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/

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

A comedian tells all in a rib-tickling memoir, and a directionless young man fishes for a life, in this edition of SELECTED SHORTS featuring two tales about young men seeking their fortunes. 

First, the comedian Mike Birbiglia returned to an uncertain period in his own life in “The Deal,” a story that was featured as part of his critically acclaimed Off-Broadway show “Sleepwalk with Me,” now out in book form.  The story recalls his early days in show business, as fledgling comic being sent by his manic agent out to California for a series of bewildering meetings that are meant to culminate in that Holy Grail of the entertainment industry, “a deal.”  Now, of course, he has deals a plenty—he’s a regular on the public radio show “This American Life,” and on television appears frequently on Comedy Central and as a guest on “Conan O’Brien” and “David Letterman.” Birbiglia reads his own tale in a sort of incredulous whine.

The second story, Lewis Robinson’s “Seeing the World,” strikes a more plaintive note, as a young man in Maine (the setting for many of Robinson’s stories) follows a dubious acquaintance who boasts endlessly of sexual conquests to the coast of Canada to fish for sea urchins.  But the story is as much about an inner journey as an outer one—who is he when he leaves, and who will be become?  Robinson is the author of  “Water Dogs,” and “Officer Friendly and Other Stories.” He was born in Massachusetts and is a graduate of Middlebury College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

SHORTS literary commentator Hannah Tinti notes that Robinson is “a fellow New Englander, a great guy and a talented writer, and reminds me a lot of Cheever and Alice Munro. Most of his stories are set in Maine, and carry the same starkness and beauty as that lonely Northern state. In this tale, Robinson’s narrator is trying to “see the world” by becoming a filmmaker, filtering his experiences and trying to add drama, but by the end of his adventure, he doesn’t need a camera anymore. Life has plenty of excitement, all on its own.”

“Seeing the World” is performed  by a veteran leading man of the SELECTED SHORTS series, and star of TV’s “Criminal Minds,” Thomas Gibson.

The musical interlude is from Raymond Scott’s “Moment Whimsical.”  The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/

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

This program features works by the prodigiously talented Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat. First, “Claire of the Sea Light,” a tender and heartrending father-daughter story was her own contribution to the anthology "Haiti Noir," which she edited. The volume is part of an intriguing series published by Akashic Books, which collects mystery and crime writing from the great cities of the world. 

The reader is Anika Noni Rose, who won a Tony Award for her performance in the Broadway musical “Caroline, Or Change,” and who is featured in the television miniseries “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.”

Shorts literary commentator Hannah Tinti observes, “Edwidge Danticat is a master storyteller, carefully weaving past and present together to tell this heartbreaking tale of a father and daughter. I think "Haiti Noir," which includes this story, sheds an important light on the complex history of Haiti and the personal struggles of the people, especially after the earthquake in 2010.”

A lighter side of Danticat is revealed in “New York Day Women,” a term she uses to describe women from the Haitian community who travel into Manhattan to perform childcare and housekeeping services. Her mother was one of these women, and Danticat accidentally encounters her one day, leading this separate life. The impulse to follow her is irresistible, and results in some remarkable discoveries about a woman she thought she knew intimately.

The reader is film and television actor Laurine Towler.

The musical interlude is Benjamin Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes.”  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 below on this site or make a comment on the Selected Shorts Web site.

Finding paradise and fixing the world in stories by promising young writers and established humorists.

What makes a paradise? We explore this idea in the first half of this program, which features stories derived from a partnership with The College Group at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in connection with their exhibition “The Emperor’s Private Paradise—Treasures from the Forbidden City.” Students were invited to submit short pieces on the theme of “A Private Paradise”; five of these are heard here: “My Backyard,” by Peter Lu, performed by Sonia Manzano; “A Room of My Own,” by Alanna Okun, performed by Rita Wolf; “Heirloom China,” by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, performed by Sonia Manzano; “Jonathan’s,” by Teo Soares, performed by David Rakoff; and “Reading Aloud,” by Marina Keegan, performed by Rita Wolf.

SHORTS literary commentator Hannah Tinti enjoys the variety in these stories: “Each of the students chose a very different kind of 'paradise'—whether it was a garden, or a first home away from home, the act of reading, a broken heirloom, or a simple meal of pasta and tomatoes. But what all of these private paradises have in common is their temporary nature. These talented young authors all hit upon a certain truth—that paradise is not a place—it is a moment in time that we do our best to hold onto, and remember, by recording it.”

Some believe that Earth started as a Paradise, but it’s certainly not one now, and we continue this program with Dave Eggers’ hilarious solution.  In “Your Mother and I,” a suburban Dad mixing up a meal of nachos casually reveals to his daughter that he and her mother solved most of the world’s problems—global warming, genocide, Aids, as well as deporting all lobbyists and painting the roads red. “Yes, that was us honey,” says reader David Rakoff—no stranger to outsize humor.  

Eggers is the author of six books and is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, the independent publishing house based in San Francisco.  Rakoff is a writer and regular contributor to PRI’s “This American Life,” and the author of "Half Empty and Don’t Get Too Comfortable."

Tinti notes: "What I love about 'Your Mother and I' is the way that Dave Eggers takes a common occurrence of parental fibbing and transforms it into a deeper kind of love story. The husband and wife featured here have accomplished a lot—but most important—they have created the child being told this story. And in many ways, this little girl is an even greater achievement than deporting lobbyists or fixing the U.N. or even converting the world to solar power.”

The final story on this program, “Visit” by Barry Yourgrau, echoes the theme of the private paradises.  The story’s main character, a nomad who feels out of place in his brother’s conventional suburban home, discovers his niece and nephew’s secret private hiding place. Taking a clue from the uncle’s unusual wardrobe—he wears plus-fours, much to his brother’s amusement—Tinti links him to the Belgian artist Hergé’s beloved cartoon character Tintin. 

“He is boy-reporter, half man, half child, and always going on adventures to distant lands, and that is exactly what this narrator does, visiting after a trip from far away, and not really fitting into the 'reality' of his brother’s drab suburban world. So it seems natural that the story takes a turn into fantasy, like the movie Pan’s Labyrinth or the 'Chronicles of Narnia'—where a door to a secret world opens. What is different in this case is that an adult stumbles upon it, rather than a child. And it’s in this secret place that the narrator finally finds the family connection he’s been looking for."

Barry Yourgrau is a performance artist and the author of "Haunted Traveller, An Imaginary Memoir" as well as "The Sadness of Sex." The reader is the Tony-Award-winning actor and director James Naughton.

The musical interlude is “Century Rolls” by John Adams. The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/

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

Three contemporary female authors, three splendid actresses and three rather different stories, each about women in transition—geographically, morally, or emotionally—make up this program.

The first two stories on this program were part of a SELECTED SHORTS evening at Symphony Space called PASSPORT TO LONDON, and were written by two women who represent different strands in the multiracial, multiethnic fabric of that great metropolis.

Shereen Pandit was a lawyer and political activist in South Africa before she was exiled in 1987 and moved to London. The first-person narrator of her story “She Shall Not Be Moved” is also a political exile, and experiences a crisis of conscience during an incident on a London bus. Reader Rita Wolf began her career at London’s Royal Court Theatre and appeared in “My Beautiful Laundrette,” among other films and stage plays.

The program’s second London-based story, “Loose Change,” was written by Andrea Levy, a Londoner whose four novels explore the issues faced by black Jamaican emigrants living in that city. In this case, the confident narrator, whose grandmother was one of those emigrants, is faced with the plight of a more recent émigré from Eastern Europe. The story is read by Eve Best, who trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and starred in the revival of Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming” both in London and on Broadway. She currently stars on the television series “Nurse Jackie.” 

Our third and final story returns us to America: Molly Giles’ whimsical story “Pie Dance.”  A woman, her former husband, his currentwife, and the family dog are the principal characters in this little domestic comedy. Giles teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. The reader is the award-winning actress Kate Burton, whose Broadway roles include "Hedda Gabler" (in the play of the same name) and Ranevskaya in “The Cherry Orchard.”

The musical interlude in this program is from Modest Moussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, and the SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit http://www.wnyc.org/shows/shorts/

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

The great epics of literature—from those by Homer to "Beowulf" to the "Song of Roland" and Dante’s "Divine Comedy"—are not short stories. For one thing, they are all rather long. But they were intended to be read—or sung—aloud before enraptured audiences. We’ll hear two such readings on this program, as well as a re-telling of "Moby Dick" from the whale’s point of view.  

First, from Homer's "The Iliad," we hear the thrilling final battle to the death between the Greek besieger Achilles and the Trojan defender Hector. The reading makes use of the brilliant English version by the late Robert Fagles, who turns Homer’s dactylic hexameters into wonderfully flowing, evocative, and modern-sounding English verse. This moving reading is performed by Stephen Lang.

Our next epic author, Dante Alighieri, was at least a couple of thousand years younger than Homer. He lived from 1265 to 1321. The Florentine poet’s great epic, "The Divine Comedy," written in terza rima stanzas in a combination of Tuscan Italian and Latin, is a journey in three parts: "Hell" (or the "Inferno"), "Purgatorio," and finally, "Paradiso." In “Inferno,” Dante is guided on his tour of "Hell" by the Roman epic poet Virgil, who takes him through the successive circles, pointing out the celebrity sinners as they writhe in torment, or just stand around hopelessly, having read the sign over the entrance “Lasciate Ogni Speranza, Voi Ch’entrata” (“Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter.”)

We’ll hear Cantos IV and V, culminating in the travelers’ encounter with the tragic lovers Paolo and Francesca. The English text is from the poet Daniel Halpern’s wonderful volume: "Dante’s Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets.”  Canto IV was translated by Mark Strand, and Canto V by Daniel Halpern himself. The reader is the actor and director Phylicia Rashad. 

The third story on our program is derived from a more contemporary epic, Herman Melville’s "Moby Dick." Paul West’s “Captain Ahab, A Novel by the White Whale” is a short but compelling meditation on that epic novel in the voice of the great white whale himself (or herself—it’s not clear.) The events of the Melville novel are all over, and the massive white swimmer looks down at the skeleton of its nemesis Ahab still tangled and attached by rope and harpoon.

Paul West was born in England, served in the Royal Air Force, and moved to America for a life of teaching and prolific publication. His white whale is wonderfully realized, including the sound of the blow hole, by Diane Venora.

The musical interlude in this program is “The Death of Hector,” from James Horner’s score for “Troy.” The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please click here.

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit the SELECTED SHORTS Web site.

This program features four contemporary tales with unexpected plot twists and emotional surprises.

The heroine of Amy Hempel’s road trip tale, “Jesus is Waiting,” seems to be driving away from something, driving towards something, or just plain driving, on America’s Interstate highways and turnpikes.

Hempel is the winner of the 2008 Rea Award for the Short Story, and is currently a faculty member in the graduate writing programs of Bennington College in Vermont and The New School University in New York City. Her works include: "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel" and "The Dog of the Marriage: Stories."

“Jesus is Waiting” is read by Mary Stuart Masterson, who made her film debut at the age of seven in “The Stepford Wives,” and whose other credits include “Fried Green Tomatoes” and a recurring role on “Law and Order: SUV.” 

Shaun Tan, the author of our second story, “No Other Country,” began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small press magazines as a teenager, and has since become known for his illustrated books and his acclaimed wordless novel, "The Arrival." This provocative short short gives us a glimpse of a world within a world, and is read by Campbell Scott.

Each year SELECTED SHORTS sponsors the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Writing Contest (details are on the SELECTED SHORTS Web site). The 2009 winner, “Swimmers,” was written by Daniela Maristany, who then a junior at Yale University. Her prize-winning entry — an affecting moment in the life of an extended family — is read by Mary Stuart Masterson.

Our final story is a haunting and utterly surprising work by master story writer, Edna O’Brien. In  “Number 10,” a husband and wife sleepwalk, or dream-travel, to a very special address, and find out things about one another that they are unable to express directly. The reader is the incomparable Marian Seldes. 

The musical interlude in this program is “Preludio”, by Victor Villadingos from the album Guitar Music of Argentina. The SELECTED SHORTS theme is Roger Kellaway’s “Come to the Meadow.”

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please click here.

We’re interested in your response to these programs.  Please comment on this site or visit the SELECTED SHORTS Web site.