Reading Between the Lines

Selected Shorts

Symphony Space

Arts, Fiction, Books, Society & Culture

4.4 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Meg Wolitzer presents two stories about the things she loves most: books and words and why they matter. In Ben Loory’s “The Book,” a contrarian volume becomes a literary sensation, and alters one woman’s life. The reader is Jane Kaczmarek. In “Things I Know to be True” by Kendra Fortmeyer, originally published in One Story, a damaged veteran uses words to hold his life together. The reader is Calvin Leon Smith. And in a special feature, Wolitzer visits a favorite indie bookstore, Three Lives & Company: http://threelives.com/who.html The Greenwich Village icon, which was founded in the 1980s, is a haven for readers, writers, and book lovers of all kinds. Michael Cunningham calls it “One of the greatest bookstores on the face of the Earth. Every single person who works there is incredibly knowledgeable and well read and full of soul.” And you’ll meet some of them—and the books they treasure--on this show.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On this selected shorts, a few of my favorite things.
0:11.5	Books, words, and a trip to a beloved indie bookstore.
0:15.2	Do you have a particular way that you hand-sell a book?
0:17.9	The most sure way, I think, is you have just read a book.
0:22.5	You have loved it.
0:24.2	And someone has asked you what to read, and you're like,
0:27.4	oh my God, you have got to read this.
0:30.4	You literally put the book in their hand.
0:32.5	I'm Meg Walletzer.
0:33.6	Stay with me.
0:36.1	You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through
0:40.2	the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.
0:51.7	Newsflash, here at Selected Shorts, we love books. And I especially love books, and most importantly, the words they contain. You know how during a Zoom you might try and look at the books on the shelf behind the person's head? Or is it just me who does that? Books are exciting, low-tech, I guess I mean no-tech objects. If you see your
1:13.6	favorite book on someone else's shelf, you immediately connect with that book and that person.
1:18.8	It's as if we're always in conversation with these inanimate objects and the people who read them.
1:24.1	And great stories often ask us to read between the lines. So on this show, a book Nanza,
1:30.0	two stories about the importance of books and words and what they reveal both on the surface
1:35.3	and under it. In one, a contrarian book becomes a literary sensation. In the other, words help a troubled
1:42.8	man control his world, and we'll have a reader's
1:46.0	adventure at Three Lives and Company. Small spaces, especially bookstores, especially our bookstore,
1:52.3	which has sort of covered floor-to-ceiling in books, wooden shelves. They're cozy, they're inviting,
1:58.1	they're welcoming, especially with the right lighting, the right ceiling, wooden floors.
	...

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