Selected Shorts: Yurts, Plums & the Federal Writers Project

Two great stories this week: “Yurt,” by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (one of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40), read by the great Joanna Gleason and “Wild Plums” by Grace Stone Coates. Both a writer and an editor, Coates  helped create the guidebook for the Federal Writers Project, which famously recorded the life stories of everyday Americans, and employed many well-known authors, including John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison. Coates sets the bar high with “Wild Plums,” which was published in The Best American Short Stories for 1929. Later, John Updike picked it as one of the Best American Short Stories of the Century. To find your time/station go here, or check out the podcast.