A couple of reading/writing/reviewing deadlines sidelined my ability to keep up with the blog posts here on my Story A Day project, but I did indeed manage to keep up with the reading through the end of the month (albeit several of the stories were awfully awfully short, I’ll admit). Over the last week, I read Neil Gaiman’s “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” (available for free on Kindle) and Holly Day’s “The Barrel,” from the new issue of Bourbon Penn—two stories about disturbing encounters with the unknown; Joseph Michaels’ “Shadow” from this week’s SmokeLong (a story I didn’t entirely feel like I understood); and a quintet of stories from the collection Micro Fiction, edited by Jerome Stern: “At the Point” by Beauvais McCaddon; “Your Fears are Justified” by Rich DeMarinis; “20/20” by Linda Brewer; “Guadalupe in the Promised Land” by Sam Shepard; and “But What Was Her Name?” by Dawn Raffel—a mixed bag of stories, with the DeMarinis and Brewer entries striking me as the strongest. Despite best intentions, I didn’t get a chance this month to check out stories from two new collections sitting on my desk: Astray by Emma Donoghue and Bobcat by Rebecca Lee. But whether Short Story month is over or not, I’ll surely be delving into those collections soon. — Art Taylor
New Fiction in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine