When you've got a problem, what you desperately want to hear from someone is,

I've got just the thing.

And this week on Selected Shorts, fiction about solutions.

Salesmen, angels, and time travelers offer up their best fixes to problems of all

kinds. Who knows? Maybe one short story at a time.

No matter how self-sufficient we are, we can't always cure what ails us.

And whether we're dealing with life's little annoyances like your basic leaky faucet

or those troubles of larger proportion, it's a relief to know that someone somewhere has a plan to deal with it.

Maybe that plan feels a bit implausible or requires a significant financial commitment, but at least for a moment, a solution

really feels within reach. In today's selected shorts, stories about characters coping with pre-existing

difficulties large and small, before they happen upon

someone or something ready to change everything. In one story, a door-to-door salesman

unveils the must-have technology of the future. In a second, a celestial being offers up a

possible remedy for the aches and pains of life. And stick around for our

final story, a Ray Bradbury classic, in which a time machine delivers a hero to our tumultuous

present. Let's begin with a story by Shinichi Hoshi. Hoshi is one of Japan's most famous

speculative fiction writers, and while he died in

1997, this story about AI feels as though it could have been written yesterday. His short story

collections include The Wimical Robot, A Well-Kept Life, and The Other Side of the Swing. This story

was published in the Penguin Book of Japanese short stories

and was translated by J. Rubin.

Performing his story's Shouldertop Secretary is Tom Sesma,

...