PRI: Selected Shorts

Paris has long been a home to American expatriate writers and artists. This program features some of the literary figures who helped define it, including the bookstore owner, Sylvia Beach. We hear part of her memoir Shakespeare & Company read by Martha Plimpton. Gbenga Akinnagbe reads from James Baldwin’s “No Name in the Street”; and John Shea gives us the early Hemingway in “Hunger Was Good Discipline.” “The Messy Joy of the Final Throes of the Dinner Party,” by Helen Phillips, performed by Kaneza Schaal, rounds out the program with humor and fantasy.