On Demand
Selected Shorts
Sunday, April 08, 2007
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Unlikely visions
“The first time I saw the night bookmobile, I was walking down Ravenswood Avenue at 4 o’clock in the morning…The sky was the terrible Chicago orange/purple color at that quiet time of the morning, when the cicadas have given up, but the birds haven’t started in yet.”
—Audrey Niffenegger, “The Night Bookmobile.”
A book lover’s fantasy, an epiphany, and a radio love poem.
Selected Shorts is a nation-wide program, and we often travel across the country to prove it. This particular program is made up of a short story read at one of our annual visits to the beautiful J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, where patrons spend intermission out on the terrace of the hilltop cultural center, looking out at the Santa Monica Mountains and all the way out to Santa Catalina Island in the Pacific Ocean, and two stories read back home at Symphony Space on the upper west side of Manhattan, only a short subway ride from the beaches of the Atlantic.
The Getty Museum reading we’ll hear is Audrey Niffeneger’s provocative fantasy, “The Night Bookmobile”, a story about an insomniac woman who goes out for a late night walk and makes a remarkable literary discovery. Audrey Niffeneger is a writer, artist, and professor at the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at Columbia College Chicago Center for book and Paper Arts. Her first novel, THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE, was a selection of The Today Show Book Club.
The reader is SHORTS regular, and Emmy Award winner, Christina Pickles.
We continue with a story read at a Symphony Space evening that celebrated the 80th anniversary of WNYC. The live performance, in October 2004, featured stories and poems about radios and listening to the radio. These included the poet Alison Townsend’s “Radio Love Poem”, about how radio is part of growing up, even now. Townsend lives in the farm country outside of Madison, Wisconsin and teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of two books of poems, THE BLUE DRESS and THE BODY KNOWS. Musical theater star and PRAIRIE HOME COMPANIONalumna Ivy Austin is the reader.
We conclude this program with a story by the late English writer V.S. Pritchett. “A Serious Question,” presents us with a glimpse of a strange marriage just as it is undergoing a sea change, and is both funny and poignant. The reader is James Naughton, who was just coming off a season of playing German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the Broadway play DEMOCRACY.
The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger, read by Christina Pickles Radio Love Poem by Alison Townsend, read by Ivy Austin A Serious Question by V.S. Pritchett, read by James Naughton
For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit Symphony Space
The Getty Museum reading we’ll hear is Audrey Niffeneger’s provocative fantasy, “The Night Bookmobile”, a story about an insomniac woman who goes out for a late night walk and makes a remarkable literary discovery. Audrey Niffeneger is a writer, artist, and professor at the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at Columbia College Chicago Center for book and Paper Arts. Her first novel, THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE, was a selection of The Today Show Book Club.
The reader is SHORTS regular, and Emmy Award winner, Christina Pickles.
We continue with a story read at a Symphony Space evening that celebrated the 80th anniversary of WNYC. The live performance, in October 2004, featured stories and poems about radios and listening to the radio. These included the poet Alison Townsend’s “Radio Love Poem”, about how radio is part of growing up, even now. Townsend lives in the farm country outside of Madison, Wisconsin and teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of two books of poems, THE BLUE DRESS and THE BODY KNOWS. Musical theater star and PRAIRIE HOME COMPANIONalumna Ivy Austin is the reader.
We conclude this program with a story by the late English writer V.S. Pritchett. “A Serious Question,” presents us with a glimpse of a strange marriage just as it is undergoing a sea change, and is both funny and poignant. The reader is James Naughton, who was just coming off a season of playing German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the Broadway play DEMOCRACY.
The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger, read by Christina Pickles Radio Love Poem by Alison Townsend, read by Ivy Austin A Serious Question by V.S. Pritchett, read by James Naughton
For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit Symphony Space
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