"Women On A Mission" make appearances in this program's two short stories. The first is Carlton Stevens Montanye's "A Shock for the Countess," a delicious 1920's pulp magazine crime story involving glamorous international jewel thieves. The reader is Fionnula Flanagan. The boulevards of Paris give way to the mountain ranges of the American West in our second story, Mark Helprin's "Katherine Comes to Yellow Sky." The heroine of this quietly beautiful tale is traveling West to break away from the confinements and restrictions of life as a 19th-century woman, and to discover her true self. The reader is Lisa Gay Hamilton.
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This SELECTED SHORTS program features two stories about remarkable couples. Rita Dove's "Second-Hand Man" pairs the strong-willed Virginia with a beau with a way with words--and a secret. The reader is Tony Award-winner Audra McDonald. Padgett Powell's eccentric chronicle "The Winnowing of Mrs. Schuping" brings a headstrong Southern woman and a real Florida sheriff together in a swamp-side courtship. Tony-winning actor James Naughton is the reader.
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A longing for silence plays an important part in both stories on this program. Kevin Brockmeier's "The Year of Silence" speculates on what it would be like if all the noise, all the sounds of civilization and daily life, were to fade to an auditory stillness. Reader Anthony Rapp appeared on Broadway in the musical "Rent." From silence we move to a ghastly chatter-filled weekend in the country as imagined by 1920s writer Ring Lardner. The zestful reader is five-time Emmy winner and screen actor Christina Pickles.
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In each of these two very American stories, different as they may be from each other, one harrowing and the other hilarious, a fervent belief drives the narrative along. In Tobias Wolff's "Bible" the story's alarming opening scenario--a woman hijacked in her car--gives way to developments that surprise both us and its heroine. The reader is Jane Alexander. The second story, Percival Everett's "The Appropriation of Cultures," also defies our expectations as its hero hits on a novel strategy for defeating racial prejudice. The reader is the Tony Award-winning ("Seven Guitars") Broadway actor and director Ruben Santiago Hudson.
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A summer vacation, a romantic tryst, and a key business trip don't turn out the way the characters in these two stories expected. In Shirley Jackson's "The Summer People," the "people" in question cross an invisible line when they decide to stay on in their summer cottage past Labor Day--with harrowing consequences. Rene Auberjonois is the reader. "Luggage tends to look alike," as a woman traveling to meet her lover, and a man plotting to bring down a business rival, discover when they wind up with each other's in Maeve Binchy's "The Wrong Suitcase." The reader is Sex and the City alum Cynthia Nixon.
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