Erika Dreifus

UPDATE: Congratulations to Frume Sarah (Commenter #5 below) and Becky Wolsk (Commenter #6). You are collection giveaway winners! I will email each of you with more information shortly. Thanks to everyone for participating.

Those of you who have been following this blog for awhile may recall two salient facts. First, around this time last year, I offered a special giveaway: two short-story collections (by Susan Perabo and Margot Singer), in conjunction with the Collection Giveaway Project, an initiative coordinated by Fiction Writers Review (FWR) in celebration of Short Story Month (May). And second, I’m now a contributing editor for FWR, and it’s in that capacity that I am once again promoting the CGP as well as participating in it.

First, the promotion part: You can find details about the 2011 CGP on the FWR site, and I very much hope that plenty of you will choose to take part on your own blogs.

Second, the participation part: This May, I will once again award two short-story collections, one each to lucky commenters who shall be selected at random. This year, the collections I’m spotlighting are Midge Raymond’s newly reissued Forgetting English and my very own Quiet Americans.

I have been a fan of Midge Raymond’s work for years. In fact, I reviewed the first edition of Forgetting English for FWR back when the collection was published by Eastern Washington University Press as winner of the Spokane Prize. In its 2011 incarnation, hot off the presses this spring, the book includes two new stories. You can read an excerpt here. (By the way, Midge is also an instructive and engaging blogger, especially on writing-related topics, and definitely worth following on Twitter, too. First, though, make sure you read the guest post she shared with us right here on Practicing Writing last week as part of her virtual book tour.)

At this point, I don’t think you need much more introductory material about my story collection, Quiet Americans. After all, you’ve been reading pre-publication and post-publication posts for months. But I am very happy to have an occasion to offer another giveaway of my book. Now that Quiet Americans is available for Kindle, I’ll be able to award either a paperback OR e-copy, so please keep that in mind should you emerge as a giveaway winner. (For now, it seems that only the previous edition of Forgetting English is available for Kindle, so the choice there will be between the new edition in paperback and the older one for e-reading.)

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post, telling me about one collection you’ve read since last year’s giveaway. Title, author, press, and a line or two about what’s most memorable about it for you. The Collection Giveaway Project and Short Story Month more broadly are intended to celebrate short stories and the people who read and write them. So let’s get a big discussion (and reading list) going.

Comment anytime up to 12:01 a.m. (U.S. Eastern time) on Tuesday, May 31, 2011. At some point that day, I’ll turn to the trusty random number generator to select and announce our two winners. Please remember that I do have a day job, so I may not get to make the announcement until evening. Thanks for your patience—and for your participation!