Skip to content
The New American West episode artwork

Sep 24, 2026 58 min

The New American West

from Selected Shorts Hosted by Symphony Space

Host Meg Wolitzer presents two works that reassess and redefine our ideas of “the West.” It’s both a landscape of awesome beauty, and the scene of cultural appropriation, and we’ve got two masters sharing and shaping our experience. In Louise Erdrich’s “The Hollow Children” a natural disaster tests family ties. It’s read by Tate Donovan. And writer and environmental activist Rick Bass stress tests the West, and his main character, in “Fires,” read by John Benjamin Hickey. We also reprise part of an interview with Louise Erdrich from earlier in the year. In it, she mentions a new novel in progress, which has now been published: The Mighty Red: A Novel.

Episode details come from the podcast's RSS feed.

Embed this episode

Ready to play

The New American West

0:00 58:13

No transcript yet.

Requests help us decide what to transcribe next.

Come listen to it on a lonely night luhui Literary audiobooks The American Senator By: Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) The Children's Book of Christmas Stories The Midnight Passenger By: Richard Henry Savage (1846-1903) Selected Essays By: Voltairine de Cleyre The Masquerader By: Katherine Thurston (1875-1911) Life in the Iron Mills The Tree-Dwellers Monsieur Lecoq: The Inquiry The Girl on the Boat The Revelation of Baha-ullah in a Sequence of Four Lessons The Pupil The Great Stone Face and Other Tales of the White Mountains Facing the Flag The Motor Girls The Gilded Age, A Tale of Today Sketches New and Old Penrod and Sam Shakspere: Personal Recollections The Dawn of a To-morrow A Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane Bib Ballads Countess Julie Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country In Kent with Charles Dickens The Return of the Soul In Freedom's Cause Listen to afternoon tea yuguohui literature The Second Jungle Book By: Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) The Castle of Otranto By: Horace Walpole The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg By: Mark Twain (1835-1910) Mathilda By: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) Uller Uprising By: H. Beam Piper (1904-1964) Selected Stories By: Bret Harte (1837-1902) The Daughter of the Sioux, By: Charles King American Notes By: Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) Astounding Stories of Super-Science, September 1930 By: Harry Bates, Editor Alarms and Discursions By: G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) Under the Greenwood Tree By: Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) The Ethical Engineer By: Harry Harrison (1925-) The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe By: Daniel Defoe Hiawatha By: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Selected Lullabies By: Eugene Field (1850-1895) The Camp of the Dog By: Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) Stories of King Arthur's Knights Told to the Children By: Mary MacGregor

Frequently asked questions

How long is this episode of Selected Shorts?

This episode is 58 minutes long.

When was this Selected Shorts episode published?

This episode was published on September 24, 2026.

Can I download this Selected Shorts episode?

Yes. Use the download control on the episode player to save the publisher-provided media file.