It must have been quite a task for Robert Weaver, even after decades of experience selecting stories for CBC Radio, to choose the 11 stories for the audio tape version of Emergent Voices. He had to decide, for instance, not to include Carol Shields’ “Flitting Behaviour,” which won a Canadian Literary Award in 1984, or either of Frances Itani’s award-winning stories from 1995 and 1996.

But there’s internal logic to this four-hour cull from the 20 years of Canadian Literary Awards, which were founded by Weaver in 1979. Janice Kulyk Keefer’s “Mrs. Putnam at the Planetarium,” in which a woman remembers her affair with a married man, precedes Shauna Singh Baldwin narrating her story “Satya,” about an Indian woman whose husband marries a second, younger woman in the hope of having sons. The next story – Carol Windley’s “Dreamland” – is set in India and Vancouver Island. Through these similarities and connections, Weaver achieves a pleasant flow – the tapes would be equally listenable to in one long gulp on a car ride, or one story at a time.

The stories originally aired on different CBC programs, so they vary in length. Henry Kromer’s reading of Michael Ondaatje’s “The Passions of Lalla” got 28 minutes of airtime on Anthology in 1982, while Bill Gaston’s 1998 award-winner “Where It Comes From, Where It Goes,” read by Michael Hogan, was squeezed into the 15-minute slot on Between the Covers. CBC listeners will recognize the style: good, clear readings with music that fades out gracefully. Highlights include stories by Gail Anderson-Dargatz, W.D. Valgardson, and Gwendolyn MacEwen. An introduction by Weaver would have been a nice addition, recalling the 20 years since he started up the awards, but perhaps modesty forbade it.