Selected Shorts: An Evening with The Believer

Believer editors Ed Park (author of the novel Personal Days) and Heidi Julavits (her most recent novel is The Uses of Enchantment) introduce fiction and creative nonfiction by writers for their monthly book and culture magazine, published by McSweeney’s.

Performance playlist:

Introductions by Heidi Julavits and Ed Park

The Honored Dead by Breece D'J Pancake
performed by Stephen Lang

Interview by Will Eno
performed by the author

Covered by Julia Slavin
performed by Alec Baldwin

Alec Baldwin can currently be seen on NBC's 30 Rock, for which he has received several awards including an Emmy Award in 2008. He has appeared in Robert DeNiro's The Good Shepherd and Martin Scorsese's The Departed and The Aviator. His other films include Beetlejuice, Miami Blues, The Hunt for Red October, Ghosts of Mississippi, The Edge, The Cooler, Nuremburg: Infamy on Trial for Turner Network Television, and Brooklyn Rules. His theatre credits include The Twentieth Century, Gross Points, Macbeth, and A Street Car Named Desire on Broadway, for which he received a Tony Award nomination.

Breece D'J Pancake (1952 - 1979) was born in West Virginia in 1952. He attended Marshall University, taught English at Virginia military schools, and then entered the creative writing program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he died in 1979. During his lifetime, his short fiction was published primarily in The Atlantic. The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake was published in 1983.

Heidi Julavits, a founding editor of The Believer, is the author of the novels The Mineral Palace, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Uses of Enchantment, as well as a collaborative book, Hotel Andromeda, with the artist Jenny Gage. She is a contributor to State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. Her writing has appeared in Esquire, Time, The New York Times, and McSweeney's, among other publications. She lives in Manhattan and Maine.

Stephen Lang has performed on Broadway in Hamlet, The Speed of Darkness (Tony and Outer Critics Circle nominations), Wait Until Dark, A Few Good Men, and Death of a Salesman. His solo show Beyond Glory earned him nominations for a Drama Desk Award and a Lucille Lortel Award, both for outstanding solo performance. His television work includes Crime Story, Tribeca, The Outer Limits, and a transformation into Babe Ruth for the biodrama Babe Ruth. He has several upcoming film projects, including Men Who Stare at Goats with George Clooney and Avatar, directed by James Cameron.

Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer and a former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. His debut novel, Personal Days, was published in May by Random House. His articles appear in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University.

Julia Slavin is the author of The New York Times Notable Book The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories and the novel Carnivore Diet. Her stories have won a Pushcart Prize and GQ's coveted Frederick Exley Fiction Competition. She worked for a decade as an ABC-TV producer in New York before moving to Washington, D.C., where she now resides.