Nothing To Do With Love

Selected Shorts

Symphony Space

Arts, Fiction, Books, Society & Culture

4.4 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Host Meg Wolitzer presents two unconventional love stories, one classic, one contemporary, that avoid the usual tropes of “meet cute,” “opposites attract,” or “happily ever after” but are still engaging. In “Love in the Slump,” by Evelyn Waugh, clueless upper-crust newlyweds are sent on a comic odyssey. The reader is Jane Kaczmarek. And Esther Yi’s “Moon” explores something we often mistake for love—obsession, as a young woman is drawn farther and farther into K-Pop fandom. The story was selected by guest editor Min Jin Lee for Best American Short Stories 2023. It’s read by Hettienne Park. And we hear Lee’s and Park’s thoughts about the story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Meet cute, opposites attract, happily ever after, but on this selected short, stories that are not about love and its
0:14.8	tropes.
0:15.8	Yet they are even more interesting for being about the things we mistake for love,
0:20.4	convention and obsession. I'm Meg Walitzer.
0:24.0	Stay with us.
0:25.0	You're listening to selected shorts,
0:31.0	where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction,
0:35.6	one short story at a time.
0:38.2	Ah Love, how we love it.
0:40.5	Being in love, watching lovers, reading about love, and on and on. These are themes and
0:45.6	tropes that dominate our fiction and our popular media because the trists and travails of celebrities
0:51.1	are as gripping as those of Kathy and Heathcliff or Mary Ann and
0:54.9	Connell from Sally Rooney's normal people. Well, sorry, this program has nothing
1:00.3	to do with love. One story is about obsession masked as love and the other is a farce during
1:06.3	which a marriage of convenience becomes a lot less convenient.
1:10.9	Evelyn Waugh, who lived from 1903 to 1966, was the prolific English writer probably best
1:16.7	known these days for the Saga Brideshead revisited.
1:20.3	Brideshead is sweeping and sad and was made into that great 1981 TV series with a young Jeremy
1:26.2	Irons and an old Lawrence Olivier.
1:29.0	But in fact, Waugh is also the author of wickedly satirical works that deconstruct English upper-class snobbery, including
1:35.8	decline and fall and a handful of dust.
1:39.5	He was himself a snob and also, according to the writer John Self, someone with a particularly complex
	...

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