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SELECTED SHORTS: A Celebration of the Short Story
A production of Symphony Space
"Investing in Media that Matters" Conference, Sundance
January 16, 2003
THE ARTISTS
Jacqueline Kim has performed at the Guthrie Theatre in The Triumph of Love, The Seagull, Electra, Fantasio, and several of Shakespeare's history plays. Her film appearances include The Operator, The Hollywood Sign, Volcano, Disclosure, Brokedown Palace, and, most recently the digital feature Charlotte Sometimes which just won the Best First Feature Audience Award at the South by Southwest Film Festival. Ms. Kim plays Martha, a young documentary filmmaker in Allan Miller's recent film In Search of Cezanne. She has made television guest appearances on ER and The West Wing. Ms. Kim is currently writing her first piece for film, And Juliet. She has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her work on Charlotte Sometimes.
Isaiah Sheffer is a founder and the artistic director of Symphony Space, as well as host and director of Selected Shorts live at Symphony Space, on tour, and on public radio nationwide. He is also a playwright and creator of the book and lyrics to such works as The Rise of David Levinsky, Yiddle with a Fiddle, and Demons and Dreamers, based on the life and work of Isaac Bashevis Singer. He is currently creating the libretto for a modern-baroque opera-ballet about the making of the American Constitution, A More Perfect Union.
Percival Everett has written more than 13 books. His most recent novels are Glyph, Frenzy, Watershed and Grand Canyon, Inc. Everett won the 2002 Hurston /Wright Legacy Award in African American Literature for his novel Erasure. He is professor and chair of English at the University of Southern California and lives with his wife on a small farm outside of Los Angeles.
Julie Otsuka was born in Palo Alto, California, and studied at Yale. She studied art and for a while pursued painting as a career, only later turning to fiction. She has had one story published in the Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops anthology 1998, edited by Carol Shields. Otsuka's first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, of which "Evacuation Order No, 19" is a chapter, was published by Alfred A. Knopf this fall.
THE STORIES
"Evacuation Order Number 10" is the first chapter of the novel, When the Emperor was Divine, by Julie Otsuka, published in September 2002 by Alfred A. Knopf. Inspired by the experience of her family members in the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, novelist Julie Otsuka's story is a spare and intimate portrayal of one Berkeley family over the years that the U.S. government detained them. Told from a different point of view in each chapter, When the Emperor was Divine offers a quiet glimpse of a father, mother, daughter and son forced to assume the role of political prisoners on December 8, 1941.
"Through an accretion of small, well-chosen details, Otsuka turns a brief novel about one of the most shameful episodes in our history into something even larger: a meditation on what it means to be loyal to one's country and to one's self, and on the cost and the necessity of remaining brave and human even as the larger world grows more fearful and Savage." - from a review by Francine Prose
"The Fix," from Percival Everett's New York Stories, is a funny and also strongly resonant story about a man who has an unusual talent for fixing things. Author Everett says, "The Fix comes from a period during which I experienced a rash of expectations from other people. Friends would call up and ask for advice, assistance. At home if anything went haywire, I was summoned, to repair bicycle breaks, kill rattlesnakes, and remove splinters from fingers. And so I imagined the character in the story, who, unlike myself, could actually repair everything brought to him. I wondered what terrible things such a talent could offer." The Fix is a very dramatic and powerful portrayal of our desperate desire as a people for someone who seems to have all the answers.
ABOUT SYMPHONY SPACE
Symphony Space has been a beloved cultural presence on New York City's Upper West Side since 1978, when co-founders Allan Miller and Isaiah Sheffer presented the free, 12-hour concert, Wall to Wall Bach, as a gift to the New York City community. Now celebrating its 25th anniversary season, Symphony Space has built a reputation as one of New York's most inventive and culturally diverse performing arts centers. A broad range of music, literature, dance, education, film, and theatre programs has traditionally attracted 130,000 attendees to Symphony Space per year from throughout the New York City area. Symphony Space also reaches hundreds of thousands of people each week across America through National Public Radio broadcasts of its signature literary program, Selected Shorts.
The Selected Shorts series, now in its 19th season, presents classic and new short fiction read by stage and screen actors. The program fosters the appreciation of short fiction and the written and spoken word through a variety of media, including live reading, radio broadcast, and audiocassette and CD. Each year, Selected Shorts is recorded during live performances and then post-produced for broadcast year-round by some 134 National Public Ratio member stations throughout the country. Emerging authors' works are read alongside those of established writers, not only offering Shorts audiences a wide variety of literary styles, but also providing outstanding new authors increased exposure to a national audience. The series is heard in New York on WNYC AM 820, Saturdays from 3 to 4 pm and on 93.9 FM, Sundays from 4 to 5 pm- In Los Angeles, the show can be heard on KPCC 89.3 FM, Saturdays from 10 to 11 pm.
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