Short Story Month Week

As I mentioned earlier, May* has been unofficially designated National Short Story Month.  Here at The Quivering Pen, I'll be celebrating all week long with daily giveaways and original essays by the participating authors.  Here's** what you have to look forward to...

Monday:  Siobhan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone
Tuesday:  Jeff Kass, Knuckleheads
Wednesday:  Seth Fried, The Great Frustration
Thursday:  Henning Koch, Love Doesn't Work
Friday:  Melanie Rae Thon, In This Light
Saturday:  Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision
Sunday:  Shann Ray, American Masculine

This week-long mini Mardi Gras was inspired by the Short Story Month Collection Giveaway Project hosted by the hard-working folks at Fiction Writers Review.  Visit this page for a list of other participating bloggers.  Thanks to the FWR, I made a last-minute, spur-of-the-moment decision to jump into the fray with giveaways of my own.  My sincerest thanks to the authors and book publicists who agreed to help me out on short notice.  This week would not have been possible without their generosity and enthusiasm.

Here are the "rules" of the daily contests:
1.  Open to residents of the U.S. and Canada only.  In addition, books cannot be shipped to addresses with P.O. boxes.
2.  All contests will remain open until May 31.  At that time, I will conduct separate drawings for each book.
3.  Yes, you can enter the drawings for each book, but you must send in an entry for each book (in other words, no emails saying, "Put me in for all of 'em!").
4.  One entry per person per book (i.e. stuffing the ballot box won't increase your chances of winning).
5.  Specific instructions on how to enter can be found in each day's blog post.

I couldn't let this day pass without mentioning that this is the birthday of one of our greatest practitioners of short fiction: Katherine Anne Porter.  Had she lived, she would have had 121 candles on her cake.  Success came relatively late in life for K. A. P., but what she left us was incredibly rich and wonderful.

On the third day after they moved to the country he came walking back from the village carrying a basket of groceries and a twenty-four-yard coil of rope. She came out to meet him, wiping her hands on her green smock. Her hair was tumbled, her nose was scarlet with sunburn; he told her that already she looked like a born country woman. His gray flannel shirt stuck to him, his heavy shoes were dusty. She assured him he looked like a rural character in a play.
       --Opening lines of "Rope"

*Wouldn't it be better to celebrate short fiction during February, the calendar's shortest month?  This would be the perfect time to stay bundled up indoors with a copy of, say, Winter's Tales by Isak Dinesen or "Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
**It's a tentative schedule, subject to change.