Lindsay Tigue has a short story in the new issue of Bearcreekfeed. Her story, "Shudder, Click," is wonderful and compact, somehow starting in a photo booth and stretching back a lifetime, and forward, too.
Lindsay blogs about short stories, too, at I Heart Short Stories, also in the blogroll here. And May is Short Story Month, so 1) give her a visit and 2) read some short stories!
I am celebrating Short Story Month by returning to Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock. I'd started it earlier, intrigued by her introduction about weaving family history and fiction, and then life and other reading tore me away.
Rejoining the book, not sure where I'd left off (bookmark taken out for re-shelving), I started with the stories in Part Two, Home, and loved them. Munro has that ability to just say it, to include everything true and of interest, down to Canadian geography and exploring crypts in an old cemetery.
Now I've returned to Part One, No Advantages, where I'll learn more about family history and people who left Scotland to settle in Canada.
Good that I'm reading it how, as I'm headed to Canada this summer for this, a week of Toronto Pursuits, and specifically this, Strange Bedfellows, for which I'll need to re-read Billy Budd, by Herman Melville, Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann, and "The Turn of the Screw," by Henry James, linked by the marvelous coincidence that they were all made into operas by Benjamin Britten.
This and other fantastic "learning vacations," chances to travel and talk with literary-minded people, are available at Classical Pursuits, the lovechild of Ann Kirkland.
Additional random coincidii here are that the discussion leaders for Classical Pursuits are often also discussion leaders for Great Books Chicago, where short story writer Lindsay Tigue helps it all happen in her job with the Great Books Foundation.
Sometimes the travel pursuits go to the Blyth Theatre Festival, with Blyth in the heart of Munro Country. And sometimes Alice Munro stories come to Joliet, Illinois, just up the road from me!
6 comments:
Short Story Month gives me the perfect excuse to reread Junot Diaz's "Drown," Joyce's "Dubliners," and I think I'll seek out work by someone I've heard of but never read. And if I may brag a bit, I have a story coming out as part of the Imaginary Families Project on the Red Dirt Chronicles site on 5/25.
Super cool. I love short stories---reading them as both isolated and part of the collection. George Saunders is one of my favorite short story-ers.
I kept wondering if She Sells Short Stories by the Seashore. And if not, why not?
I agree with Julie!
Alice Munro is my favorite. Now I want to read some Munro stories this summer
Etta, there's another book since Castle Rock. Too Much Happiness!
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