From wild and wacky to knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud fun, these humorous tales represent some of the best of recent seasons of the hit public radio series Selected Shorts. Comedian Wyatt Cenac gives a killer performance of Simon Rich’s hilarious tale of woe from the point of view of a condom in a young man’s wallet. Alec Baldwin gives a delightful over-the-top performance of James Thurber’s wonderfully silly classic tale of the day everybody in a small Ohio town thought the dam broke.

By turns funny, moving, romantic and surreal, and filled with unexpected twists and turns, each of the tales on this lineup has a magical element.

Moving stories about married couples' powerful and complicated loves, read by actors Frances Sternhagen, Robert Sean Leonard, Keir Dullea, Joanna Gleason, Harold Gould and Joanne Woodward. A native couple's rocky college love affair lasts a lifetime in Do You Know Where I Am by Sherman Alexie. In Karen E. Bender's Eternal Love, a mother nervously chaperones her retarded daughter's honeymoon.

First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era - including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall - through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central example of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece. Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (Annie Hall, The Family Stone) performs these classic essays, including the title piece, which will transport the listener back to a unique time and place: the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood’s heyday as a countercultural center.

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It As It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the listener.

In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.

Selected Shorts is an award-winning, one-hour program featuring readings of classic and new short fiction, recorded live at New York's Symphony Space. One of the most popular series on the airwaves, this unique show is hosted by Isaiah Sheffer and produced for radio by Symphony Space and WNYC Radio.

From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.

It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island 90 miles to the south.

New American Stories presents diverse stories of contemporary American life and dreams lost and found, by four of the best young contemporary writers - Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Aleksandar Hemon - as performed by terrific stage and screen actors. All four writers have a unique perspective on the American experience, which is reflected in their work.

A boon for booklovers, this audio set features funny, fantastical and poignant stories about people with unique and passionate connections to the written word.

Tony Roberts reads a hilarious Walter R. Brooks story about how Ed - a talking horse - became a voracious reader of adventure tales and mysteries. In a story by Italo Calvino, read by John Shea, a man tries to make the most of his beach holiday by reading and making love at the same time.

A lot can happen on the way from one place to another, especially when an overnight flight makes for an unexpected romantic encounter between strangers seated together; a trucker finds life beyond the ranch where he grew up; and a bored Midwestern housewife tries to escape Kansas City.

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car.

This transcendent story follows four college friends who move to New York City, buoyed by ambition: Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, an artist; Malcolm, an architect; and, at the center, Jude, a withdrawn, brilliant attorney haunted by an unspeakable past. Through decades of shared and separate lives, Jude’s suffering - and its impact on those who love him - raises questions about the limits of human endurance, the possibility for redemption, and the meaning of friendship.