Selected Shorts

Symphony Space

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Short fiction, performed with literary grace.

The gist

Selected Shorts treats short stories as events worth sitting with. Meg Wolitzer and Brooke Gladstone set a theme, offer a little literary context, and then let actors carry pieces about family, belonging, advice, adaptation, identity, and memory.

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About Selected Shorts

Selected Shorts is a literary performance series organized around the short story. Its center of gravity is not discussion, argument, or personality, but the act of reading fiction aloud. Meg Wolitzer often provides the frame. Her introductions are concise and interpretive, giving a theme enough shape to prepare the audience without crowding the story. Then the performers take over. Recent episodes gather fiction around families, substitutions, movie adaptations, self-made narratives, clubs, secret places, friendly counsel, and the life and work of Grace Paley. The subjects can be playful. They can also turn strange, melancholy, or quietly severe. One episode treats family as a source of love, mystery, exasperation, and generational pressure, moving from a mother-daughter history to the tenderness and worry of a grandparent and child. Another looks at replicas and remakes, where models, altered speech, and the confusion of spouses and strangers become ways to think about reality losing its familiar outline. A film-themed episode links fiction to All About Eve, The Twilight Zone, Alice in Wonderland, and the Tribeca Film Festival. A Brooke Gladstone-curated evening considers how people use stories to define, shape, and remember themselves. The club-themed hour asks what it costs to belong, from bookish circles to darker forms of appetite. Secret spaces bring privacy, hiding, and the odd intimacy of rooms that may conceal more than their owners expect. Advice becomes another fiction-making machine, promising certainty while revealing how rarely counsel is neutral. The Grace Paley centennial episode gives special weight to a writer whose art, family life, teaching, and political conviction are presented as inseparable. Across these episodes, the show trusts the listener's appetite for complete passages rather than quick takes. Its best clips are often the readings themselves: long stretches where a performer's timing lets a character's worry, wit, or bewilderment settle in. The editorial wrapper matters, but it stays modest. Selected Shorts works because it respects fiction as performance and performance as interpretation.

Made for: For listeners who enjoy short stories, stage-caliber readings, and thoughtful framing that does not over-explain. It especially suits readers, theatergoers, and narrative-minded podcast listeners who prefer atmosphere and craft to conversation.

What sets it apart: Selected Shorts gives fiction the shape of a live literary event, pairing themed editorial introductions with extended actor performances. The show stands apart by letting the story, not the host, carry the emotional weight.

In their own words

Spellbinding short stories by established and emerging writers take on a new life when they are performed by stars of the stage and screen. Listen free on your computer or mobile device. Symphony Space, the home of Selected Shorts, was founded almost 40 years ago in the belief that the arts bring people together, transcend barriers, and celebrate both our similarities and our differences. That belief remains our guiding principle and is more important now than ever. Your generosity during the Covid19 crisis will help us continue to provide great programs free of charge. Thank you for your support.

As heard by us

Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026

Selected Shorts makes literary craft audible by pairing performed fiction with Meg Wolitzer's attentive framing of language, structure, and theme.

Selected Shorts gives fiction the full apparatus of performance, with actors carrying the stories and Meg Wolitzer providing compact introductions and interpretive bridges.

Read our full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A mermaid, an O. Henry winner, and your neglected imagination walk onto a Symphony Space stage.

Press play if you want

actors who make punctuation, pauses, and strange prose feel like stage directions
Meg Wolitzer giving you literary context before the fiction takes over

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

short fiction performancesfamily and generational bondsidentity and self-narrationbelonging and social rulessecret spaces and privacyfilm and literary adaptationadvice and interpretationwriters' lives and influence

Talks about

Arts Performing Arts Radio Drama

Best episodes of Selected Shorts

Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.

Extended FamiliesApr 16, 2026

A thoughtful hour of short fiction that finds plot, drama, and surprise in family ties.

Selected Shorts makes family the engine of its fiction, using plot, character, drama, and surprise to ask how far people will go for the people they love.

Sleight of Hand

A literary hour where fiction's sleight of hand does the work, and the room goes very still.

Selected Shorts argues for fiction as a quiet form of sleight of hand, with the show more interested in how expectation is guided than in any blunt surprise.

Writers & Readers

A polished literary hour where ambition, authorship, and celebrity keep changing hands.

Selected Shorts turns reading and writing into a compact drama of appetite, vanity, and consequence. Meg Wolitzer opens by folding betrayal, obsession, and scandal into a kind of intrigue more often associated with a binge watch, then bookends the hour with Billy Collins poems…

No Filter

A patient, literary hour about the gap between public image and private self.

Selected Shorts treats public image and private self as a quiet, steady tension, with Meg Wolitzer guiding the hour through social media, revelation, and the gap between who people seem to be and who they are willing to admit. The tone is literary and unhurried.

Margaret Atwood: Future Imperfect

A live Selected Shorts hour that lets Atwood's story and Burstyn's reading carry the set.

Margaret Atwood is the center of a live Selected Shorts from Symphony Space, with Meg Wolitzer introducing a New York appearance tied to Old Babes in the Wood.

The New Yorker: A Century of Fiction

A polished centennial tribute that keeps the fiction front and center.

The hour treats The New Yorker at 100 as both archive and living magazine, returning to Harold Ross's 1925 idea of wit, reporting, fiction, art, and criticism while also nodding to the writers who have passed through its pages.

Laughing in the Face of Danger

A poised comic reading that uses laughter to soften fear.

Selected Shorts opens with David Sedaris's story about pets, birds, moths, dogs, and one long-suffering husband, while Meg Wolitzer keeps the frame light and amused, treating laughter as a way of getting at fear.

Adios, Sayonara, Goodbye!

A graceful hour about attachment and letting go, with wry framing and varied readings.

Selected Shorts spends its hour on attachment, and on the small things people refuse to let go of, with Meg Wolitzer keeping the tone lightly wry.

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Find your next episode

About Selected Shorts

In their own words

As heard by us

Why you'd press play

Talks about

Best episodes of Selected Shorts

Podcasts like Selected Shorts

Episodes

Celebrating the O’Henry Prize, with Amor Towles

It's About Time

The Way I See It

Meg Wolitzer Talks with Denis O'Hare

Haruki Murakami: Then and Now

Uprooted

Reality Checks

Problems without Solutions

Changing the Narrative

Classics with a Twist

Just the Thing

Off the Leash

The Quiet Part Out Loud

Meet the Neighbors

Perfectly Unmatched

Come Out Swinging

McSweeney’s 25th Anniversary Extravaganza

Sizzling Summer Travels

I Contain Multitudes

Best American Short Stories

Homewreckers

What Are the Odds?

On the Couch

To the Rescue

Surprising Interventions

Ken Burns Presents Willa Cather’s America

The Role You Were Born to Play

A Simple Solution

Unwrapping the Holidays

Classics from The New Yorker

Reading Between the Lines

Accidental Revelations

Fooling Yourself

Tangled Lives

Generation Gap

Reinventing the Wheel

Better With You?

Hiding in Plain Sight

Writers & Readers

Laughing in the Face of Danger

Sleight of Hand

Celebrating the O’Henry Prize, with Amor Towles

Best American Short Stories 2022

Pride Inside

Adios, Sayonara, Goodbye!

Romance of the Summer

Margaret Atwood: Future Imperfect

The New You

The New Yorker: A Century of Fiction

No Filter

Passport to Ireland with Colum McCann

The New American West

Love and UFOs

A Full Plate

Forsaking All Others

Building Worlds, with N.K. Jemisin

Up in the Air with Radiolab

Seeing is Believing

Romance of the Summer

Shifting Identities

Picture Perfect

Walking on Eggshells

Lost and Found

Stories from the City of Immigrants with Waterwell

Roz Chast: While You Were Dreaming

Twisty Tales: O’Henry Prize Winners with Edward P. Jones

Nothing to Do with Love

The Pursuit of Happiness with Death, Sex and Money

Death Sex Money

Modest Expectations

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