Brian Agler (1989 - 2020) was a speechwriter and humorist who passed away from colorectal cancer in 2020, at the age of 31. His professional work included speeches, opinion pieces, and books for presidents, celebrities, athletes, and Fortune 50 CEOs; his personal writings were published by The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and Esquire. Shortly before his death, he published an open letter entitled Don't Worry. He loved baseball, barbecue, and the Houston Astros, and his family and friends––especially his wife Claire, and their son Sam, who was born six weeks after his death.
Colby Minifie currently stars on the television series The Boys and its spinoff Gen V. She has appeared on Broadway in The Pillowman,Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and Six Degrees Of Separation; Off-Broadway in Epiphany, Punk Rock, Close Up Space, Landscape of the Body, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Her film and television credits include Fear the Walking Dead, Law & Order, Glee, Nurse Jackie, The Blacklist, The Michael J. Fox Show, Black Box, Deep Powder, Camilla Dickinson, The Greatest, The Winning Season, Don’t Think Twice,Paterno, Submission, The Super, An Actor Prepares, Radium Girls, Madam Secretary, Dietland, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and Homebody. Minifie is thrilled to continue to work with Selected Shorts.
James Naughton has won Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Musical for City of Angels and Chicago. On Broadway, he directed the Tony-nominated productions of Arthur Miller’s The Price and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, starring Paul Newman. He also directed the television production of Our Town for Showtime and Masterpiece Theatre. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including The Devil Wears Prada, Damages, The Paper Chase, Gossip Girl, Ally McBeal, Planet of the Apes, Hostages, Turks & Caicos, The Affair, The Tap, The Independents, The Romanoffs, The Accidental Wolf, And Just Like That…, Not the Same Clarence, Three Women, and SilverSizzle.
Susan Perabo is the author of the short story collections Who I Was Supposed to Be and Why They Run the Way They Do and the novels The Broken Places and The Fall of Lisa Bellow. Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and New Stories from the South and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, TheIowa Review, TheMissouri Review, and TheSun. She is Writer in Residence and Professor of Creative Writing at Dickinson College and on the faculty at Queens University.
John Updike (1932 – 2009) is the author of over sixty books, spanning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He is the recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the 1998 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Beginning in 1954, he contributed hundreds of essays, stories, and poems to The New Yorker. He is best known for the series of novels that includes Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Is Rich (Pulitzer Prize 1981); Rabbit at Rest (Pulitzer Prize 1990); and Rabbit Redux; and the story collections Too Far to Go (The Maples Stories), Trust Me,My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, and posthumously, The Stories of John Updike.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at The Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive for emerging novelists. Wolitzer, who was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, is the radio and podcast host of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts.
CREDITS
“Still of Some Use,” by John Updike, from Trust Me (Knopf, 1987). First appeared in The New Yorker (September 28, 1980). Copyright © 1980 by the John H. Updike Literary Trust. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency.
“Some Say the World,” by Susan Perabo, from Who I Was Supposed to Be (Simon & Schuster, 1999). Copyright © 1999 by Susan Perabo. Used by permission of the author.
“The Rules of This Board Game Are Long, But Also Complicated,” by Brian Agler, from McSweeney's (January 31, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Brian Agler. Used by permission of Claire Mauksch.
