Selected Shorts: A Night at the Office

Stephen Colbert, David Rakoff (This American Life contributor), and Ivy Austin take on the competitive, convivial, pleasurable, cramped, fun and stressful world of work. Dark and funny tales by Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End), MacArthur award-winner Lydia Davis and PEN/Faulkner Award-winner T.C. Boyle.

Performance playlist:

The Chairs (an excerpt from Then We Came to the End) by Joshua Ferris
performed by Ivy Austin

Alvin the Typesetter by Lydia Davis
performed by David Rakoff

The Lie by T. Coraghessan Boyle
performed by Stephen Colbert

Lydia Davis, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of Varieties of Disturbance, which was a National Book Award Finalist, Samuel Johnson is Indignant, Almost No Memory, The End of the Story, and Break it Down. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Harper's The New Yorker, Bomb, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney's and many other magazines and literary journals. Davis is a translator of the French works by Maurice Blanchot and Michael Leiris, as well as a highly-acclaimed new translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. Among other honors, she has been awarded the Guggenheim fellowship and Lannan Literary Prize, and has been named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government.

Joshua Ferris's fiction has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Best New American Voices 2005, and Prairie Schooner. His debut novel, Then We Came to the End, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and won the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book is a satire of the American workplace set in a Chicago ad agency that is experiencing a downturn at the end of the '90's Internet boom. He is at work on his second novel.

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of A Friend of the Earth, Riven Rock, The Tortilla Curtain, The Road to Wellville, East is East, World's End (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award), Budding Prospects, Water Music, Drop City (nominated for the 2003 National Book Award), The Inner Circle, Talk Talk and eight collections of stories. In 1999, he was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. His stories appear regularly in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire and Playboy. He lives near Santa Barbara, California.

David Rakoff is the author of the books Don't Get Too Comfortable and Fraud, and is a regular contributor to Public Radio International's This American Life. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Outside, GQ and Salon, among others. As an actor and director, he has worked with Amy and David Sedaris on the plays Stitches, One Woman Shoe, The Little Frieda Mysteries, and The Book of Liz, and can be seen in the films Capote (fleetingly) and Strangers with Candy (fleetingly; mutely).

Stephen Colbert is the host and executive producer of the Emmy-nominated Comedy Central series, The Colbert Report. He was a member of Chicago's Second City improv comedy troupe with Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello. The three have developed two separate series for Comedy Central: Exit 57, and Comedy Central's first live action series, Strangers with Candy. Colbert has written for numerous television shows, including Saturday Night Live and the Peabody Award-winning The Daily Show, for which he also served as a correspondent. His first book, I Am America (And So Can You!), debuted at #1 on The New York Times Bestseller List.