Best stories in October
Read 31 short stories in October, which I kept track of with WorkFlowy.com - very easy to use, absolutely essential now to keeping my writing, reading, submissions and to-do lists organized.
The first anthology I bought in Oct was the Million Writers Award non-sf anthology. Two so far are standouts: Marshall Moore's The Infinite Monkey Theoreom (funny, painful, oh the bureaucracy) and Eric Beetner's Ditch (reverse chronology = good strategy for this). I also bought the sf/f Million Writers Awards, and was knocked away by Adam-Troy Castro's brilliant and dark Arvies (originally published in Lightspeed). I read it on the shuttle from the parking lot and nearly missed my stop because I was so engrossed.
Another anthology I bought was Daily Science Fiction's January 2012 issue. I enjoyed Melissa Mead's Electric Company because I am a sucker for anthropomorphized appliances. (Including the Supernatural story where Jared is a toaster and the Inception story where Arthur is a teapot.) DSF's January issue has other good stories in it too, and two which have decidedly Twilight Zone endings. This is funny because I've been watching Rod Serling on YouTube this month as well.
My favorite YA story of the month is David Levithan's A Word from the Nearly Distant Past, in the anthology How Beautiful the Ordinary. Bittersweet and hopeful. Also Elise Juska's The Way I Saw the World Then, from The Missouri Review in 2009 (reprinted in Best Short Stories 2010).
At Clarkesworld I read Genevieve Valentine's story A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones because, hello Europa! My own Europa story is coming out in an anthology soon. At Strange Horizons I loved the details and writing of Lavie Tidhar's The Lord of Discarded Things, but maybe it's part of a novel? His story The School is one of my favorite stories of 2011.
In the re-reading department, here's a shout out for David Benioff's Zooanthropy in the Best of Tin House - excellent, strange, moving. Benioff, it turns out, is the showrunner of Game of Thrones. My story Searching for Slave Leia in Lightspeed is about an abusive showrunner. No relation.