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This program features unusual selections from a trio of guest hosts: Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly, the graphic novelist and art director of The New Yorker, respectively, who jointly hosted an evening at Symphony Space, and the novelist Jonathan Lethem.

Many of the stories we’ve featured have involved courtship and marriage, but this may be the first occasion on which they played a role in story selection. Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly met when Mouly—a French émigré—started reading graphic novels as a way to learn English, and their courtship involved much reading aloud. Eventually they started their own graphic journal, Raw, from which some of their story selections derived, and their joint sense of the outsize and absurd is evident in the two stories featured on this program.

Milt Gross was a successful cartoonist whose career spanned the period between 1915 and 1950, and was also the author of comic stories written in a sort of fractured Yiddish. (His book titles include Dunk Esk, Famous Fimmales, and Nize Baby). His style is vividly represented by “De Smot Billy Gut,” a favorite of host Isaiah Sheffer’s, who reads it.

Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter of such memorable films as Spartacus and Johnny Got His Gun, is best known as a victim of the Hollywood blacklist, but there is no hint of that grim period in the hilarious diatribe penned to a hotel manager after a miserable stay, an example, Art Spiegelman points out, of what happens when a talented writer has a lot of time on his hands. The impeccable read is by regular leading man James Naughton, Tony Award winner for City of Angels, among many Broadway credits.

Novelist Jonathan Lethem also skewed towards the fantastic in his story picks, which reflect his fascination with animals. “Many of my favorite people,” he confesses from the stage of Symphony Space, “turned out to have fur.” Isaiah Sheffer returns in a more questing mode to read Jorge Luis Borges “Dream Tigers.”

“De Smot Gilly-Gut” by Milt Gross, read by Isaiah Sheffer
“Letter #16 to William Hunt, the Franklin Hotel, Rochester, Minnesota-Los Angeles, California, December 9, 1958” by Dalton Trumbo, read by James Naughton
“Dream Tigers” by Jorge Luis Borges, read by Isaiah Sheffer