Embracing Disaster: Joyce Carol Oates and Etgar Keret

Dianna Agron is an actress, singer, and dancer, best known for her role as Quinn Fabray on Glee. Additional film and television credits include Veronica Mars, Heroes, Burlesque, I Am Number Four, The Family, Zipper, and Novitiate, winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. Her most recent film appearances include the anthology series Berlin, I Love You, which she also directed, and the short film Shiva Baby. On stage, Agron has appeared in McQueen on the West End in London, and with her one-woman cabaret at Café Carlyle in New York. Agron will appear in the forthcoming films The Laureate and As Sick as they Made Us.

Becky Ann Baker has appeared on television in Freaks and Geeks, Kings, The Good Wife, Girls, for which she received a Critics Choice nomination, The Blacklist, Big Little Lies, Brockmire, Younger, Hunters, Little Voice, New Amsterdam, and Billions. Her film credits include A Simple Plan, Lorenzo’s Oil, Sabrina, Two Weeks Notice, Nights in Rodanthe, Starbright, The Half of It, and Holler. She has performed on Broadway in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, A Streetcar Named Desire, Titanic, Assassins, All My Sons, and Good People. Off-Broadway, she has appeared in Suddenly Last Summer at the Roundabout Theatre Company; Comedy of Errors, Othello, and Two Gentlemen of Verona at the New York Shakespeare Festival; Durang, Durang at the Manhattan Theatre Club; and Barbecue at the Public Theater. In 2021, Baker performed virtually in TheHomeboundProject.

Ira Glass is the host and creator of the documentary radio program This American Life. Under his editorial direction, the program has won the highest honors for broadcasting and journalistic excellence, including multiple Peabody Awards. His team also created the podcasts Serial and S-Town. The television adaptation of This American Life, produced for the Showtime network, won three Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Nonfiction Series. The radio show and podcast of This American Life reach nearly 6 million listeners each week. He recently performed live with Seven Things I’ve Learned: An Evening with Ira Glass at California State University, Chico.

Etgar Keret is the author of numerous short story collections, including The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God; The Nimrod Flipout; Missing Kissinger; The Girl on the Fridge; and Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, as well as the memoir The Seven Good Years. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among other publications. In 2010, he was honored with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and he was awarded the Charles Bronfman Prize in 2016. His most recent work, the short story collection Fly Already, was published in 2019. Keret wrote and directed The Middleman, a mini-series for French TV starring Mathieu Amalric. His children’s book, Waiting for Nissim, was adapted into a musical piece by the Israel Festival, the Jerusalem Orchestra East West and the Israeli Opera.

Cynthia Nixon made her film debut in Little Darlings at 12 years old and her Broadway debut at 14 in The Philadelphia Story. Since then she’s appeared in more than 40 plays, scores of films and television shows, and received 2 Emmys, 2 Tonys, and a Grammy Award. She is best known for her role as Miranda on HBO’s Sex and the City. In 2017, Nixon alternated the roles of Regina and Birdie with Laura Linney in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes on Broadway, winning her 2nd Tony Award. She also appeared on numerous "best actress of 2018" lists for her portrayal of American poet Emily Dickinson in Terrence Davies' much-lauded film A Quiet Passion. Also in 2018 she ran for Governor of New York state. Currently, she can be seen in Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series Ratched opposite Sarah Paulson and will star in Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded Age and the Sex and the City revival, And Just Like That. Nixon spends a good portion of her off-time fighting for funding for New York public schools, abortion rights, and LGBT equality. She and her wife, Christine, have 3 children: Sam, Charlie, and Max.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including Them, winner of the National Book Award; Black Water; We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; The Accursed; The Pursuit; and Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. Oates was recently honored with the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. Her most recent novel, Breathe, was published in August 2021.

Liev Schreiber is a Selected Shorts alum, best known for Showtimes’ Ray Donovan, for which he earned five Golden Globe nominations and three Emmy nominations. His film credits include the Scream trilogy, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Manchurian Candidate, Spotlight, Isle of Dogs, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. He has appeared on Broadway in Glengarry Glen Ross, for which he won a Tony Award, A View from the Bridge, for which he won a Drama Desk Award, Talk Radio, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He received an Obie for his performance In the Public Theater’s production of Cymbeline, as well as playing the title roles in their productions of Hamlet, Henry V, and Macbeth. Schreiber is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. Upcoming projects include The French Dispatch, Across the River and Into the Trees, and the full-length feature of Ray Donovan

CREDITS

“Fly Already” by Etgar Keret, from Fly Already (Riverhead Books, 2019). Translation copyright © 2019 by Sondra Silverston. Originally published in The New Yorker (May 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Etgar Keret. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

“Where Are You?” by Joyce Carol Oates, from The New Yorker (July 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Joyce Carol Oates. Used by permission of the author.

“One Gram Short” by Etgar Keret, from Fly Already (Riverhead Books, 2019). Translation copyright © 2019 by Nathan Englander. Originally published in The New Yorker (December 2014). Copyright © 2014 by Etgar Keret. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

“Assassin” by Joyce Carol Oates, from Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers (Akashic Books, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Joyce Carol Oates. Used by permission of the author.