The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 (The O. Henry Prize Collection) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345807316 ISBN 13: 9780345807311

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014

Synopsis

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories roam the world, from Nigeria to Venice, from an erupting volcano in Iceland to a brothel in the old Wild West. They feature a dazzling array of characters: a young American falling in love in Japan, a girl raised by snake-handling fundamentalists, an old man mourning his late wife, and a fierce guard dog with a talent for escape. Accompanying the stories are the editor’s introduction, essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.

Mark Haddon, “The Gun,” Granta
Stephen Dixon, “Talk,” The American Reader
Tessa Hadley, “Valentine,” The New Yorker
Olivia Clare, “Pétur,” Ecotone
David Bradley, “You Remember The Pin Mill,” Narrative
Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Nemecia,” Narrativemagazine.com
Dylan Landis, “Trust,” Tin House
Allison Alsup, “Old Houses,” New Orleans Review
Halina Duraj, “Fatherland,” Harvard Review
Chanelle Benz, “West of the Known,” The American Reader  
William Trevor, “The Women,” The New Yorker
Colleen Morrissey, “Good Faith,” The Cincinnati Review
Robert Anthony Siegel, “The Right Imaginary Person,” Tin House
Louise Erdrich, “Nero,” The New Yorker
Rebecca Hirsch Garcia, “A Golden Light,” Threepenny Review
Chinelo Okparanta, “Fairness,” Subtropics
Kristen Iskandrian, “The Inheritors,” Tin House
Michael Parker, “Deep Eddy,” Southwest Review
Maura Stanton, “Oh Shenandoah,” New England Review
Laura van den Berg, “Opa-Locka,” The Southern Review
 
The Jurors on Their Favorites: Tash Aw, James Lasdun, Joan Silber
The Writers on Their Work
Publications Submitted

About this title

About the Author

Laura Furman, series editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories since 2003, is the winner of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for her fiction. The author of seven books, including her recent story collection The Mother Who Stayed, she taught writing for many years at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Central Texas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from the Introduction

The mission since 1919 of The O. Henry Prize Stories has been to encourage the art of the short story. By calling attention to their gifts, we encourage short-story writers. When we put a story between book covers, we give it a longer life and a wider readership.

Because each story’s crucial first publication was in a magazine (print or online), we list the magazines that have submitted their short fiction in the back of each collection (pp. 358–77). We hope that with the information provided, new readers will find and enjoy the magazines and perhaps subscribe to one or two. These days, a reader also has the opportunity to be a patron of the arts and donate to a magazine, which helps keep the little magazines alive.

Some of the listed magazines are not struggling. The New Yorker publishes fiction weekly and has a sterling history of cultivating and supporting writers over the long haul, as does Harper’s. But some fit the classic notion of a little magazine: circulation well under one thousand, inventive design, eccentric and centrist fiction published side by side. Noon, for example, is an annual always filled with challenging fiction and always a pleasure to see and hold.

Some excellent magazines—Granta, Tin House, Narrative, and The American Reader, founded in September 2012—are brought into being by the vision and ambition of private benefactors. Tin House is a rare literary magazine that’s a commercial success. American nonprofit magazines with 501(c)(3) status such as A Public Space are eligible for support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a perennial pincushion when it comes to federal funding. The Threepenny Review publishes consistently readable and challenging essays, poetry, and fiction with the support of “subscriber-donors,” whose subscriptions make up about 35 percent of the annual budget, along with their donations (40 percent), according to editor Wendy Lesser. The rest of the broadsheet’s funding comes from grants, advertising, single-copy sales, and digital sales. Narrative (and NarrativeMagazine.com) is the product of its two editors, Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks, who supported it themselves at first and gradually built a board, an advisory council, and a base of donors.

Many magazines are funded by public and private academic institutions. Shrinking state budgets may put a magazine in mortal danger, as those in charge question whether a small magazine is the best use of public funding. Does it aid the institution as, say, a winning football team does? Measuring the value of art, not to mention the value of prestige, is a trickier score to keep than that of the Cotton Bowl. Still, some institutions, private and public, continue year after year to support the magazines that give established and new writers a chance. In recent years, Ecotone has emerged as a solidly interesting magazine. The Publishing Laboratory of the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington founded the magazine in 2005 and also supports its small press, Lookout Books. New England Review was founded in 1978 at Middlebury College, a small liberal-arts school in Vermont. New Orleans Review (1968) is sponsored by the English Department of Loyola University, New Orleans, and Subtropics by the University of Florida. Since 1915, Southwest Review has been Southern Methodist University’s pride. The exquisite Southern Review is supported by Louisiana State University.

Many little magazines seek help from donors, joining schools, hospitals, scientific research institutions, museums, and a myriad of organizations that do not make a profit but add immeasurably to our lives. Your subscriptions to such magazines help keep them alive. The editors and staff of little magazines don’t enjoy big salaries. Some have no salaries at all. They work with such devotion because the idea of publishing new literary work is a powerful motivation, profit or no profit. The real success of a magazine lies in the quality of the work chosen and published.

This year’s jurors are Tash Aw, James Lasdun, and Joan Silber, all previous O. Henry winners. Each read a blind manuscript and chose a favorite without consultation with one another or me. In the “Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014” section (pp. 333–38), you’ll find their essays.

Years ago, my family drove to Colorado for a break from the Central Texas summer. We’d brought way too much stuff, and our rented Aztek was weighed down by the extra container on its roof. On the way, I got gasoline on my favorite white shirt and parted with it. Along Highway 90, still in Texas, we slept in a dank cement-block motel with mold-filled air-conditioning. But when we reached the rented house in Gunnison, where we could finally stop traveling, instead of flinging open the car doors and escaping, we stayed in the Aztek so we could keep listening to the audio recording of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Haddon’s story in this collection, “The Gun,” was chosen by juror Tash Aw as his favorite. One quality the story shares with the novel is Haddon’s ability to involve the reader in the improbable, sometimes confounding events of his characters’ lives.

The relationship between the two boys whose adventure forms the bulk of the action isn’t profound. They are together and then they part, for many reasons and with some feeling, all unstated. Their nonchalant friendship leaves both boys unprepared for the arbitrary violence and emotion to come. “The Gun” is a story made up of curious incidents that, when put together with Haddon’s skill, bring the characters so close that the action of the story seems to have happened to us.

The primary relationship in “Pétur” by Olivia Clare is between mother and son, in Iceland to celebrate the mother’s birthday. They, and the reader, are in a realm of “unworldly weather.” The story streams past unfamiliar words such as fjalls and hrossagaukur, and a weather report—“ash from Eyjafjallajökull”—before we’re sure exactly who and where the characters are. Our ignorance is dispensed with abruptly:

Adam was a data systems analyst. He was thirty-six. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, where Laura was, in a house she’d once shared with Adam’s father on the other side of town. Iceland for two weeks had been her idea for her birthday. She’d just turned sixty-one, and she’d told Adam she didn’t believe it, and he shouldn’t, either. She’d said, You look in the mirror and acknowledge you’re as old as you like. She felt nineteen, mostly. She looked fifty.

Mother and son, on vacation in a land of ash and icebabies, are introduced with quite a few numbers (thirty-six, one, two, sixty-one, nineteen, fifty). We’ve been given what looks like information, though the numbers urge us to pause, add, and subtract before we go on. This odd timing is a risk for the author. Short-story beginnings are crucial, and often writers take great trouble to be as clear and simple as possible to usher the reader into the story. Clare does the opposite, giving her reader firm ground to stand on and then taking it away. The passage of the mother’s birthday and the spooky volcanic ash falling everywhere seem like part of the same unpredictable event. The reader is then immersed in what is most important in “Pétur”: the characters’ knowledge and ignorance of each other; the transformation of a woman from a mildly negligent mother into a woman either unhinged or unloosed in her own new reality. The reader watches the son as he watches his mother drift further from him than ever before.

The sisters in “Opa-locka” by Laura van den Berg are linked, like survivors of the same plane crash. (Joan Silber chose “Opa-locka” as her favorite, p. 337–38.) The sisters’ closeness is their bedrock. As the story opens, they’re working as private detectives, observing the movements of a possibly adulterous husband from a rooftop. They also search, perennially, for their father, who’s a disappointment whether absent or present. The slow revelation of their past and future winds through “Opa-locka” while the reader waits for the solution to the story’s mystery. Surely, the deep sadness that haunts the story isn’t for their client, her wandering husband, or even for Mozart’s Don Giovanni, who makes a surprise appearance in Van den Berg’s story.

In “Nemecia” by Kirstin Valdez Quade, the narrator, Maria, tells us that her cousin Nemecia lived with her family because her own mother, Maria’s aunt Benigna, “couldn’t care for her. Later, when Aunt Benigna recovered . . . , Nemecia had already lived with us for so long that she stayed. This was not unusual in our New Mexico town in those years between the wars; if someone died, or came upon hard times, or simply had too many children, there were always aunts or sisters or grandmothers with room for an extra child.”

Yet it isn’t Nemecia who grows up as an “extra child,” but Maria. The ravenous and dramatic Nemecia is the child indulged and favored by the adults. She terrifies Maria and tortures her in a variety of ways, yet when Nemecia turns sixteen and has bigger fish to fry than her little cousin, Maria finds that “instead of relief, [she feels] emptiness.” For Maria, Nemecia is glamorous and tragic; Maria’s envy of her cousin begins to poison her life. A family secret, distorted by Nemecia, is the basis of Maria’s lifetime imprisonment in the family. Nemecia moves to California, renames herself “Norma,” and lives with her mother, brother, and stepfather in a house where Spanish is never spoken. Nemecia/Norma is free to reinvent herself, while Maria is cursed by her search for the truth and by her envious need for her nemesis.

Another pair of girls, Uzoamaka, the narrator, and Eno, the daughter of a family servant, are at the center of Chinelo Okparanta’s “Fairness.” Both Eno and her mother have fair skin, while Uzoamaka and her school friends have skin “the color not of ripe pawpaw peels, but of its seeds.” She declares, “We are thirsty for fairness.” A school friend has lightened her skin with a special product, using household bleach instead of the cosmetics—Esoterica, Movate, Skin Success, Ambi—Uzoamaka’s mother brings home from her trips overseas in pursuit of fairness for herself and her daughter.

But there is bleach and there is bleach, and fairness can mean justice rather than skin color. The disaster that follows is about far more than color. The problematic reality of Uzoamaka’s dark skin is another hurdle to clear for her ambitious mother, who plans to send her to America and advises powder to “brighten” her up, while the lightness of the housegirl Ekaite’s skin doesn’t give her the power to defend herself against Uzoamaka.

Kristen Iskandrian’s “The Inheritors” is an alluring story, told by a narrator whose mother has died and father absconded to a condo in Florida; she’s adrift for the moment. “I like being sad,” she tells us in a long passage detailing what annoyed her about her fellow employee at Second Chances, a consignment store.

I like being sad, which mystified her; I like it until I reach the nadir where sadness changes, as if chemically, to repulsion and self-loathing, making me wish that I was “capable” of “handling” things instead of turning away from them in disgust until my disgust disgusts me, and my anger at my inadequacy as a human being angers me, and all of that pure, easy, delectable sorrow gets squandered. She refused, cheerfully, to understand this, and it wasn’t her refusal that was maddening but her cheer.

Their friendship develops, and the narrator’s illusion of mutual understanding grows. It’s a time when she’s neither here nor there, and she’s lonely. Her friend from work is someone who’ll be there without her having to make arrangements for company, and someone about whom she’s curious. The coincidence of their jobs makes their friendship prematurely comfortable.

The silent partner in their troika is the consignment shop itself—a museum of the unwanted and the relinquished—and the hidden dramas performed there each day. Each woman has strong feelings about her personal possessions. For the narrator, the most important exist in her memory. Their weight on her is as heavy and awkward as carrying ten sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The treasures her friend has collected are a sum greater than all of her parts. Once we see them in her apartment, we believe, as the narrator does, that this is a person anchored to the spot, but we also know, even if the narrator doesn’t, that here is a person who’ll never be fully known. The reader’s double knowledge is a tribute to Iskandrian’s talent and imagination. “The Inheritors” is juror James Lasdun’s favorite; his consideration of Kristen Iskandrian’s story is on pp. 335–37.

A more nefarious pair opens Dylan Landis’s “Trust” with an exchange of lies:

“We’re just practicing,” says Tina.
“We’re just playing,” says Rainey.
“We’re just taking a walk.”
“Yeah, but we’re walking behind them,” says Rainey.

They could just be playing. There’s something sweet about two girls walking along, playing or pretending to be “robber girls,” or so it seems until the story opens to reveal the darkness of sexual abuse and the presence of a gun. There’s another dangerous element at work, but it’s shoved to the side. When a remark of Tina’s offends her friend, it might seem no more than a momentary insensitivity, easily forgiven, if Landis didn’t follow her remark and immediate apology with a description of the gun.

“Inside Rainey’s purse, the gun beats like a heart.” The gun is alive and vaguely sexual. There’s something wrong with these girls, the reader senses, a mixture of all three elements of danger: the secret of sexual abuse, the presence of the gun, and their unexplored, explosive friendship. Rainey and Tina’s criminal debut isn’t on the scale of Bonnie and Clyde’s, but it’s a devastation made vivid by Landis’s writerly skill and patience.

The Canadian writer Clark Blaise theorized that short stories reverse from beginning to end; what begins with smiles will end in tears. William Trevor’s story about Cecilia Normanton, “The Women,” begins with a description of the 1980s as “listless,” a word that also describes the obedient and ignorant heroine, about whom we learn in the same sentence that she knew “her father well, her mother not at all.”

After two years, Cecilia’s been told, her parents’ happy marriage ended because her mother fell in love with another man. Her father grew “melancholy,” which had a powerful effect on his daughter, who never dared to ask if her mother had died. Eventually, after a childhood spent with a tutor and servants who haven’t the time to converse, Cecilia is sent to boarding school, which she dislikes at first but comes to enjoy. Into her new life two women enter, and all that she missed and ignored during her childhood takes center stage.

Trevor isn’t a writer who pulls the rug from under his readers as a matter of course. He isn’t known for plot twists but rather for slow, steady, devastating revelations of character. The unfussy precision of his language seems like the wise conclusion to a thoughtful argument. Yet more goes on than well-tempered descriptions. Behind every Trevor story—“The Women” is no different—one detects the drumbeat of reversal, the revelation of the subtle beneath the obvious, of the truth beneath the secret.

The title of Halina Duraj’s “Fatherland” refers both to Poland, the birth country of the narrator’s parents, and also to the country of family. What might be called the crea...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0345807316
• ISBN 13: 9780345807311
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416
• Editor: Furman Laura