Antagonists Wanted

Selected Shorts

Symphony Space

Arts, Fiction, Books, Society & Culture

4.4 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Host Meg Wolitzer presents three stories featuring famous villains, real and fictional. A woman writes a letter to a former president—now residing in Hell—in “Thank You, Mr. Nixon,” by Gish Jen, performed by Cindy Cheung. And a man in recovery faces off against a former Roman leader with a really bad rep in "Playing Ping-Pong with Pontius Pilate" by Greg Ames, performed by Nate Corddry. Finally, Moby Dick has a say in its own epic in “Captain Ahab, A Novel by the White Whale,” by Paul West, performed by Diane Venora. Author Gish Jen provides on-stage commentary about her work.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Here those are righteous and good, and sadly, sometimes they can be a little boring.
0:12.5	Villains meanwhile are fascinating, dangerous, and complicated.
0:16.7	Just try to imagine your favorite stories without characters like Hannibal Lecter, The Wicked
0:21.5	Witch of the West, or Darth Vader.
0:24.1	If we took them all away, then you know what?
0:26.9	The restarling might make jail visits to someone who passed a few bad checks.
0:32.1	Dorothy Gale would find her way back to Kansas in maybe five minutes, ten minutes tops.
0:36.9	And Luke Skywalker's real dad would turn out to be an accountant named Stan.
0:42.7	I'm Meg Wallitzer, and on this episode of Selected Shorts, a salute to Villainy.
0:47.6	Stay with us.
0:55.6	We're listening to Selected Shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the
0:59.5	magic of fiction one short story at a time.
1:03.5	Villainy is a strange concept, because evil people might not call themselves evil.
1:09.9	Maybe if they took one of those personality quizzes in a magazine, they would describe
1:13.3	themselves as moderately ruthless.
1:16.7	Like only a five on the ruthless scale.
1:19.4	A fiction writer's job isn't usually to judge characters, but to let us see who they
1:23.8	are in full.
1:25.7	In this hour of Selected Shorts, we're going to hear stories that let us get closer than
1:29.9	shouting range to a few different antagonists.
1:33.3	The villain may be featured in the story, or appear as something of a distant memory,
1:37.7	but either way, they're definitely the reason we have a story to tell.
	...

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