Fork in the Road

Jessica Hecht received an Emmy Award nomination for her performance in the Netflix series Special. She has been seen on television in the limited series Super Pumped and The Loudest Voice and in recurring roles on Tokyo Vice, The Sinner, Dickinson, The Boys, and Succession. She is also recognizable to television audiences from Friends and Breaking Bad. She has played memorable roles on Bored to Death, High Maintenance, Falling Water, The Single Guy, and Red Oaks. Her film performances include A+, Anesthesia, J. Edgar, The Grey Zone, The Sitter, My Soul to Take, Dan in Real Life, Sideways, The Atlantic City Story, and The Sunlit Night. An acclaimed stage actress, Hecht has appeared on Broadway in productions of Eureka Day, for which she received a Tony nomination; The Price opposite Mark Ruffalo; Fiddler on the Roof opposite Danny Burstein; The Assembled Parties opposite Judith Light; Harvey opposite Jim Parsons; After the Fall opposite Carla Gugino; The Last Night of Ballyhoo opposite Paul Rudd; Brighton Beach Memoirs opposite Laurie Metcalf; Julius Caesar opposite Denzel Washington; A View From the Bridge opposite Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson (Tony nomination); and Summer, 1976 opposite Laura Linney (Tony nomination). Off-Broadway, she has appeared in King Lear opposite John Lithgow and Annette Bening, Stage Kiss opposite Sandra Oh, Three Sisters opposite Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, and at Lincoln Center Theater in Admissions, for which she received an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination and an Obie Award. Hecht can currently be seen in the feature film Eleanor the Great, directed by Scarlett Johansson, Floating Carousel, American Classic on MGM+, and Dog Day Afternoon on Broadway, starring Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.

Nikki M. James recently starred as Ida B. Wells in the Tony-winning musical Suffs, for which she was also nominated for a Tony Award. She originated the role of Nabalungi in the Broadway hit musical The Book of Mormon, for which she won the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Her favorite theater credits include Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day at The Public, Broadway productions of Les Miserables and All Shook Up; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin with Encores!; Romeo and Juliet and Antony & Cleopatra alongside Christopher Plummer at the Stratford Theater; The Wiz at the La Jolla Playhouse; Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night with Shakespeare in the Park; Bernarda Alba at Lincoln Center; and Preludes with LCT3. Her film and television credits include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Lucky Stiff, BrainDead, Proven Innocent, The Good Wife, Modern Love, Severance, and Spoiler Alert. As a director, she has helmed episodes of The Bite and The Good Fight. She served as an assistant director to Michael Arden for the Broadway revival of Once on this Island and A Christmas Carol starring Jefferson Mays. James can currently be seen in Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again and as Audrey in the Off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 – 2018) authored 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories and novellas, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five collections of essays, and four volumes of translation over her celebrated career, including the Hainish Cycle and the Earthsea series. Le Guin’s major titles have been translated into 42 languages and have remained in print, often for over half a century. She was honored with the National Book Award, nine Hugo Awards, six Nebula Awards, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She was the second woman named a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Le Guin is the subject of the documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. Her final publications included the non-fiction collections Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Ursula K Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, both released posthumously.

Helen Schulman is a novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. Her collection of stories, Fools for Love, was published by Knopf in July 2025. Prior to publication, the title story was published in The Atlantic. Her newest novel, Lucky Dogs, was one of Oprah Daily’s top ten novels of 2023. She is also the author of the novels Come With Me (San Francisco Chronicle ten best books of 2019), This Beautiful Life (a New York Times and International Best Seller), A Day At The Beach, P.S., (made into a motion picture starring Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Paul Rudd and Marcia Gay Harden, for which Professor Schulman has a screenwriting credit), The Revisionist and Out Of Time (Barnes and Noble Discovery), and the short story collection Not A Free Show. She co-edited the anthology Wanting A Child with Jill Bialosky. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review, A Public Space and The Paris Review. She is the Fiction Chair at The Writing Program at The New School where she is a tenured Professor of Writing. She is also the Executive Director of WriteOnNYC.com. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Schulman has been a NYFA Fellow, Sundance Fellow, Aspen Words Fellow, a Tennessee Williams Fellow (Columbia University) and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among other novels. A musical of The Interestings is in development. Wolitzer was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and also writes books for young readers. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a yearlong intensive for emerging novelists.

CREDITS

“Direction of the Road,” by Ursula K. LeGuin, from The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (Harper & Row, 1975). First published in Orbit 12 (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1973). Copyright © 1973 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Used by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.

“The Shabbos Goy,” by Helen Schulman, from Fools for Love (Knopf, 2025). First appeared in The Kenyon Review (Volume XIII, Number 1, Jan/Feb 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Helen Schulman. Abridged version of the text used by permission of the author.