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Selected Shorts
Host Meg Wolitzer hands off to guest host Roxane Gay in this rebroadcast of a show about considering people and feelings at a distance. Italian fabulist Italo Calvino observes young love on the slopes in “The Adventure of a Skier,” performed by James Naughton. In Edwidge Danticat’s “New York Day Women” a daughter watches her mother walking through Manhattan. The reader is Laurine Towler. And then James Baldwin grapples with what it means to be an American in "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel," performed by Brandon J. Dirden.
James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) was a writer and civil rights activist. He wrote more than a dozen novels and essay collections, including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and If Beale Street Could Talk. Baldwin’s work deals primarily with the social and cultural issues of being black and homosexual in America before and during the civil rights movement. His unfinished work, Remember This House, was adapted into the award-winning documentary I Am Not Your Negro in 2016, and a film adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk was released in 2018.
Italo Calvino (1923 – 1985) was the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, including The Baron in the Trees, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Cosmicomics, Difficult Loves, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, Mr. Palomar, The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, t zero, Under the Jaguar Sun, The Watcher and Other Stories, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, The Uses of Literature, the anthology Italian Folktales, and several collections of literary essays. At the time of his death, Calvino was the most translated contemporary writer in Italy.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, Claire of the Sea Light, and The Dew Breaker. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow and a 2020 winner of the Vilceck Prize. Her most recent work, the story collection Everything Inside, is a 2020 winner of the Bocas Fiction Prize, the Story Prize, and the National Books Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
Brandon J. Dirden most recently appeared on Broadway in the Tony Award-winning production of Take Me Out and Skeleton Crew, for which he received a Drama Desk nomination. He also starred as Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Tony Award-winning production of All the Way with Bryan Cranston, and as Booster in the Tony Award-winning revival of August Wilson’s Jitney. Additional Broadway credits include Clybourne Park, Enron, and Prelude to a Kiss. His many off-Broadway appearances include The Piano Lesson, for which he won Obie, Theatre World, and AUDELCO awards, and Lessons in Survival with The Vineyard, an online theatrical event where theater artists came together to reinvestigate the words of trailblazing artists and activists who survived and created in times of revolution in our country On screen he has appeared in The Good Wife, The Big C, Public Morals, Manifest, The Get Down, The Accidental Wolf,Blue Bloods,The Quad, For Life, Mrs. America, and four seasons of The Americans. Dirden recently directed his wife, Crystal Dickinson, in Wine in the Wilderness at Two River Theater. He is a proud member of Actors Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA, and Fair Wage on Stage.
Roxane Gay has authored numerous essay collections and works of fiction, including Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, Hunger, and the comic series World of Wakanda. Her writing appears in McSweeney's, Tin House, The New York Times, Rumpus, Oxford American, Salon, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Time. She is the founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, founding editor of PANK, and editor of collections including Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture and the 2018 edition of TheBest American Short Stories. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Purdue University. Recent works include Graceful Burdens, The Banks with artist Ming Doyle, the graphic novel The Sacrifice of Darkness, and editor of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde.
James Naughton has won Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Musical for City of Angels and Chicago. On Broadway, he directed the Tony-nominated productions of Arthur Miller’s The Price and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, starring Paul Newman. He also directed the television production of Our Town for Showtime and Masterpiece Theatre. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including The Devil Wears Prada, Damages, The Paper Chase, Gossip Girl, Ally McBeal, Planet of the Apes, Hostages, Turks & Caicos, The Affair, The Tap, The Independents, The Romanoffs, The Accidental Wolf, and And Just Like That….
Laurine Towler made her Broadway debut in Lettice and Lovage with Dame Maggie Smith, and appeared in the national tour with Julie Harris. She also toured nationally with The Tap Dance Kid. Her film and television credits include Woody Allen’s Celebrity and Small Time Crooks, People I Know with Al Pacino, Uptown Girls, Law & Order: SVU, Molly Gunn, The Sopranos, St. Elsewhere, and Brother to Brother. Towler is a social justice activist and has been a teaching artist with Morningside Center, Lincoln Center, The Roundabout Theatre Company, and Symphony Space.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer is a faculty member in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive in the novel. She is excited to be the new host of the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts.
CREDITS
“The Adventure of a Skier” by Italo Calvino, translated by Ann Goldstein, from The New Yorker (July 2017). First appeared in Italian in Gli amori difficili (Difficult Loves) (Einaudi, 1970). Story copyright © 1970 by Italo Calvino. English translation copyright © 2017 by Ann Goldstein. Used by permission of the Wylie Agency.
“New York Day Woman” by Edwidge Danticat. From Krik? Krak! Copyright ©1995 by Edwidge Danticat. Used by permission by Soho Press.
“Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,” collected in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (Library of America, 1998). First appeared in Nobody Knows My Name (Dial Press, 1961). Copyright © 1961 by James Baldwin.
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