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This program includes two stories featuring improbable events, one involving the 1960s, the other an uncanny go-to guy. 

Two tales of urgency and change, inspired by music.

This program features neighbors and other strangers in four diverse tales.

On this program, appearances are deceiving in stories about apartments and neighbors.

Each of the three works on this program, by masters Tennessee Williams, Edna O’Brien, and Flannery O’Connor, offers us intense and provocative close-ups of its main characters. 

A couple with a rocky marriage learn a life lesson when their home is invaded, and a whole community disappears in a powerful story about the Japanese internment, leaving their bewildered, or blinkered, neighbors behind.

A lot of people listen to SELECTED SHORTS in their cars.  In this program, the characters are in their cars—running from a bad love affair in the first piece, and toward a natural disaster in the second.

The funny, or funny/sad, side of life is offered up in tales by three masters of the form.

This program includes four pieces exploring the ideas of time, place, and identity, beginning with SHORTS host Isaiah Sheffer’s reading of Jonathan Safran Foer's  “Why I’m Not Where You Are, 5/21/63,” from his book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. 

In the fall of 2011 we celebrated the long-awaited publication of the big novel IQ84 by the prodigious Japanese writer Haruki Murakami with a Symphony Space marathon SELECTED SHORTS program called “Murakami Madness.”  Earlier in this radio season we’ve heard portions from that epic evening, including the opening chapter of the novel, and several short stories which we selected to show the remarkable range and variety in subject matter, literary imagination, and diverse moods—from provocatively comical to truly frightening—that characterize Murakami’s work.

A program devoted to “growing up fast.”  In our first story, Tobias Wolff’s “Smorgasbord,” two prep-school boys lose their innocence in more way than one when the stepmother of a classmate take them out to dinner.  The prep school is familiar turf for Wolff, who lied his way into his own school, a move that may have prepared him for his future career as a fiction writer.

“Help”, wanted, unwanted, sought, and refused, is the topic of today’s two stories; one focusing on present-day Haiti and one from an American master.

This program is based on a special evening at Symphony Space derived from writer, filmmaker, and visual and performance artist Miranda July’s book It Chooses You. 

This program brings us two venturesome women in two big cities.  The first part features an excerpt from Haruki Murakami’s prodigious novel 1Q84, and the second is an American story of a woman’s remarkable night-time encounters.

The legendary Broadway set designer Boris Aronson, when asked by an interviewer how he imagined the decors for the many different kinds of plays he designed, said, “You know, there are only two kinds of plays—plays about “issues” and plays about “relatives.”  But the two stories on this program are about people who have issues with their relatives, and/or significant others. 

A culinary mutiny and citrus lust in two contemporary tales in which taste buds rule.

Love has been the inspiration for many stories, often romantic and rose colored, but on this program, we’re featuring two stories that are about the tougher side of love, or how you sometimes have to go through tough times to find true love.

Two stories by internationally acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami that demonstrate what SHORTS literary commentator Hannah Tinti calls his gift for “capturing the strangeness and hidden mystery of everyday life.”