Sometimes a beer won't cut it.

Sometimes a beer won't cut it.

Neither will a bike ride or a lavender and vanilla bubble bath or an afternoon off.

When the pressure gets to be too much, it's time for a great escape.

I'm Meg Walitzer and coming up on this selected shorts, stories about fleeing the scene.

Don't you run off.

You're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors

transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time.

Listen, I get it. You follow the news, talk to friends and relatives, even sit quietly and try to make sense of it all.

I don't need to remind you of, say, the maddening flow of information you face on a daily basis,

or the difficulties that we're confronting as a species.

No, I'm guessing you need what all of us need from time to time,

an escape from it all.

Not just lunch in the park or a three hour break from Twitter

if you haven't been so corrupted by social media

that you can actually force yourself to look away for that long.

I mean a genuine strategy for escape, a real chance to cut ties with the old life at least for a brief span of time and feel something new appear in its place.

In this episode of Selected Shorts, that's what we'll consider.

Stories by three great fiction writers that contemplate a way out.

One story suggests that escape comes in the form of starting over in a new location.

Another story delivers that escape in deep space

with or without individual consent.

...