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Selected Shorts

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  Unexpected Developments

  ”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

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