Selected Shorts Holiday Gift Sets
EPISODE 1 Airs Monday January 29 at Noon
"Selected Shorts Holiday Gift Set: You Might As Well Live: A Dorothy Parker Celebration"
Guest host Jane Curtin presents sassy stories about sassy women from the legendary Dorothy Parker, including "The Sexes," read by Parker Posey and “The Standard of Living” (two secretaries on a fantasy shopping spree), read by Hope Davis. A cranky coffee shop employee with amazing luck keeps them company in Robert Coover’s "Waitress” read by Sonia Manzano.
You might as well live” is the world-weary last line of one of Dorothy Parker’s more quoted ditties, "Resume." It’s quintessential Parker—bite the bullet of life, ideally with a gin in one hand, and a pen in the other. Parker's sardonic stories of socialites, and secretaries, and hapless men of all kinds reflected the post-Jazz Age in which she worked, but also something universal that has kept them alive to this day.
EPISODE 2 Airs Tuesday January 30 at Noon
"Selected Shorts Holiday Gift Set: Take a Seat"
On this program, guest host Robert Sean Leonard presents four stories about sitting down to a meal, or a drink, with surprising results. First, the novelist Henry Miller tells us about the dinner party from Hell in "Soiree in Hollywood." If there were a how-to book for murder, it would certainly include the technique suggested in our second story, Roald Dahl’s celebrated "Lamb to the Slaughter." It’s a comic thriller that takes the concept of "hide in plain sight" to new heights.
Israeli writer EtgarKeret constructs stories that are often just one stop beyond normal. So in "Halibut," the third story on this program, two regular guys sit down to have lunch—and one of them orders a talking fish. "How I Met Your Mother" star Josh Radnor reads.
Our final story is Robert Coover’s "Going for a Beer." It took up only one page in The New Yorker, where it was originally published in 2011, but spans the whole life of the confused narrator, who thought he was just going out for a drink and winds up seduced, married, and rejected multiple times.
EPISODE 3 Airs Wednesday January 31 at Noon
"Selected Shorts Holiday Gift Set: 3. We’re So Excited"
Oh, the self-indulgent '80s, the era of conspicuous consumption, the era that brought us Madonna, and Rubik's cube, and made the word “like” into verbal punctuation. But it was also the decade in which some of our best contemporary writers came into their own. Writers like Ann Beattie and Donald Barthelme—each a winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story—and Raymond Carver, and chroniclers of the '80s scene, like TamaJanowitz.
Works by all these writers were featured during a special "80s" evening at Symphony Space, and we feature them on this program. They include Donald Barthelme’s "Chablis," a gentle tale of a bemused Dad coming to terms with his own maturity, and TamaJanowitz's iconic story "The Slaves in New York," which was first published in The New Yorker, and seemed to sum up the era's Zeitgeist. The '80s were all about big money, big spending, big art. But what if you were one of the "have nots"?
Our third story is by Raymond Carver, who redefined the American short story. In his "After the Denim" the weekly ritual of a long-married couple is threatened by interlopers. Our final story is "Snow," by Ann Beattie, another writer, like Raymond Carver, who extracts intense meaning from ordinary lives and ordinary acts. In "Snow", a long-ago love affair is distilled into the memory of a single season.
EPISODE 4 Airs Thursday January 1 at Noon
"Selected Shorts Holiday Gift Set: Compulsions"
Guest host John Lithgow introduces two stories about compulsion. W.W. Jacobs "The Monkey’s Paw" has been keeping readers up at night since it was first published in 1902. The tale of a sinister relic brought from the mysterious East to a cozy suburban bungalow, may have some period touches, but is every bit as gripping as it was for its original audience. Our next story is Isabel Allende's lyrical "Two Words." In it, a resourceful young woman born into a family too poor to name their children reinvents herself as a broker of words. As her fame spreads, she attracts the attention of a guerilla leader who wants to reinvent himself.
EPISODE 5 Airs Friday January 2 at Noon
"Selected Shorts Holiday Gift Set: Eccentrics"
Two great stories about eccentrics taking a stand are presented by guest host Stephen Colbert. It takes a brilliant eccentric like film director John Sayles to come up with an oxymoron like an "anarchists' convention." In his "At the Anarchists' Convention," fierce old lefties fight everything from the fruit cup to the manager at their annual banquet.
In our second story, "The Falls," by George Saunders, two inadequate men are faced with the same crisis. We know them only by their self-absorbed interior monologues, until the moment when each faces a situation that can't be ignored or fantasized about. Reader Rene Auberjonois hand-picked this one, which first appeared in The New Yorker.