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Love has been the inspiration for many stories, often romantic and rose colored, but on this program, we’re featuring two stories that are about the tougher side of love, or how you sometimes have to go through tough times to find true love.

Two stories by internationally acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami that demonstrate what SHORTS literary commentator Hannah Tinti calls his gift for “capturing the strangeness and hidden mystery of everyday life.”

A Russian troika—humor, tragedy, and magic are featured in three stories that come from an evening at Symphony Space entitled RUSSIAN TALES: CLASSIC AND NEW, two by the classic writers Anton Chekhov and Isaac Babel, and one by a contemporary Russian woman.

“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.