It’s June 1! Which means National Short Story Month is officially over for 2015. My goal when it started was to read a story a day for the whole month. Well, I came out 23 for 31, which isn’t bad and is about 20 more stories than I’d normally read in a month. I reported on the first week here and the second week here. To finish out the month:

“Gwen” by Jamaica Kincaid: I’ve never read any Kincaid fiction and found this in an anthology I had out from the library. Apparently it appears as part of a set of connected stories in Kincaid’s Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip

“Nemecia” and “Jubilee” by Kirstin Valdez Quade: Quade was my big discovery for the month; see below.

“So Much Water So Close to Home” by Raymond Carver: A re-read because Carver. From our giant American Library Collected Stories edition.

“That Golden Summer” by Asali Solomon: One of my absolute favorites of the month. If you like Joyce Carol Oates “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” check this out. Some similar themes are covered but with a lot more humor though it is no less devastating. From her collection Get Down.

“Dancing with the One-Armed Gal” by Tim Gautreaux: A re-read. Gautreaux is great, and if you’re not familiar with him but enjoy stories, take a gander at his stuff. Maybe start with his collection Welding with Children. (This story can be found in that one, as well as my favorite TG story, “The Pine Oil Writers’ Conference”)

“Mortals” by Tobias Wolff: For my money, you can never go wrong with Wolff. This can be found in Our Story Begins and probably in other places.

“The Five Wounds” by Kirstin Valdez Quade: My month ended up including four stories from Quade’s collection Night at the Fiestas, and I’m connecting with her writing for so many reasons. One is the familiarity of the settings–from California agricultural communities to areas of New Mexico where I spent many months while my husband was in grad school in Santa Fe. Another is the way the stories are saturated with religion and spirituality, and thirdly there’s a coming-of-age theme running through–several of the stories I’ve read so far have a whiff of YA about them in the best way. The NYT review captures the spirit of this collection really well.

“A Field Guide to the Western Birds” by Wallace Stegner: This one is about fifty pages and I’m still reading it a little into June. Stegner is one of my favorites, just a master of the sentence. This is in the Collected Stories.

Let’s do this again in 2016!