Short Story Month Collection Giveaway Project
Welcome to Short Story Month!
This year, I am happy to be joining other bloggers in the annual Fiction Writers Review Collection Giveaway Project, a community effort by lit bloggers to raise attention for short story collections. FWR Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus suggested FWR as a home for this project last year and will not only be participating on her own blog, but will also be helping FWR run the project. And those of you who are fiction bloggers yourselves, click here for information on how you can participate as well.
The only difficult part about this for me has been choosing a collection to give away…but I've finally narrowed it down. To three.
First, I'm happy to be giving away Erika's own collection, Quiet Americans, out this year and well worth the long wait! I first met Erika in a bookstore outside Boston, where we did a reading together as finalists for a short story award. So I've enjoyed her work for many years and was thrilled to have a whole collection of her haunting and thought-provoking stories to curl up with this winter. From a high-ranking Nazi's wife and a Jewish doctor in prewar Berlin to a refugee returning to Europe as terrorists massacre Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the characters and conflicts that emerge in Quiet Americans reframe familiar questions about what is right and wrong, remembered and repressed, resolved and unending.
I'm also happy to be giving away Becky Hagenston's collection Strange Weather, which received the 2009 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and was published by the fabulous Press 53. As with Erika, I'd already been acquainted with Becky's work and with some of these stories through the many literary magazines they've appeared in, and I loved having the chance to overdose on them with this collection, which is nearly impossible to put down. From the visceral tension in the mother-daughter relationship in "Trafalgar" to the wonderfully witty ghost story "Anthony," these stories offer us a delightful mix of magic and reality, while never losing their grip on the truths that draw us to stories in the first place.
And finally, I'm delighted to offer the wonderful collection The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund, now out in paperback. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, this beautiful book introduces us to characters venturing out into a world in hopes of escaping their troubles, only to find that life remains as complicated as it was before they left. You may have already read "All Boy" in Best American Short Stories 2010 (two additional stories from the collection, "Bed Death" and "Talking Fowl with My Father," are on the list of Other Distinguished Stories) — and if you've already read Lori's work, you'll only want to read more.
To be entered to win, leave a comment on this post any time from now to midnight (Pacific time!) on Tuesday, May 31, 2011, at which time I'll use a random number generator to select three lucky winners.
Happy Short Story Month! Go forth, read stories, and celebrate.
