Host Meg Wolitzer presents a quartet of summer stories. Umberto Eco endures trial by mini bar in “How to Travel with a Salmon,” read by Jin Hah. A scenic getaway turns eerie in Elizabeth Spencer’s “The Weekend Travelers,” read by Campbell Scott. Life looks up—way up—for an overworked restaurant owner in “The Man, The Restaurant, and the Eiffel Tower,” by Ben Loory, read by Stana Katic. And upper-class “frenemies” have a reckoning in Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever,” read by Maria Tucci.

Meg Wolitzer presents stories that take the idea of “the magic of fiction” literally—or literarily. The British writer Penelope Lively offers up a tricky combination of love and real estate in “The Third Wife,” performed by real-life husband and wife Patricia Kalember and Daniel Gerroll. The only “trick” in our next story, “Tempo,” by R.O. Kwon, is the trick the mind plays when it wishes the present would restore a lost bit of the past. The reader is Hettienne Park. And Dave Eggers’ “The Alaska of Giants and Gods” includes a real magic act, but also the longing for some other kind of magic, misplaced on a rocky road, to be restored. Kate Burton reads.

Meg Wolitzer presents four works that consider various forms of risk, and risk taking. In “Clicking on Heaven’s Door,” by Anand Giridharadas, performed by Negin Farsad, the pearly gates require an online account, a password, a security question…you get the idea. “The Stand-In,” by Gerald Jones and Jean Marple, imagines a unique job. It’s read by Tony Hale. David Sedaris creates the ultimate in well-meant interference in other people’s lives—oh, and there’s a parrot. “Farnsworth” is read by Jessica Keenan Wynn. And—dining at the end of the world. Where’s the waiter? Robin Hemley’s “The Last Customer,” is read by Jane Curtin and Mike Doyle.