Celebrating the O’Henry Prize, with Amor Towles

·58 min·4 clips

Amor Towles explains short fiction by comparing it to overhearing strangers argue at a restaurant and watching them leave before you get any answers.

The prize comes first. Meg Wolitzer places the O. Henry Prize in the history of short fiction, including its start in 1919, without turning the hour into a lecture. Selected Shorts treats the award as a smart way into contemporary stories that deserve to be heard aloud. Amor Towles is the guest presence, and the program pulls from 2024 prize winners. The first story has serious engine noise. Wolitzer describes Allegra Hyde's piece as lively and packed, full of language that roars, putters, zooms, and coasts. Jane Kaczmarek talks backstage at Symphony Space about listening to the story like an actor. Lists, commas, and periods became cues for how to move through it, not decorative bits on the page. The structure keeps pushing. Her comments make the piece sound deliberately jagged, with punctuation doing real work. At first, the mood is playful. Kaczmarek remembers odd images, fanciful language, and the pleasure of phrases like duct taped cacti on a dashboard. Then the road tightens. In her telling, the ending turns when gas is gone, the world changes, and the trip starts feeling like an odyssey toward fossilhood. The second story lowers its voice. Wolitzer sets up a marriage strained by a child and a stranger, keeping the plot mostly out of the way. That restraint suits the show. The host gives enough context to enter the stories, then lets the fiction breathe. The ending lands softly, with the thought that resolution may only mean finding a better way to look for your own answers.

As heard by us

Prize-winning fiction, presented live and with care, still finds room to surprise.

Selected Shorts presents two O. Henry Prize-winning stories with a steady, attentive hand, and each gets enough space to land. One moves through road warriors of the near future; the other follows a marriage under strain from ambition and tradition.

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Why you'd press play

Two 2024 O. Henry Prize-winning stories, hosted by Amor Towles, with a literary hush.

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