Thanks to the faculty & students of Clarkstown South High School for reading The Good Thief! This week I skyped into their classes. If your school is reading The Good Thief, go here to find out more about scheduling a school visit. In the meantime, enjoy these shots from the kids at Clarkstown. Personally, I’m loving the skeleton in front.
The four tales on this week’s program were all recorded at a live performance celebrating 25 seasons of Selected Shorts. These are great stories, each with hidden surprises. We’ve got Amy Hempel’s road trip tale, “Jesus is Waiting,” (read by Mary Stuart Masterson); “Swimmers” by Daniela Maristany (winner of the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Writing Contest); “Number 10,” by Edna O’Brien on the perils of sleepwalking (read by Marian Seldes); and a piece by Shaun Tan, “No Other Country,” (read by Campbell Scott), which brings all the beauty and strangeness of Tan’s artwork into the land of literary fiction. Here’s to the next 25 years of Selected Shorts! To listen to the podcast of this show, go here. To find your local time/station, go here.
Last Friday, One Story hosted our annual benefit at The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn. About 500 people came, and to get upstairs to the party, our guests took a ride on this amazing freight elevator, designed by the artist Giuseppe Stampone. Stampone turned the space into a unique art piece, using quotes from Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is written on the walls of the shaft. Starting out in Hell on the first floor, the elevator lifts you up through Purgatory, up to Paradise on the third floor (where our party was). This work was commisioned by No Longer Empty for the Grand Opening of The Invisible Dog in October 2009 and is part of their permanent collection.
This week on Selected Shorts, we will be getting our Classics on, with performances of three epic tales: Cantos from Dante’s “Inferno” read by Phylicia Rashad; “The Death of Hector,” (from Homer’s The Iliad) read by Stephen Lang; and “Captain Ahab, A Novel by the White Whale,” by Paul West (based on Melville’s Moby Dick), read by Diane Venora. For your time or station, go here, or to listen to this episode on podcast, go here. To see Selected Shorts spanking great new website, go here!
An interview I did a while back with Jonathan Bastian for Aspen Public Radio’s Page by Page just went up as a podcast. We talk about The Good Thief, but also One Story and various ways writers can negotiate social media, especially shy ones, like me. Want to listen? Go here.
We’ve got 3 great stories by women writers this week on Selected Shorts: “She Shall Not Be Moved” by Shereen Pandit, performed by Rita Wolf (My Beautiful Laundrette); “Loose Change” by Andrea Levy, performed by Eve Best (Nurse Jackie); and “Pie Dance” by Molly Giles, performed by Kate Burton (Grey’s Anatomy). For your time/station, go here. And if you’re in New York City, be sure to join us on April 27th at Symphony Space–when Neil Gaimon will be hosting a special night of Selected Shorts, with Boyd Gaines (Driving Miss Daisy), Josh Hamilton (The Coast of Utopia) and Marin Ireland (Three Sisters).
On April 29th, 2011, One Story is hosting our 2nd annual Literary Debutante Ball. This year we’re celebrating 5 One Story authors who have published their first books in the past year: Robin Black (If I Loved You I Would Tell You This), Susanna Daniel (Stiltsville), Seth Fried (The Great Frustration), Jerry Gabriel (Drowned boy) and Jim Hanas (Why They Cried). We’re also honoring the novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro, for her extraordinary support of other writers. There will be food, specialty cocktails, music by Lapis Luna, and a silent auction of amazing art, curated by David Goodman. Our benefit committee this year is very hot: T Cooper, Jamie Lee Curtis, Mark Hage, Amy Hempel, A.M. Homes, Virginia Lawrence, Andrew McCarthy & Dolores Rice, Paul Morris, Leigh Newman, Maud Newton, George Saunders and Jim & Karen Shepard. If you haven’t got your ticket yet, buy one soon, we’re nearly sold out. All proceeds go to support One Story magazine, and our mission to save the short story. Hope to see you all there.
This weekend on Selected Shorts, we have two stories by the immensely talented Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat, read by actresses Anika Noni Rose and Laurine Towler. “New York Day Women” is from Danticat’s collection, Krik? Krak! and “Claire of the Sea Light” is from the anthology Haiti Noir, which Danticat edited and has recently been published by Akashic Books. They are both amazing stories–I was in the audience at Symphony Space for a celebration of Haiti Noir, and it was an extraordinary evening. The audience literally gasped during Anika Noni Rose’s performance. Tune in this week to hear for yourself. For your time/station, go here.
concrete, shadows, Bond St.
