Stephen Colbert used his day off from the late show to come to selected shorts and perform a short story by masterful satirist George Saunders. Why? To find out you'll have to stick around.

I'm your host, Meg Walitzer, and you're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors

transport us through the ray of light.

Whether writing satires about hellish theme parks or heartfelt

tales about ailing octogenarians, Saunders somehow finds the good or at any rate the

imperfectly human in his characters. The result is a catalog as funny as it is moving, as devastating as it is

hopeful. Like many readers we had selected shorts were drawn to Saunders fierce

fascinating voice right away.

Over the years we featured many stories from Saunders collections, including the much love 10th

of December and even a bit of the Booker Prize winning novel Lincoln and Labardo.

We've also been lucky enough to host the author several times at Symphony Space in New York City.

When his new collection Liberation Day was announced, we at Shorts were quick to invite Saunders back

to the theater for an evening of performance and conversation.

In this hour we're going to hear excerpts from that night.

We'll also hear a Saunders favorite from our archives.

If you're not yet familiar with George Saunders, his wise and wicked stories can meet you right

where you are. Maybe you're a little stuck in your own head feeling doubtful about the world or your

place in it. Saunders knows all about that and might have a ray of light to send your way.

He offers a kind of beam that travels directly from his sensibility into yours.

Listening to him, you'll get a chance to see into his wild and ironic but very open way of

seeing.

And you may well take note of the generosity of spirit, the delicate

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