"The Last Leaf" by Katherine Anne Porter

An old servant finds a home of her own at the end of her life. Her former employers discover then what she really meant to them. Read by Jonathan Strong.

Over nine decades, Katherine Anne Porter may not have produced the world's largest oeuvre--but what an oeuvre! Anyone who has read her short stories about her early life in Texas or the novel Ship of Fools (however flawed it is supposed to be) could tell you what a consummate writer she is. She spent much of her life traveling back and forth between Mexico (where she worked on a magazine for a while), the United States, and Europe. Eventually she settled near the District of Columbia. "I shall try to tell the truth," she once said, "but the result will be fiction." Hmm... sounds like she was near Washington.

Jonathan Strong spends his summers teaching fiction writing at the Bread Loaf School of English in the Green Mountains of Vermont. When he is not busy swatting deerflies there in his off-hours, he can be found working on his own fiction--currently a novel half-done. He promises to keep reading steadily for us!