Guest host David Sedaris two stories about learning from your mistakes. Isaiah Sheffer reads Tobias Wolff’s “Mortals,” in which a botched obit leads to a life lesson. In Edwidge Danticat’s “Reading Lessons,” read by Marsha Stephanie Blake, it is the teacher who is taught.
Guest host David Sedaris presents two stories about learning from your mistakes. In Tobias Wolff’s “Mortals,” a botched obituary leads to a life lesson for a young writer. Wolff is the author of the celebrated memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, the novels The Barracks Thief, Ugly Rumors, and Old School, and critically acclaimed short story collections including In The Garden of North American Martyrs, The Collected Stories, and Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. Awards include the PEN/Malamud Award, The Story Prize, and the National Medal of Arts.
Wolff teaches in the creative writing program at Stanford University.
Reader Isaiah Sheffer (1935-2012) was the co-founder and artistic director of Symphony Space, and the creator of SELECTED SHORTS.
Edwidge Danticat draws on memories of her native Haiti in "Reading Lessons," the story of a school teacher at a crossroads in her professional and personal life.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Create Dangerously, and Claire of the Sea Light. She is also the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2. She has written six books for children and young adults, Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama's Nightingale, Untwine, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance. Her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Her most recent book, The Art of Death, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is a 2009 MacArthur fellow.
"Reading Lessons" is read by Marsha Stephanie Blake, whose television work includes roles on "Getting On," "Orange is the New Black," “Girls,” “Happyish,” “Chicago P.D.” and “Elementary.” Films include "Stand Clear of the Closing Doors," and "The Architect." On stage she has appeared in “The Merchant of Venice,” among other work.
