McSweeney’s 25th Anniversary Extravaganza

Selected Shorts

Symphony Space

Arts, Fiction, Books, Society & Culture

4.4 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Meg Wolitzer presents stories celebrating a quarter century of clever, funny, playful, weird, and literary writing, in print and online, showcased by the powerhouse indie publisher McSweeney’s. These include a comic fantasy, “Poor Little Egg-Boy Hatched in a Shul, by Nathan Englander, performed by Ophira Eisenberg; an unusual mother/son story, “Crumb Cake,” by Etgar Keret, performed by Andy Richter; and unlikely heroism at the amusement park in “Stay Brave, My Hercules,” by Ernie Wang, performed by BD Wong.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Smart, hilarious, groundbreaking, and absolutely in love with the power of stories.
0:13.0	That is the indie publisher McSweeney's all over.
0:17.0	They turned 25 recently, and we had selected shorts threw them a party.
0:24.7	Stick around, there's cake and hard-boiled eggs and a Disney vacation.
0:53.9	Seriously, I'm Meg Wallitzer. Stay with me. You're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. Since its founding in
0:56.1	1998, the indie publisher McSweeney's has had an incredibly clear sensibility. Led by the writer
1:02.5	Dave Eggers, McSweeney's meant clever, funny, playful, weird, and literary writing that was
1:08.1	more than a little biting. Even during its earliest days in the late
1:11.8	90s, with regular contributors like Michael Shabon and Zadie Smith, it always felt like the sort of
1:17.5	club that would be fun to be a part of. In the intervening years, McSweeney's has produced an
1:23.4	incredible body of literary journals that are art objects as much as they are story collections.
1:29.2	McSweeney's has published works by authors from James Hanaham to Lydia Davis, made nonfiction
1:34.8	magazines including The Believer and Lucky Peach, and their sister organization 826 National
1:40.8	is a non-profit that assists kids with their writing skills. And online, the McSweeney's
1:46.6	internet tendency has released on a daily basis, hilarious satire and absurd rants that we often
1:52.8	can't air on the radio. If you're curious, Google decorative gourd season, and all will become
1:59.0	clear to you. In 2023, McSweeney's turned 25 years old,
2:04.5	and we at Selected Shorts thought it was more than fitting to celebrate. We collected a number of
2:09.7	stories we love from the 70-plus issues of their journals and invited a cast of McSweeney's
2:14.8	admirers to read them live at Symphony Space in New York.
2:19.0	In the next hour, you'll hear performances from that night, from some writers you probably know and others you might not.
2:26.4	The host of our live show, the actor and writer John Hodgman, has been a part of McSweeney's since very early in its existence.
	...

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