This week on Selected Shorts, what does it take to prove your love?

The perfect gift?

A bit of yourself you can't give?

Or losing yourself altogether?

Authors including Edgar Carrot and Haruki Murakami explore this theme in unexpected ways.

Join me, Meg Wallitzer.

You're listening to Selected Shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the

magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

You would think it would be good enough to have someone say they love you, and you don't

even have to have seen the film love actually to know that there are infinite permutations.

But human beings are demanding, and one of the things we seem to demand is proof of love.

That's not nearly as easy as proof of age or proof of vaccination status, so we resort

to tokens, trials, and tests.

In the three stories on this show, we hear about three different tests of love.

In one, a husband looks for the ultimate gift for a demanding wife, in another old flames

extinguish, and in the third, a challenging marriage leads to complications and questions.

He featured many of Edgar Carrot's funny and tender stories over the years, from collections

such as suddenly a knock on the door, and fly already.

So we knew we wanted him to contribute to our anthology, Small Odesies, and he didn't

disappoint.

Our title may suggest small, but a husband in search of the perfect 50th anniversary

present for his hard-to-please wife thinks big.

...