Hummingbirds and whales and foxes, oh my!

Join me, Meg Wallitzer, for fiction about the beauty and vulnerability of the natural world,

including a darkly funny fable, starring a talking fox who is sure to make you feel better about your terrible spelling.

You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us that the natural world is both miraculous and fragile,

multifarious but diminishing, filled with wonder and danger.

And sometimes it is the role of fiction to remind us of our place in the grand design.

Many writers have taken on the task of giving us a glimpse of the profundity of nature.

The challenge is showing the scale.

Maybe we can't exactly convey that, but some of our best writers do show us the awe and power and the fragility

of nature all at once, as it roils and moves and shifts around us, below us and above us.

Nature writing has long been a mainstay of literature. How could it not be? It's always there,

right before our eyes, both hard to describe and yet

desperately in need of description. Nature is as old as anything, and yet in written form, it never

gets old. On this program, one story explores the miracle that is the heart, the one thing

we have in common with all creatures from tiny to immense. And the second

sends an ambassador from the natural world to marvel at ours at his peril. Also, stay tuned for

the return of the Selected Shorts Book Club after the second story. Every creature on earth has

approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime.

This provocative line is one of many quietly beautiful truths in our first story,

Brian Doyle's intricate Joyous Volodorus.

Doyle was a widely published author whose works include the novels Mink River and the Plover.

In the context of Joyous Volodorus, it's also worth noting that his novel Martin Martin was given an award for distinguished nature writing.

...