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A special Symphony Space evening entitled “Actors’ Choice Night” featured stories selected by the performers. Hollywood and Broadway star Tony Roberts, whose credits include many of Woody Allen’s pictures—among them “Annie Hall,” “Radio Days”, and “Hannah and Her Sisters”--as well as stage appearances in “The Sisters Rosensweig,” “Victor/Victoria,” and “Cabaret,” turned out to be a Joseph Conrad fan. He chose “Initiation,” a gripping tale of a young naval officer’s first encounter with maritime disaster and the fickle nature of the sea. The story has all the lush and powerful hallmarks of a work by the author of Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, who lived from 1857 to 1924.

Perhaps in keeping with our increasingly mobile and miniaturized times, the short story genre has evolved a fictional subset--mini-fictions or micro-fictions. These compact tales can have all the power and effect of a longer work, and we devoted an evening at Symphony Space to celebrating a volume published by W.W. Norton, entitled New Sudden Fiction: Short-short Stories from America and Beyond, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. From it, we selected “COUNTRY MILES” by Robert King, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Dakota. In it, an ordinary life suddenly takes on epic proportions—at least in terms of mileage! The reader is the distinguished American actress Marian Seldes.

“Initiation,” by Joseph Conrad, read by Tony Roberts
“Country Miles,” by Robert King, read by Marian Seldes

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