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Selected Shorts Archive


February 2009

Let's Not Talk

Sunday, February 22, 2009

This week on Selected Shorts: The world grows quiet, and a horrible weekend in the country.


Passions Run Deep

Sunday, February 15, 2009

”The irony of his playing the song straight and from the heart was made more ironic by the fact that as he played it, it came straight and from his heart, as he was claiming Southern soil, or at lest recognizing his blood in it. His was the land of cotton and hell no, it was not forgotten. –Percival Everett, “The Appropriation of Cultures.”

Racial prejudices are met and mastered in unexpected ways in two contemporary tales.


Unexpected Developments

Sunday, February 08, 2009

”Her heart gave several sharp sideways jumps, each one hurting her breastbone. It had happened as she always knew it would happen one day. She had got the wrong case. She looked in terror and there were her initials; somebody else called AG had taken her case. ‘Oh my God,’ wept Annie Grant, ‘oh God, why did you let this happen to me? Why? I’m not that bad, God.’” –Maeve Binchy, “The Wrong Suitcase.”

A summer vacation turns nightmarish, and what happens when luggage tends to look alike.

A summer vacation, a romantic tryst, and a key business trip don’t turn out the way the characters in these two stories expected. In Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People,” the “people” in question cross an invisible line when they decide to stay on in their summer cottage past Labor Day—with harrowing consequences. Jackson is best known for the eerie “The Lottery,” and this little tale partakes of some of its sinister reworkings of small communities. The reader is the stage, screen and television actor Rene Auberjonois.

“Luggage tends to look alike,” as a woman traveling to meet her lover, and a man plotting to bring down a business rival, discover when they wind up with each other’s in Maeve Binchy’s “The Wrong Suitcase.” And that’s not all that’s wrong, as you’ll hear in this lively read by Sex and the City alum Cynthia Nixon.

“The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson, read by Rene Auberjonois
“The Wrong Suitcase” by Maeve Binchy, read by Cynthia Nixon.

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

For information about the 2009 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize contest, go to Selected Shorts


Two Wild Guys

Sunday, February 01, 2009

”John Stregg opened his front door wide and there was Gleason, his girlfriend Jade’s little brother. The boy stood, frail and skinny, in the snow with a sad look on his face and a gun in his hand.”—Louise Erdrich, “Gleason”
Two tales that profile impulsive men at crucial moments in their lives.