Selected Shorts: For Better and for Worse

Moving stories about married couples' powerful and complicated loves, read by actors Frances Sternhagen, Robert Sean Leonard, Keir Dullea, Joanna Gleason, Harold Gould and Joanne Woodward.

A native couple's rocky college love affair lasts a lifetime in Do You Know Where I Am by Sherman Alexie. In Karen E. Bender's Eternal Love, a mother nervously chaperones her retarded daughter's honeymoon. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wife's Story is a supernatural tale of marriage and transformation, and Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur's Mrs. Farrokhlaqa Sadraldivan Golchehreh intimately describes the title character's resentment of her heartless husband.

This collection also includes listeners' favorites such as Luis Alberto Urrea's Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses, about a grieving man who visits the reservation to bury his young wife and makes amends with her family; and We Are Nighttime Travelers by Ethan Canin, in which the arrival of mysterious visitor sets off new sparks in a longtime marriage.