Anna Sale

Hello, good evening.

Welcome to Selected Shorts.

I am your host this evening.

My name is Anna Sale.

I'm so glad to be here.

In addition to hosting Selected Shorts this evening, I host the Slate podcast, Death, Sex, and Money.

Yes.

We have been making this show since 2014.

Our team, we say it's the show about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.

It's also a show about basically the things that short stories are written about.

In fact, like the name of the show is kind of a short story.

In our very first episode, I was interviewing the musician Bill Withers, and he said, death, sex, and money.

If you reverse it, that's the story of rock and roll right there.

Something special about the stories written tonight, they're all written by human beings.

And each of them has at least one moment of deep cringe, like deep feelings of pathetic, feeling pathetic, feeling like a clumsy screw-up, feeling so, so alone.

And reading them and hearing them tonight, you're going to feel that.

And then you'll feel how at the end, just having touched that, you'll feel lighter.

You'll feel light cracking through that cringe, feeling that awe of connection.

That is what you can go to when you have that feeling and you want to go to a keyboard.

Just pull a short story off the shelf.