Selected Shorts

Guest host Sonia Manzano presents love the modern way in two stories and a selection of posts to OK Cupid. These are read by Giullian Yao Gioiello and Colby Minifie. Then Jill Eikenberry reads Elizabeth Crane’s "Ad," a stream-of-consciousness exercise for the Personals column, and love overwhelms the characters in Andrea Barrett's "The Littoral Zone," read by Becky Ann Baker and Dylan Baker.

Guest host David Sedaris presents two ruefully funny stories. Dorothy Parker skewers a boozy, possessive mother in "I Live on Your Visits," read by Celeste Holm. Then, a country wedding becomes a comedy of errors in Arthur Bradford's "Snakebite," read by John Benjamin Hickey.

Guest host Maulik Pancholy presents two stories about families. In Heather Monley’s “Paddle to Canada,” a risky family boating trip becomes contested history. Jenna Ushkowitz is the reader.  And Jamel Brinkley’s “A Family” shows people coming together in unexpected ways after a loss. Brandon J. Dirden performs this Best American Short Stories selection.  

Guest host Denis O’Hare helps us celebrate the landmark event that helped give birth to the modern movement for LGBTQIA+ rights in America. On this special program, we first hear eyewitness accounts of the riots drawn from  The Stonewall Reader,  published by Penguin Classics and edited by The New York Public Library. Memoirs by Jayne County, Mark Segal, Lucian Truscott IV, and Holly Woodlawn are read by Ivory Aquino, Kate Bornstein, Michael Early, and Beth Malone. Next, we hear about the origins of the Gay Pride March one year after the riots when Ivory Aquino and Kate Bornstein perform Perry Brass’s “We Did It.” And to show how things have changed in 50 years, comments from Tobin Low and Kathy Tu, hosts of the  Nancy  podcast from WNYC Studios; fierce and touching poems by trans artist Kay Ulanday Barrett, “Right to Release,” and “Song for the Kicked Out,” read by Barrett, and a short story by Gary Eldon Peter in which a gay man at a straight wedding imagines a possible wedding of his own. His “Wedding” is performed by John Benjamin Hickey.

Guest host Sonia Manzano presents works by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Carolina Ravassa reads "Remnants of Carnival," in which a little girl is briefly transformed. Denis O'Hare tells an eerie tale of a strange marriage in "The Obedient Ones," and Lynn Cohen is a scary matriarch in "Happy Birthday."