On this program, appearances are deceiving in stories about apartments and neighbors.

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. 

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.

This April 15 marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, a maritime calamity that has resonated throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, inspiring hundreds of books and famous films like “A Night To Remember” and James Cameron’s hugely successful “Titanic,” which has just been re-released in 3-D. Most of these stories focus on the experiences of the passengers, but this special webcast offers a different perspective, in a micro fiction by Jesse Lee Kercheval.

A lot of people listen to SELECTED SHORTS in their cars.  In this program, the characters are in their cars—running from a bad love affair in the first piece, and toward a natural disaster in the second.

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