Host Meg Wolitzer presents two stories and two poems the celebrate the power and mystery of reading and writing. Billy Collins contributes magical verse from two perspectives in “Books” read by Kirsten Vangsness, and “Dear Reader,” performed by Dion Graham. N.K. Jemisin entices us with a tricky narrative that contemplates the cost of literary celebrity. It’s read by Yetide Badaki.And at least one character in Ian McEwan’s “My Purple Scented Novel” wants celebrity at all costs. It's read by Tony Hale.

Host Meg Wolitzer presents two stories about selves obscured and revealed, by characters whose own identities are mysteries to them. In Aimee Bender’s “Un-Selfie, a woman reveals her extraordinary past to a stranger.The story was a commission for our 2022 Small Odysseys anthology, and is read by Alysia Reiner. In our second story, “Best Western” by Louise Erdrich, a young wife struggles to maintain a romantic fiction, until the real world crashes in on her. It’s read by Patricia Kalember.

On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone was our guest for a live Selected Shorts event, and this week, host Meg Wolitzer presents some of the stories Gladstone chose. They all explore the theme of tales we tell ourselves—and others. The title says it all in Mary Gordon’s “My Podiatrist Tells Me a Story about a Boy and a Dog” read by Bebe Neuwirth and Richard Masur. Two imaginative cooks reinvent themselves in a new country in Meron Hadero’s “A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times,” read by Chinasa Ogbuagu. And a child imagines an absent parent through her postcards in “Love, Your Only Mother” by David Michael Kaplan, read by Bebe Neuwirth.