Forget why and how they are so yesterday.

This week on selected shorts, it's who, what, where,

as we ask basic questions with stories performed by Willem Defoe and more.

Stay with us. I'm your host Meg Walitzer and you're listening to selected Shorts where our

greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time.

Shorts has a long history and I'm so happy that as host I get to be a part of it in a new way

This show has been my companion for years and I'm so glad to be with you every week. There's something about

finding a story on the radio by a writer whose work you might not know or maybe

haven't read in a while. I've had that experience with this show. I've heard a story and just loved it and I'll be like I love this writer who is she and the thing is I wasn't expecting that particular story I wasn't in the mood for that one writer when you you come right down to it, most stories,

however subtle, are asking the big basic questions

that we usually apply to journalism, who, what, where.

And in the three stories on this show, we see how writers make those questions count.

The who, the characters, really resonate, the what, their situation, is revealed in a way that is specific to that writer and his or her concerns.

And the Ware, well all the Wears in these three stories are of course different

but each of them is its own fully imagined world.

In one story in our show, a celebrity... is its own fully imagined world.

In one story in our show, a celebrity writer plays himself

for a TV crew, and so does his son.

In the second, sensory overload turns a man

into a psychedelic dreamer, not sure what's real and what he's imagined.

And in the third, a traditional woman has a difficult reckoning with her family and her place in it.

Our first story is by the prolific. with her family and her place in it.

...