Selected Shorts: American Classics

I’ll admit, I approached this skeptically—how many times can you hear ‘The Lottery’ without it feeling stale? But *Selected Shorts* flips the script by making the *performance* the story. Christine Baranski’s reading of Dorothy Parker’s ‘Here We Are’ is worth the price alone; she nails Parker’s razor-sharp cynicism with a smirk you can *hear*. And Malachy McCourt’s rendition of a Ring Lardner tale? Pure, unfiltered joy—his Irish lilt turns every sarcastic quip into a punchline. That said, it’s not flawless. The production’s minimalist approach sometimes feels *too* sparse—no music or ambient sound means the weaker performances (looking at you, one overly dramatic Hemingway reading) stick out like sore thumbs. And while the story selection is bold, it occasionally leans *too* literary; a few pieces (a dense Melville excerpt) might lose casual listeners. But when it *works*—like Freda Foh Shen’s heartbreaking turn in Amy Tan’s ‘Two Kinds’—it’s transcendent. The real triumph? It makes you *crave* the physical texts afterward, which is the highest praise for any audiobook. If you love short stories but hate the hit-or-miss nature of most anthologies, this is your antidote.