Meg Wolitzer

Don't believe me? Well, hold tight, because this Selected Shorts is all about the power and the price of fitting in.

I'm Meg Wolitzer.

Don't go anywhere.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

[applauding]

That was Kirsten Vangsness reading Diana Spechler's story Reality.

I'm Meg Wolitzer.

Now, usually on a reality show, contestants are seen as villains or sweethearts, or so I've heard from people who watch them, whereas I, of course, only read Proust in my leisure time.

Established masters and promising newcomers take us on a literary tour of the Emerald Isle.

I'm Meg Wolitzer.

Grab a stool, stay put.

We're lucky to count best-selling author Colum McCann, whose powerful works of fiction include Let the Great World Spin and Twist, as a friend of Selected Shorts.

[laughs] [claps]

Crystal Dickinson performed Anne Enright's Lucy's Boyfriend.

I'm Meg Wolitzer.

Our second story, Fishing the Slow Black River, is by our guest host, Colum McCann.

You are listening to a reading of articles and features from Time Magazine on the Niagara Frontier Radio Reading Service.

Next, we have an article written by Meg Wolitzer to remembrance of Gloria Steinem.

In the beginning, there was the famous story about the young journalist, Gloria Steinem, going undercover in 1963 as a playboy bunny.

all decotage and rabbit ears in order to expose a culture of degradation and misogyny the bunny episode is certainly the steinem anecdote most often cited but it's such an early story that it's just a cannery really hinting only a little at what would become a lifelong commitment to feminism Sam, who died September 2nd in her home in New York City at the age of 92, was an icon of second wave feminism.

And then my husband lost his job on the day the book came out.

I learned of it in the green room in the presence of Meg Wolitzer, who was my conversation partner at

my

book launch at Barnes & Noble.

And of course, once he sees the brilliance of the work and the fact that her memory is declining, he decides that perhaps he would be better off usurping the title as his own.

Now, I know we've heard that storyline before in big hits like Meg Wolitzer's The Wife, But believe me, Julie Orringer takes this tale and makes it fresh and fascinating and a page turning literary work that you will not be able to set down.

This is one I was just telling Cindy that I feel like you and I read most of each other's stacks, but we each have a couple.

And this is one I've not read.

I couldn't get over the surreal sense of, oh, the world is not what I thought it was, she said.

Even as her career blossomed with new challenges, she is at work on another buzzy Broadway musical, an adaptation of the best-selling Meg Wolitzer novel, The Interestings.

Burrell was awash in sorrow.

She finally gives voice to it in Good Grief, her first studio album in seven years, released late last month.

[upbeat jazz music] There's no one way to look at the American West: a wild place of awesome natural beauty, a big open territory for pioneering individualists, or a colonized landscape.

I'm Meg Wolitzer, and in this edition of Selected Shorts, fiction that explores an iconic area of the country and the space it occupies in our minds.

Stay with us.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time.

That was Louise Erdrich, author of The Hollow Children, talking about her latest project.

When we return, fires, wild animals, and love hide just out of sight.

I'm Meg Wolitzer.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, recorded live at our home base at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide.

You...

And what I found interesting was you actually started writing this just after reading Meg Wolitzer's book, right?

So I got sent the book.

So, um, there was a team in place-