'Eccentrics' with Stephen Colbert on 'Selected Shorts'

Guest host Stephen Colbert presents stories with anarchists and oddballs by John Sayles and George Saunders.

On this SELECTED SHORTS show, we have two great stories about eccentrics taking a stand. It takes a brilliant eccentric like film director John Sayles to come up with an oxymoron like an “anarchists’ convention.” In his “At the Anarchists’ Convention,” fierce old lefties fight everything from the fruit cup to the manager at their annual banquet. The story was published in The Atlantic Monthly, included in The Best American Short Stories 1980 and was the title story in Sayles’ collection The Anarchists’ Convention and Other Stories. The reader is comic actor Jerry Stiller, best known for the role of Frank Costanza on the sitcom “Seinfeld.”

In our second story, “The Falls,” by George Saunders, two inadequate men are faced with the same crisis. We know them only by their self-absorbed interior monologues, until the moment when each faces a situation that can’t be ignored or fantasized about. Reader Rene Auberjonois hand-picked this one, which first appeared in The New Yorker.

Full Article: WNYC.org

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