Selected Shorts: New Fiction from The Paris Review

Editor Philip Gourevitch and Senior Editor Nathaniel Rich co-host a night of extraordinary fiction from the pages of The Paris Review. Under the new leadership of Gourevitch, over the past years The Paris Review has continued to give national exposure to masterful new voices in fiction, including writers Karl Taro Greenfeld and Lisa Halliday, featured at this performance.

Performance playlist:

Introductions by Philip Gourevitch and Nathaniel Rich

Stump Louie
by Lisa Halliday
read by Isaiah Sheffer

The Mathematician
by Daniel Kehlmann
translated by Carol Brown Janeway
read by B.D. Wong

Silver
by Karl Taro Greenfeld
read by Campbell Scott

Philip Gourevitch is the editor of The Paris Review and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of A Cold Case (2001) and We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. His books have been translated into ten languages and his short stories have appeared in a number of journals. Before re-launching The Paris Review in 2005, Gourevitch traveled extensively for a decade, writing from Africa, Asia and Europe. In 2004, he was The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, covering the presidential election. He lives in Brooklyn and is at work on a new book with the filmmaker Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure, which will be published this year.

Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of Speed Tribes, Standard Deviations and, most recently, China Syndrome. A longtime staff writer and editor for The Nation, Time and Sports Illustrated, his writing has also appeared in GQ, Vogue, Outside, Men’s Journal, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine and numerous other publications. His fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and his travel writing appears in several Lonely Planet travel guides. He lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters.

Lisa Halliday lives in New York and London and is working on a novel.

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich and lives in Vienna. His novels and story collections have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have won several prizes, including the 2005 Candide Award. His novel Measuring the World became an instant bestseller in several European countries. In 2006, Kehlmann was a writer-in-residence at New York University’s Deutsches Haus.

Nathaniel Rich, the senior editor of The Paris Review, has written for The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. In April, Riverhead will publish his novel, The Mayor’s Tongue.

Campbell Scott has appeared in many films, including The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Sheltering Sky, The Spanish Prisoner, Dying Young, Singles, Roger Dodger, The Secret Lives of Dentists, The Dying Gaul and Duma. His Broadway credits include The Real Thing, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Ah, Wilderness! Along with Stanley Tucci, he directed the film Big Night, which received the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best First Film. He was the narrator in the 2007 documentary on Iraq, No End in Sight. Also recently, he starred in the ABC series Six Degrees and wrote and directed the feature Company Retreat.

Isaiah Sheffer is a founder and the Artistic Director of Symphony Space, as well as host and director of Selected Shorts live at Symphony Space, on tour and on public radio nationwide. This year, among other projects, he has been busy staging and writing songs and satire for Symphony Space’s cabaret, The Thalia Follies.

BD Wong received all five major New York theatre awards – Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Clarence Derwent – for his Broadway debut in M. Butterfly. His other theatre work includes roles in Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, the Broadway musical revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Off Broadway appearances in As Thousands Cheer and The Tempest. He appears in the films Stay, The Freshman, Jurassic Park, Father of the Bride and Seven Years in Tibet. Recently, he directed Yellow Wood, which appeared at the 2007 New York Musical Festival. Currently, he plays the part of Dr. George Huang in Law & Order: SVU.