Selected Shorts: Salman Rushdie presents The Best American Short Stories 2008

Salman Rushdie presents The Best American Short Stories 2008 

Published by Houghton Mifflin

Performance playlist:

Introductions
by Salman Rushdie

The Year of Silence
by Kevin Brockmeier
performed by Anthony Rapp

Bible
by Tobias Wolff
performed by Jane Alexander

Jane Alexander’s distinguished acting career includes her Tony Award-winning performance in The Great White Hope and her Tony Award-nominated roles in The Sisters Rosensweig and First Monday in October. She is a four-time Oscar nominee for the films Testament, Kramer vs. Kramer, All The President’s Men, and The Great White Hope. Most recently, she has been seen in Feast of Love, Fur, The Ring, Sunshine State, and HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me. She is the author of Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics, documenting her tenure as chairman of the NEA.

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer, and the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All Story, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. Recently, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and named one of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists.

Anthony Rapp originated the role of Mark Cohen in Jonathan Larson’s Tony Award-winning rock opera, Rent. Other Broadway credits include the revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. He recently adapted his book, Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent, into a one-man show which he performed at City Theatre in Pittsburgh. His film credits include Adventures in Babysitting, School Ties, Dazed and Confused, and A Beautiful Mind. In 2000, he released his debut album, Look Around.

Salman Rushdie is the author of novels including Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Shalimar the Clown, and The Enchantress of Florence, and has published a collection of short stories, East, West. His second novel, Midnight’s Children, was awarded both the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers” as the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. His other accolades include the Whitbread Novel Award, the Prix du Meilleur livre Étranger, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

Tobias Wolff’s books include the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, the novel Old School; four collections of short stories, The Night In Question, Back in the World, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, and Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. His work has received numerous awards, including the Rea Award for the Short Story, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the O. Henry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.