The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

Kurze Beschreibung
Twenty unforgettable stories--the best of the year--by celebrated writers as well as new and emerging voices. he winning stories evoke lives both near and distant, in settings ranging from Afghanistan and Paraguay to Japan and Ireland, and feature an engaging array of characters.

Lange Beschreibung
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The winning stories come from a mix of established writers and emerging voices, and are uniformly breathtaking. They are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired their stories, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction.

'The Tomb of Wrestling,' Jo Ann Beard, Tin House
'Counterblast,' Marjorie Celona, The Southern Review
'Nayla,' Youmna Chlala, Prairie Schooner
'Lucky Dragon,' Viet Dinh, Ploughshares
'Stop n Go,' Michael Parker, New England Review
'Past Perfect Continuous,' Dounia Choukri, Chicago Quarterly Review
'Inversion of Marcia,' Thomas Bolt, n+1
'Nights in Logar,' Jamil Jan Kochai, A Public Space
'How We Eat,' Mark Jude Poirier, Epoch
'Deaf and Blind,' Lara Vapnyar, The New Yorker
'Why Were They Throwing Bricks?,' Jenny Zhang, n+1
'An Amount of Discretion,' Lauren Alwan, The Southern Review
'Queen Elizabeth,' Brad Felver, One Story
'The Stamp Collector,' Dave King, Fence
'More or Less Like a Man,' Michael Powers, The Threepenny Review
'The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies,' Jo Lloyd, Zoetrope
'Up Here,' Tristan Hughes, Ploughshares
'The Houses That Are Left Behind,' Brenda Walker, The Kenyon Review
'We Keep Them Anyway,' Stephanie A. Vega, The Threepenny Review
'Solstice,' Anne Enright, The New Yorker

Prize Jury for 2018:  Fiona McFarlane, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elizabeth Tallent

Rezensierung
'Widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction.' --The Atlantic Monthly

'This year s twenty O. Henry Prize Stories place the poetic qualities of the short story on full display.' --The New Criterion

'The latest installment of the storied short fiction prize volume . . . [is] a strong collection of first-rate work without a false note. Essential for students of the form.' --Kirkus Reviews

Buchausschnitt
Introduction

The subject matter of the twenty stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories is so varied that even naming it feels reductive: a violent home invasion, an illiterate writer of letters from the dead, a retrospective homage to a failed marriage, an inconspicuous man in a very small town who bears witness to the great world s horrors.

It becomes second nature for passionate readers to identify and consider the elements of fiction: plot, language, characters, setting. Subject matter seems like the most obvious one, yet is perhaps the least important in the long run. While an interesting subject might initially attract readers, it won t keep them there unless the formal elements are in balance.

For the author, subject matter is more complicated. Each element of a story can seem to have its own notion of its importance, so that the writer often feels in control of nothing. Add to this the fact that a writer can start with one idea of what the story is about and end by realizing that it s about something else entirely. Many authors say that they write to understand their own lives, so that even when a writer thinks she s creating a unique, completely invented character, she isn t surprised to recognize someone she knows lurking in the portrait or even herself.

Nothing matters in the end except the story itself.

After you have completed a story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018, you might find you have two different answers to the questions What is the subject matter? and What is the heart of the story? And if you turn to Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018, you can see what answers the authors themselves have to offer.

Jo Ann Beard s The Tomb of Wrestling is spectacular in the fullest sense of the word: at once a spectacle and an impressive artistic achievement. Jurors Fiona McFarlane and Elizabeth Tallent chose The Tomb of Wrestling as their favorite story (pp. 347 and 350).

Here s a story in which subject matter and plot march with locked arms. A woman is alone in her house. An intruder enters and attacks her. They fight. One wins and one loses. Beard describes their battle in raw and realistic detail. And yet, as in any short story, there s a story underneath the story, and this understory is immediately hinted at by the second clause of the first sentence: She struck her attacker in the head with a shovel, a small one that she normally kept in the trunk of her car for moving things off the highway. Surely every reader wants to say, Who cares how big the shovel is or why she keeps it in her trunk? Get on with the fight. The first clause is so strong that the reader wants to know what happens next, which is one definition of plot.

But we care about the shovel at least in part because the story is also about the particulars of the antagonists. We learn their names and stories, what each of them cares about, and how they came to be in the house at the same moment. We also learn where their minds are wandering, through passages that step away from the physical struggle. The mind never stops wandering, not even when the body is fighting for survival. Beard catches perfectly each character s strong will to live. By the story s end, the reader is fascinated as much by their mental ramblings as by the specifics of the struggle, and in this way The Tomb of Wrestling resembles what we call real life.

Marjorie Celona s Counterblast, chosen by 2018 juror Ottessa Moshfegh as her favorite story (p. 348), is funny, wry, sad, and full of energy. The narrator tells about the failure of her marriage and what she was like as the mother of an infant. The action centers on the death of her father-in-law and her interactions with her husband and his sister. The most intimate relations