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If you walked into New York's Morgen's Restaurant in the 1950s, you'd be greeted at the door by a perfectly dressed and powdered blonde who'd smilingly show you to your table and hand over a menu. That hostess, Audrey Elaine Morgen Volk, is at the center of her daughter Patricia Volk's new memoir, Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, And Me. In it, Volk describes how two vivid women helped her move into adulthood: One was the iconoclastic Italian fashion designer Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli; the other was her mother, a loving, difficult and icy stunner.

The search is over for the winner of Round 11 of Three-Minute Fiction, the contest where listeners submit original short stories that can be read in about three minutes.

We received help this round from graduate students at 16 different writing programs across the country. They poured through thousands of submissions and passed the best of the best along to our judge this round, novelist Karen Russell.

Here was your challenge for this round: A character finds something he or she has no intention of returning.

The stories of One Thousand and One Nights are among the world's most famous works of literature. They start with a king who discovers that his wife is having an affair. In a fit of rage, he has her executed. Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh explains what happens next:

"From that night, he decreed a law that he will marry a virgin every single day and deflower her at night, and then kill her at dawn," al-Shaykh tells NPR's Rachel Martin.

The killing continues until Scheherazade, the daughter of the king's vizier, offers herself as the king's bride.