Nothing to Do with Love
6/11/202658 min
Host Meg Wolitzer presents two unconventional love stories, one classic, one contemporary, that avoid the usual tropes of “meet cute,” “opposites attract,” or “happily ever after” but are still engaging. In “Love in the Slump,” by Evelyn Waugh, clueless upper-crust newlyweds are sent on a comic odyssey. The reader is Jane Kaczmarek. And Esther Yi’s “Moon” explores something we often mistake for love—obsession--as a young woman is drawn farther and farther into K-Pop fandom. The story was selected by guest editor Min Jin Lee for Best American Short Stories 2023. It’s read by Hettienne Park. And we hear Lee’s and Park’s thoughts about the story.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
It's smart to always have a few financial goals, and a really smart one you can set? Earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can. Get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover.com/creditcard.
Meg Wolitzer· Host0:25
[upbeat music] Meet cute, opposites attract, happily ever after. But on this Selected Shorts, stories that are not about love and its tropes, yet they are even more interesting for being about the things we mistake for love, convention, and obsession. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Stay with us. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. Ah, love. How we love it. Being in love, watching lovers, reading about love, and on and on. These are themes and tropes that dominate our fiction and our popular media because the trysts and travails of celebrities are as gripping as those of Cathy and Heathcliff or Marianne and Connell from Sally Rooney's Normal People. Well, sorry. This program has nothing to do with love. One story is about obsession masked as love,