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Ryan Harty’s “Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down,” doesn’t really tell us that, but it does pose complex questions about the what makes us human, and what makes us love, in a piece that is both fantastical and real. Harty is a recipient of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop John Simmons Short Fiction Award for his book Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona. A graduate of University of California-Berkeley and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his stories have been widely published in such magazines as Tin House and the Missouri Review. He lives in San Francisco, and teaches at Stanford University.

Here is another appearance this season by George Bartenieff, who toured to cities including London, Berlin, Heidelberg, Vienna, and Washington DC, of his Obie Award-winning one man show I Will Bear Witness, based on the diaries of Victor Klemperer, which he co-adapted and directed with Karen Malpede.

Our second story is both an American, and a SELECTED SHORTS, classic, Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” written in 1894 but, like most of her fiction, acutely familiar in its emotional irony... Kate Chopin was a forgotten voice until her literary reputation was resuscitated by critics in the 1950s. Today her novel, THE AWAKENING, written in 1899, is widely read and admired, the work of a feminist who was definitely ahead of her time. “The Story of an Hour,” brief as it is, is a subtle emotional thriller, with a surprise ending, deliciously realized by the Emmy Award-winning reader Christina Pickles.

Ryan Harty, “Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down,” read by George Bartenieff
Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour,” read by Christina Pickles