"Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story" presents some of the finest artists of the American theater and screen reading short fiction by classic, contemporary and bold new writers. Recorded live at Peter Norton Symphony Space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for over two decades, performances have featured distinguished works by classic masters such as Chekhov, Edith Wharton, de Maupassant, Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Bashevis Singer; stories by contemporary greats such as Alice Munro, John Updike, John Edgar Wideman, Grace Paley, William Trevor and Alice Walker; as well as the fresh, vivid and diverse works of a new generation of remarkable literary talents, from Pulitzer Prize-winning Jhumpa Lahiri, Academy of Rome Prize-winner Tom Bissell and celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat to promising newcomers like Rattawut Lapchararoensap, Yiyun Li and Etgar Keret.

More than 80 stories are read to captivated audiences during a single"Selected Shorts" live performance season. Favorite "Selected Shorts" actors who have read in recent seasons are Hope Davis, Alec Baldwin, Cynthia Nixon, Sonia Manzano, Kathleen Chalfant, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Holly Hunter, Robert Sean Leonard, David Strathairn and Stephen Colbert.

Airs:  3 p.m. Saturday on KSTX 89.1 FM
Website:  www.symphonyspace.org

About the Host

Isaiah Sheffer is co-founder with Allan Miller of Symphony Space and serves as its artistic director, now preparing for the theatre's 30th anniversary season. At Symphony Space, Sheffer hosts and directs the long-running hit series "Selected Shorts" — live, on tour and in its PRI radio incarnation across the country. He also stages the annual James Joyce celebration "Bloomsday on Broadway," as he has every year on June 16 for the past 26 years. With Martin Sage, Sheffer creates the theatre's hit political cabaret, "The Thalia Follies," writing lyrics and comedy sketches, and performing in such diverse genres as rap, show tunes, exalted poetry and nutty characters.

Sheffer's writing for the stage and screen includes the book and lyrics to two successful musicals, "The Rise of David Levinsky" and "Yiddle with a Fiddle," as well as an original play about Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Demons and Dreamers," and the libretto for the baroque ballet on the subject of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, "A More Perfect Union." In 2006, he launched Symphony Space's Summer Stock on Broadway with a Rodgers and Hart reconstructed musical, "Manhattan Madcaps of 1924," by Jerzy Turnpike. His television writing includes scripts for the PBS series, "Millenium: The Music of Ten Centuries," and he is the author of the screenplay for the film "A Pair of Jokers," which starred Jerry Stiller. He is currently at work on "A Symphony Space Portrait," a musical retrospective that will be the centerpiece of the theatre's 30th birthday celebration, set for January 10, 2008.