Prize Stories 1986: The O. Henry Awards - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385231563 ISBN 13: 9780385231565

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1986

Synopsis

“Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious award for short fiction.”—The Atlantic Monthly

The O. Henry Prize Stories 1986 collects 19 of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The 1986 winning story is Alice Walker’s “Kindred Spirits,” which profiles a young African-American woman after her divorce from her white husband. A Special Award for Continuing Achievement is given to Joyce Carol Oates for “Master Race” that narrates a shocking of a sexual assault in Germany. Other stories include:

Stuart Dybek “Pet Milk”
Greg Johnson “Crazy Ladies”
John L’Heureux “The Comedian”
Joyce R. Kornblatt “Offerings”
Ward Just “The Costa Brava, 1959”
Peter Meinke “Uncle George and Uncle Stefan”
Bobbie Anne Mason “Big Bertha Stories”
Merrill Joan Gerber “‘I Don’t Believe This’”
Gordon Lish “Resurrection”
Peter Cameron “Excerpts from Swan Lake”
Alice Adams “Molly’s Dog”
Deborah Eisenberg “Transaction in a Foreign Currency”
Anthony DiFranco “The Garden of Redemption”
Jeanne Wilmot “Dirt Angel”
Elizabeth Spencer “The Cousins”
Irvin Faust “The Year of the Hot Jock”
Stephanie Vaughn “Kid MacArthur”

About this title

About the Author:

Born in 1919, William Abrahams published four successful novels and a number of poems before finding his true calling as an editor. He presided over the O. Henry Awards for more than 30 years starting in 1965. Abrahams also worked as the west coast editor of Atlantic Monthly Press and collaborated on nonfiction books with his partner, Peter Stansky. He passed away in 1998.

From Publishers Weekly:

The tellers of these 19 tales constitute a pantheon of rising or already established young writers, including first-prize winner Alice Walker, with "Kindred Spirits," a vignette about a young black woman returning home after divorcing her white husband, and special-award winner Joyce Carol Oates, whose "Master Race" recounts in spare and elegant prose the sexual assault in Germany of a youngish American academic by a black G.I. In many ways more compelling, however, are Bobbie Ann Mason's "Big Bertha Stories," a blinding insight into the mind of a man hounded by memories of Vietnam; John L'Heureux's "The Comedian," a metaphysical tour de force about a standup comic who becomes pregnant with a baby whose blithe in utero singing drowns out the arguments for abortion; Stephanie Vaughn's "Kid MacArthur," a boy growing up in an army family, learning to use guns before pencils, reluctantly going off to war and returning a militant vegetarian, shrinking from any violation of flesh. These and several other stories capture and involve the reader: they are written with grace, authority and bitter knowledge, and despite their verbal brevity cast a long shadow that is deeply etched and hard to dispel. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0385231563
• ISBN 13: 9780385231565
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 292
• Editor: Abrahams William