It’s simple, really: every day in May (at least in 2013, we’ll see about future years), here at RAMH I’ll post I posted an excerpt from a different short story. Each story may be a famous one or one you’ve never heard of; they’ll come from all sorts of genres and time periods (although, my own cultural illiteracy being what it is, they’ll all be in English). I may include scraps of stories by myself; not sure about that yet. Some scraps I expect to be only a couple sentences long; others, several paragraphs. The only thing the stories will have in common is that I will have read and remembered something about all of them, sometimes even decades later.
And yes, whenever possible I will also include a link to some online source where you can read the whole story (or at least see where I found it).
The featured stories (to date):
| RAMH Date (May, 2013) |
Title | Author | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer | S.J. Perelman | |
| 2 | Drunk With Love | Ellen Gilchrist | |
| 3 | My Kinsman, Major Mollineux | Nathaniel Hawthorne | |
| 4 | The Killion | Ian Frazier | |
| 5 | Big Blonde | Dorothy Parker | |
| 6 | Entropy | Thomas Pynchon | |
| 7 | The Jockey | Carson McCullers | |
| 8 | The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald | Gordon Lightfoot | |
| 9 | Babel II | Damon Knight | |
| 10 | Blue Moon | Jayne Anne Phillips | |
| 11 | The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg | Mark Twain | |
| 12 | Tam O’Shanter | Donna Tartt | |
| 13 | A Toy for Juliette | Robert Bloch | |
| 14 | The Burning | Eudora Welty | |
| 15 | Cell Block Tango | John Kander and Fred Ebb | |
| 16 | A Clean, Well-Lighted Place | Ernest Hemingway | |
| 17 | Abominable | Carol Emshwiller | |
| 18 | Jeffty Is Five | Harlan Ellison | |
| 19 | Everything That Rises Must Converge | Flannery O’Connor | |
| 20 | Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 21 | Mirror Games | Colette | |
| 22 | Stan | Eminem | |
| 23 | The Heirs | Bobbie Ann Mason | |
| 24 | The Secret Miracle | Jorge Luis Borges | |
| 25 | The Duchess and the Jeweller | Virginia Woolf | |
| 26 | Game | Donald Barthelme | |
| 27 | Faithless | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 28 | The Enormous Radio | John Cheever | |
| 29 | Golden Ring | Tammy Wynette and George Jones | |
| 30 | The Catbird Seat | James Thurber | |
| 31 | First Sale | Jessica Francis Kane |
—
Deeper background, for information hounds:
I’m afraid I don’t know the author Jessica Francis Kane, but I follow her publisher, Graywolf Press, on Twitter. Graywolf, in turn, follows Kane. And a few weeks ago she posted a tweet (retweeted by Graywolf — are you following this???) which said:
National Poetry Month has “Poem in Your Pocket” Day. What could Short Story Month have? Twitter, this is our calling.
(The “Poem in Your Pocket” thing is an initiative sponsored by the Academy of American Poets poets.org site. On that day — which was April 18 this year — “people throughout the United States select a poem, carry it with them, and share it with others throughout the day.”)
Well, I thought about Kane’s question for a handful of minutes. And then — I almost never do this with strangers — I replied to her tweet:
Short Story Up Your Sleeve Day?
She liked it enough to say so publicly, and after my initial excitement (Twitter can do that) I, uh… well, I forgot all about it. (And as far as I know, so did the rest of the Internet.)
Scroll the calendar ahead a couple of weeks. Suddenly (or so it seemed) I started to see references to one of those periodic mass writing-exercise social-networking things which sweep the Internet every now and then. This one is called Story a Day: the idea is, you commit to write a (probably short-short) story every single day for the month of May. An interesting idea, and if I didn’t have a day job and other writing projects already I’m pretty sure I’d take them up on the challenge.
But then I remembered the Short Story Up Your Sleeve thing. Maybe I couldn’t write a story a day… but I sure could share a story a day.
So that’s what this month-long series will do.
If I’m feeling ambitious later, I may come up with some way to make these things easier for you to share, too. I noticed, for example, that the Poet in Your Pocket thing included a page of pocket-sized PDFs, pre-preprinted with poems. Maybe I’ll do something like that. Who knows.
Anyhow, please enjoy the samples. And — if you get a chance, and are so inclined — sometime this month, toast their authors, or just the simple notion that people continue to write and share short stories in the first place.
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