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

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.

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. 

“The Dead,” Part 2 by James Joyce is performed by Rene Auberjonois, Fionnula Flanagan and Isaiah Sheffer.

James Joyce’s classic story, “The Dead”, takes place at a New Year’s dinner-dance in Dublin in 1904. It is filled with colorful personalities, and is a glimpse of a bygone era.

The hostesses of the annual dinner are the Misses Kate and Julia Morkan, frail elderly aunts of the story’s central characters, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta, the crisis in whose marriage provides the dramatic through-line of this deeply emotional story.

This program is devoted to two classic tales of terror by two masters of the genre. "Dracula’s Guest" by Bram Stoker is read by Aasif Mandvi and "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe is read by Fionnula Flanagan.

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.

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

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. 

“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.