Celebrating the O’Henry Prize, with Amor Towles

·58 min·4 clips

Amor Towles compares reading a short story to overhearing strangers argue at a restaurant, then watching them leave before you get answers.

1. Selected Shorts hosts a special episode at Symphony Space in New York City, celebrating two 2024 O. Henry Prize-winning short stories curated by novelist Amor Towles. 2. Host Meg Wolitzer introduces the program; Amor Towles, author of 'A Gentleman in Moscow' and 'The Lincoln Highway,' serves as the evening's presenter and 2024 O. Henry Prize guest editor. 3. The episode's thesis is that short fiction, unlike the novel, denies the reader orientation — you must assemble meaning from glimpses, and the story ends just as it comes into focus. 4. Towles opens by describing his concurrent work finishing his own story collection while selecting prize stories, which sharpened his thinking about the structural differences between forms. 5. His central analogy: in a novel, the author orients you with character, setting, timing, backstory, and motifs; in short fiction, none of that luxury exists. 6. He compares reading a short story to overhearing a heated argument between a couple at the next restaurant table — you piece together who Tony is and what happened last night — and just as the picture clarifies, they pay the check and leave. 7. 'Mobilization' by Allegra Hyde, read by Jane Kaczmarek, opens with a triumphant first-person-plural narrator: a civilization of nomadic motorhome-dwellers who claim to have solved humanity's desire for both adventure and home. 8. The collective catalogues its membership — wealthy actors with rooftop hot tubs, families crammed in campers, heavy-metal musicians, oddballs in salvaged-wood trolleys — united by the creed 'everyone is always at home, but always away.' 9. The story's prose style is characterized by lists with alternating commas and periods, which Kaczmarek notes required careful beat-by-beat attention: 'if you honor her periods versus her commas, it takes you on an incredible journey.' 10. The turn arrives when the caravan, running on fumes in Texas, learns there is no fuel — a trade embargo, domestic strike, and delayed shipments — and decides to drive to Galveston Island on the theory that oil-executive territory must have supply. 11. Galveston also has no fuel; the caravan grinds to a halt on the beach; electric-rig owners depart to get help and never return; beach chairs come out; denial holds briefly before decay sets in. 12. The story's final movement compresses centuries: storm surge, ocean submersion, bacterial decomposition, fossilization, tectonic movement, and transformation into superheated petroleum — the nomads become the oil they consumed. 13. Kaczmarek describes never having read an author who 'writes fun words like duct-tape cacti to the dashboard' and says Hyde must have had a blast writing it. 14. Wolitzer contextualizes the story's irony: 'Hyde's post-apocalyptic story opens like a Mad Max movie and ends like a prophecy' about a gas-guzzling society driving backward to primordial times. 15. 'The Import' by Jai Chakrabarty, read by Arjun Gupta, centers on Raj and Bethany, a Brooklyn couple — she a magazine editor who travels a quarter of the year, he a Times journalist who went part-time to become primary caregiver for their three-year-old son Shay. 16. Raj's mother in Kolkata arranges for Rupa, a 22-year-old from her household's entourage of servants, to come for six months as a babysitter — her salary equal to several years of Indian wages — partly to teach Shay Bengali. 17. Rupa's presence exposes fractures: Bethany's fear of being 'usurped,' Raj's plan to use Rupa's coverage to resume his early New York social life, and his ongoing affair with a runner named Molly Choi whose lavender scent he notices when they run together in Prospect Park. 18. The story's complication turns on a video call: Raj's mother pans the camera to reveal Rupa's daughter Lakshmi, nearly five, whom Rupa left in Kolkata — a detail Raj's mother deliberately withheld, saying simply 'you didn't ask.' 19. The episode has the studied intimacy of a live literary performance: two well-matched actor-reader pairings, crisp production, and an audience whose laughter and silence punctuate both stories. 20. Listeners who enjoy short literary fiction, the O. Henry Prize tradition, or live-performance reading shows will find the episode rewarding; those expecting traditional podcast conversation or plot-summary commentary should look elsewhere.

As heard by us

Two O. Henry Prize winners, one fizzing road tale and one marriage under pressure, presented with careful, actor-driven restraint.

Selected Shorts centers the hour on two O. Henry Prize-winning stories, introduced by Amor Tolles and hosted by Meg Wolitzer. The first leans into a near-future road tale, with inventive language and a tight formal shape that Jane Kaczmarek's backstage response helps make clear.

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Why you'd press play

You want Amor Tolles guiding two O. Henry Prize-winning stories through two very different worlds.

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