Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts series is not like most literary events. While often authors will read their own work and then join in a conversation, at Selected Shorts, the reading is done by actors, almost changing short stories into dramas. Wednesday night was no exception, as authors Salman Rushdie and Teju Cole took the stage with host and Time Out New York contributing editor Matthew Love to discuss the components of a good story, only to make way for actors including Blythe Danner and Jeffrey Wright.

“A good story is one that makes you want to listen,” Rushdie said, going on to note that the oral tradition of storytelling in India shaped his own approach to writing. “The art of telling a story is keeping an audience sitting there and from throwing things at you.”

“That can be the litmus test for our evening,” Love joked. Cole took a different approach, noting that the mark of a good story was the internal shift in the reader. “The reader is one way when starting, and hopefully, quite another by the time the story is complete,” Cole noted.

While Cole was speaking about the experience of reading a well-crafted story, his words easily applied to the performance of his and Rushdie’s work, which included stories that had seen limited publication, such as A Globe of Heaven which Rushdie published to his now inactive Tumblr, and Cole’s Small Fates 1912, which took form on Twitter.

Blythe Danner, who recently starred in The Country House, read Rushdie’s A Globe of Heaven, a short story where “art history meets science fiction”, as Rushdie noted in his introduction. Danner’s performance was measured, her ethereal reading style well-suited to taking on the perspective of Ava, a restorer of celestial globes, who encounters Maria Celestis, a woman who has tried to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life through her “discovery” of carved globes in the Mexican desert. “It was an unusual experience,” Rushdie told the Guardian. “It was interesting to hear how the words sound in someone else’s voice.”

Zainab Jah, who was awarded the San Francisco Bay Area Critic’s Circle award for her performance in the play Ruined, performed Cole’s Modern Girls, which he envisioned as a homage to his mother’s world in 1960s Nigeria, also dealing with issues of class and religion. Jah’s reading brought the story to life, and Cole remarked to the Guardian that it was a unique privilege to see this particular story performed: “With Zainab’s reading, the story finally came home.”

Danner returned to the stage, this time with Wright, to read Cole’s Small Fates 1912. At times humorously macabre, Cole’s story, set in 1912, constructed a portrait of the unique kind of mayhem that could only happen in New York. From its observations of Houdini surviving his feats of daring to murders and robberies gone awry, Danner and Wright’s matter-of-fact reading highlighted the pathos of each 140-character observation. It was in this reading that Rushdie’s earlier remark was best proven: “Literature happens at the level of the sentence.”

The evening concluded with Michael Stuhlbarg, who was recently seen on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, reading Rushdie’s affecting story In the South, which was inspired by Rushdie encountering a rather cantankerous older man. “For the story, I sliced him in two: now there are two cantankerous old men,” he added, to the amusement of the audience. While Stuhlbarg’s reading added to the humour of the story, his performance underscored the sorrow underpinning the tale, best summarised by one sentence near the end: “Life and death were adjacent verandas.”

When I spoke to Jah, she noted how her performance differed from her work on the stage: “In a play, you are a component of a larger world, but in reading Teju Cole’s Modern Girls, I needed to create the whole world myself. It was a wonderful process.”