Short Story September is coming up…

It’ll soon be another month, and there’s another tag for it now as Rebecca of Bookish Beck has taken over as host of Short Story September. It’s also RIP XXI (Readers Imbibing Peril) in September/October.

I don’t know about you, but I struggle to read whole books of short stories by one author. I find they’re often just over too quickly, then it’s read and repeat for the next story. I could intersperse a book of short stories with other reads, but I fear it’d get put to the side and forgotten as I’m not good at reading several books at the same time. However, I’ve come up with a plan…

Do you remember back in the 1995 when Penguin was celebrating its 60th birthday, they published several sets of ‘Penguin 60s’ – little paperbacks of short stories, novellas and essays- there was the orange-spined set, the black-spine classics set, plus a smaller children’s set. I bought both sets, and they’ve languished in a cupboard ever since. The other day, I came across one of the classics selection that had got separated from the rest – and it was 3 Turgenev short stories. This inspired me to dig out some others for Short Story September and bearing RIP in mind too. Being extracted from collections, means I can read the whole lot in one go, and not have to worry about forgetting to finish them. Perfect… the initial ones I’ve picked out are:

• Ivan Turgenev – Three Sketches from ‘A Hunter’s Album’. (3 from 25, first published in 1852).
• Patricia Highsmith – Little Tales of Misogyny (17 really short stories of ‘simmering malice’, most just 3 or so small pages, 1977)
• Muriel Spark – The Portobello Road and Other Stories (4 in total, 1938-61)
• Poppy Z Brite – His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood (4 stories of ‘contemporary horror’ from her collection 1994 Swamp Foetus).

I can’t wait to get going on these. Are you joining in this tag?