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This program continues our broadcasts of selections from our programs read at The Mount, the home of Edith Wharton, in Lenox, Massachusetts in the Berkshires. For us SHORTS folks, reading at The Mount represents a chance to get out of the noisy city (which we love) and enjoy the restful air of the country. So maybe that’s why we chose this first story, “Liberty Hall”, by Ring Lardner, an hilarious story about a very New York couple, displaced in a topsy-turvy country “idyll.”

Ring Lardner (1885-1933) was a newspaper columnist and sportswriter before turning to fiction. His best known work is the epistolary novel, YOU KNOW ME, AL, and he was a contributor to many of the “smart” magazines of the 1920s, including the then fledgling New Yorker. “Liberty Hall” is read by Christina Pickles, who won five Emmy Awards for her work on the hospital series, ST ELSEWHERE, and who played Monica and Ross’s dysfunctional mother on FRIENDS. Her stage work includes plays by Isbsen, Shaw, Chekhov, and Moss Hart, and her film credits include Baz Luhrman’s “William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet” and “Legends of the Fall.”

Writer Willa Cather neatly bridges two centuries--she was born in 1873 and came of age in the west during the last years of the American frontier, and lived until 1947. She developed a love for the beauty of open grassland and an abiding interest in the old world customs of her neighbors, the dreamers and builders who inhabit her fiction. Her best known works are O PIONEERS!, MY ANTONIA, and DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP. Her story “The Namesake” unravels the past of a proud, secretive man, revealing a crucial link with a long-dead ancestor. Reader John Shea has appeared in many films and televison series.

Ring Lardner, "Liberty Hall," read by Christina Pickles
Willa Cather, "The Namesake," read by John Shea

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit Symphony Space