Classics with a Twist

Selected Shorts

Symphony Space

Arts, Fiction, Books, Society & Culture

4.4 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Host Meg Wolitzer presents three imaginative and funny reworkings of classic stories. In Ginny Hogan’s “Phantoms and Prejudice,” Jane Austen’s Bennet sisters learn about ghosting. The reader is Sara Bareilles. Anthony Marra invents a plausible reason for murder in his reworking of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” read by Mike Doyle. And Michael Cunningham turns Jack into an entrepreneur in “Jacked,” read by Jim Parsons.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On this selected shorts,
0:09.1	Classics get a makeover.
0:10.7	Jane Austen gets ghosted,
0:12.4	Edgar Allan Poe meets the iPhone,
0:14.7	and Jack leaves the beanstalk to become an entrepreneur.
0:18.3	Timeless Tales reimagined with the help of actors Jim Parsons and Sarah Borellis.
0:23.2	I'm Meg Wallitzer. Don't go anywhere. We were sure that our program concept, classics with a twist, no, it's not a cocktail, would capture the imagination of both our live and broadcast-slash-ppodcast audiences. Those who encountered classics in middle school
0:56.3	may turn up their nose, but classics are beloved by you, short fiction lovers. And you enjoy
1:02.9	hearing from deft practitioners capable of transforming these classics into something new,
1:08.6	pulling them into the present day with all its complexities.
1:12.4	The stories on this show retain enough of their original identities for us to recognize how
1:17.3	the material is being questioned and reshaped. But wonderful new versions of the original characters
1:23.5	emerge, and they are ones in which we are more likely to recognize ourselves, or at least
1:28.9	the world we live in now.
1:31.3	One story views a Jane Austen favorite through the lens of third-wave feminism with a little
1:36.3	social media thrown in.
1:38.5	In another, a Poe classic is reframed as a critique of the iPhone, And a third turns Jack and the Beanstalk into a story
1:46.4	about social as well as beanstalk climbing. We love adding new talent to our already fantastic
1:53.3	lineup of shorts readers. And on this particular evening, we were happy to welcome my friend
1:58.8	the multi-talented Sarah Borellis.
2:01.3	She's a Grammy-award-winning singer-songwriter and a librettist known for shows such as Waitress
2:06.5	and a lead role on the Netflix musical comedy series Girls Five Eva.
	...

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