Wednesday’s Work-in-Progress: Short Story Month Giveaway!

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UPDATE: SHARY has won the giveaway! Shary, I’ll be in touch with you shortly. Meantime, I thank you all for participating and for sharing your short-story suggestions. Some great finds there.

It has taken me until the middle of May–Short Story Month–but I’m finally announcing the 2013 SSM giveaway of Quiet Americans. Details in a moment.

First, I want to encourage you to go over to Books, Personally and read Jennifer’s wonderful post all about Short Story Month (complete with links to other celebrating sites, including Fiction Writers Review, where I’ve done my bit to contribute to this year’s festivities).

Then, please come on back here and leave a comment. Bonus points if you mention one of the stories (or collections) you’ve most enjoyed over the past year. Extra bonus points if you mention a story that’s available online and give us a link to it. (I’m serious–you’ll get one or two additional entries in the giveaway if you do these things when you leave your comment.)

Comment anytime between now and May 30. On May 31, I’ll announce the giveaway winner. Please note that I can ship your SIGNED copy of Quiet Americans only within the U.S. at this time. And thanks for playing along!

6 thoughts on “Wednesday’s Work-in-Progress: Short Story Month Giveaway!

  1. Clive Collins says:

    Hello Erika, I’ve loved short stories for as long as I can remember. Before I could read, I listened. My mother was a wonderful teller of stories, recounting incidents from her own childhood to me when I was small. And then there was the radio. The BBC had a programme in the 1950s called “Listen with Mother”. It was broadcast every weekday at a quarter-to-two in the afternoon and was announced by a set of chimes after which a voice would state, rather severely, that “when the music stops, Daphne Oxenford will be here to tell you a story”. (It is a sadness that Daphne Oxenford died in December last year. It is both a sadness and a disgrace that the BBC has more or less closed itself down as a medium for the broadcasting of work in the short story form from new and emerging writers.) I write short stories myself. My collection “Misunderstandings” (Marion Boyars) shared the Macmillan Silver PEN Award in 1994.

    Stories available online that I’ve enjoyed this year are: “La Vita Nuova” by Allegra Goodman (http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/05/03/100503fi_fiction_goodman?currentPage=all) and, not for the first time, “The Man Who Would Be King” by Rudyard Kipling (http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/296/)

    Stories not available online but which I have greatly enjoyed this year include
    “James Joyce, English Teacher” by Richard Beard, a short story available from Amazon.com, and a collection called “East of Suez” by Alice Perrin. A contemporary of Kipling, Alice Perrin was unknown to me until I came across this new edition of some of her work, edited and with an introduction by Melissa Edmundson Makala .

  2. Bet says:

    I haven’t been a short story fan in the past, but my recent acquisition of The Complete Short Stories of Elizabeth Taylor has inspired me to be more open to the genre. Like a poem, a short story is sometimes able to pack a big emotional wallop in a small punch. Next up for me is Jon McGregor’s This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You.

  3. Shary says:

    Short story month inspired me to submit, something that scares me but that I know I have to do. I finished my latest story and sent it off yesterday. Fingers crossed!

    Two collections I’ve enjoyed recently are The Most Beautiful Book in the World by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt and Forgetting English (reread this one) by Midge Raymond.

  4. I write short stories, and I try to do some short story binge reading now and then, scouring the Internet for on-line journals and traditional publications with an on-line presence. The stand-out for me during my March and April reading effort was “Socorro” by S. L. Knapp at Abyss & Apex. http://www.abyssapexzine.com/2013/03/socorro-sl-knapp/ I also liked some of the stories in the “Best American Short Stories 2012” edited by Tom Perrotta, though I didn’t read the whole thing. http://ttbook.org/book/tom-perrotta-best-american-short-stories-2012 That included Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” which was pretty incredible.

  5. I read a lot of short stories, as they are a staple of Orthodox Jewish magazines. There was one written by Bracha Rosman about a couple waiting for their kids to arrive for the holiday of Sukkot that was particularly memorable.

    And last week, I read Ken Liu’s multiple-prize-winning story “Paper Menagerie.” Here’s the link: http://io9.com/5958919/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-the-hugo-nebula-and-world-fantasy-awards.

  6. Crystal says:

    I love short stories, and try to read them often. This year, I really loved Emma Straub’s Other People We Married and Elisa Schappell’s Blueprints for Building Better Girls.

    Also, I’m kind of in love with fivechapters.com. The stories that they feature, split into five parts and posted daily for a week, are all wonderful, thought-provoking, lovely. Definitely make it a point to read every week.

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