Alaa Al Aswany comes to Fifty-Two Stories – One of the great things about Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories website (aside from getting to read great stories for free), is the multicultural mix of the stories they serve up for our delectation. And this week it doesn’t get much more cosmopolitan than a story from Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany called The Kitchen Boy. The story comes from Alaa Al Aswany’s upcoming short story collection, Friendly Fire (a collection which explores the lives of contemporary Egyptians), and it promises an exploration of ‘the hypocrisy of class divide’, which in my book makes The Kitchen Boy an unmissable read.
Talking about unmissable reads, I actually missed out on not only reading last week’s offering, but also revealing what the free story offering was. Shame on me! So in the spirit of better late than never, the story served up by Fifty-Two Stories last week was Good Girl by Holly Goddard Jones. As usual it looks to be a great story, and with Cal Morgan proclaiming it to be one of his favourites of the year, I’m doubly ashamed for having basically ignored it for a week. I’m on it Cal. Both stories are uploading to my ereader as I speak.
BBAW shortlist announced. Voting opens – You may remember last week I put up a post of gratitude to those (Mee for one) who put RobAroundBooks forward in a couple of categories for the Book Blogger Appreciation Week Awards. Well today the shortlists were made public and voting has commenced in all categories. Sadly RobAroundBooks never made it onto the shortlist (now I know how Salman Rushdie feels 
), but a heck of a lot of great blogs did. So if have a few minutes to spare, then get yourself along to the BBAW ‘voting booth’ and vote for your shortlist favourites. You have until Saturday September 12 at 11:59 PM EST, to do so. Good luck to all shortlisters!
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