In “Suburbia,” by Amy Silverberg, a young girl leaves home for the first time, and both she, and it, are transformed. The reader is Martha Plimpton. “Everything is Far from Here,” by Cristina Henriquez, goes to the heart of the country’s immigration crisis with an affecting portrait of a migrant mother and her son. It’s performed by Zabryna Guevara.
Roxane Gay is the author of numerous essay collections and works of fiction, including Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, Difficult Women, and Hunger, as well as the comic series World of Wakanda. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Best American Short Stories, 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 and founding editor of PANK, and editor of the collection Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Purdue University.
In her introduction to Amy Silverberg’s “Suburbia,” Gay mentions that there is room for lightness and the unexpected in Best American selections, and this story of a young girl leaving home for the first time includes just those elements. Amy Silverberg is a writer, stand-up comedian, and teacher at the University of Southern California. Her stories have been featured in The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Collagist, Hobart, Joyland, The Offing, Split Lip Magazine, and The Tin House Open Bar, among other publications.
“Suburbia” is performed by Martha Plimpton, whose television credits include How to Make It in America, Raising Hope, Younger, The Real O’Neals, The Blacklist, and The Good Wife,for which she received an Emmy Award. Her film credits include The Goonies, The Mosquito Coast, Running on Empty, Beautiful Girls, Parenthood, 200 Cigarettes, Pecker, Eye of God,Small Town Murder Songs, Hello Again, and Natalie. Theatre credits include her Tony-nominated performances in The Coast of Utopia, Top Girls, and Pal Joey. She was honored with an Obie Award for her performance in Hobson’s Choice off-Broadway. Plimpton has been a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble since 1998.
Our second story, “Everything is Far from Here,” goes to the heart of the country’s immigration crisis, with its affecting portrait of a migrant mother desperately searching for her son at a detention center. Author Cristina Henríquez is best known for her novel The Book of Unknown Americans, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and aNew York Times Notable Book of 2014. She is also the author of the short story collection Come Together, Fall Apart and the novel The World in Half. Henríquez’s fiction has been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and the anthology This Is Not Chick Lit. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, Real Simple, Preservation, and the anthology State by State, among other publications.
The reader is Zabryna Guevara, best known for her roles on Gotham and The Get Down. Additional film and television credits include Law & Order, 3 lbs, Person of Interest, Blue Bloods, Burn Notice, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Chicago Med, The Handmaid’s Tale, Snowfall, Irreplaceable You, Castle Rock, New Amsterdam, and most recently, Tell Me a Story.Guevara has been featured off-Broadway in Chimichangas and Zoloft and Water By the Spoonful. She will appear in the forthcoming film Swallow.
