Modest Expectations
5/21/20261 hr
Host Meg Wolitzer presents four stories, recorded at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, in which characters shape their expectations and dreams to a manageable size. So if you’re “Medusa,” as in our first story, by Tania James, you try to figure out how to live in the world instead of turning it to stone. The reader is Constance Zimmer. Parents in our second story, “We Only Wanted Their Happiness,” by Alexander Weinstein, make a tactical choice about technology. It’s performed by Randall Park. The narrator of Honor Levy’s “Good Boys,” read by Annie Hamilton, understands that infatuation is a phase. And a man and a woman sidestep romance in “Arrangements” by Charlie Watts, performed by Laura Harrier and Will Harrison. The program was created in cooperation with Belletrist, an online book club created by Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss.
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First 90 secondsMeg Wolitzer· Host0:00
[jazzy music] Charles Dickens brought us that little scamp Pip with all of his great expectations. But what if you don't have the loyal chums or a mysterious benefactor, and you happen to have a head full of snakes instead of hair? I'm Meg Wolitzer, and coming up, twisty tales told by characters with modest expectations. Stay with us. [jazzy music] You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. As a human, it's hard not to get your hopes up. We're hardwired to get them way up, really. Whether it's imagining what treasures are hidden in that bin at the garage sale across the street or dreaming about what our lives might be like by the time we're 40, we don't really limit ourselves. If we didn't dream big dreams, it'd make the future seem a lot less bright. The problem is disappointment and what to do with it if things don't quite turn out how we imagined. Well, so let's try something. In the next hour, we're gonna hear stories that present a kind of thought experiment, and that experiment is what if we kept our outsized optimism in a more reasonable place? What if, unlike Pip in the Dickens classic, we had less than great, even modest expectations?