I chose a handful of the stories after hearing them on two fabulous short story podcasts, The New Yorker Fiction podcast with Deborah Treasman, the fiction editor, who has current writers choose past published stories and read and talk about them, and Selected Shorts, in which actors read short stories live on stage in New York. The links below are to web-based recordings, but you can also download the podcasts themselves on iTunes. The dates and readers are listed here for The New Yorker and here for Selected Shorts. Because the Selected Shorts ones are read live, there is an audience, and they laugh a lot more than I care for, and the actor reading usually does a little acting. Just a warning.
1. "Kansas" by Antonya Nelson
2. "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty (Selected Shorts: Program 2: Week of October 13 - October 19, 2007)
3. "The Gospel According to Mark" by Jorge Luis Borges
4. "A Day" by William Trevor
5. "Half a Grapefruit" by Alice Munro
6. "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out" by Patricia Highsmith
7. "Fredericka the Beautiful" by Ann Hood (From Seventeen January, 1992)
8. "Sermon in the Guava Tree" by Kiran Desai (Selected Shorts: Program 11: Week of December 15 - December 21, 2007)
