The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 (The O. Henry Prize Collection) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1101971118 ISBN 13: 9781101971116

Publisher: Anchor, 2016

Synopsis

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories range in setting from Japan at the outset of World War II to a remote cabin in the woods of Wyoming, and the characters that inhabit them range from a misanthropic survivor of an apocalyptic flood to a unicorn hidden in a suburban house. Whether fantastical or realistic, gothic or lyrical, the stories here are uniformly breathtaking. They are accompanied by the editor’s introduction, essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.

CONTENTS

"Irises," Elizabeth Genovise
"The Mongerji Letters," Geetha Iyer
"Narrator," Elizabeth Tallent
"Bonus Baby," Joe Donnelly
"Divergence," David H. Lynn
"A Simple Composition," Shruti Swamy
"Storm Windows," Charles Haverty
"Train to Harbin," Asako Serizawa
"Dismemberment," Wendell Berry
"Exit Zero," Marie-Helene Bertino
"Cigarettes," Sam Savage
"Temples," Adrienne Celt
"Safety," Lydia Fitzpatrick
"Bounty," Diane Cook
"A Single Deliberate Thing," Zebbie Watson
"The Crabapple Tree," Robert Coover
"Winter 1965," Frederic Tuten
"They Were Awake," Rebecca Evanhoe
"Slumming," Ottessa Moshfegh   
"Happiness," Ron Carlson
The Jurors on Their Favorites: Molly Antopol, Peter Cameron, Lionel Shriver
The Writers on Their Work
Publications Submitted

For author interviews, photos, and more, go to www.ohenryprizestories.com  

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.

 
Introduction
 
This year, as always, when the reading got under way for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016, the stories in the just-published 2015 collection whispered in my ear that this would be the year when I wouldn’t find another twenty worthy of succeeding them. The haunting prediction held for a while, and then the first right one appeared. This year, Ron Carlson’s “Happiness” reassured me that once again there were more wonderful stories to discover for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016.
 
A story with that title might be greeted with skepticism. Happiness? Really? The word’s in our Declaration of Independence but most of us can’t say what it means to be happy, though we know the feeling when it’s there and we miss it when it’s gone.
 
Carlson’s characters—the narrator, his brother, and two sons—are meeting at the family’s mountain cabin in October to secure the place for the winter. When the narrator and his son stop for the night in Wyoming, it’s five degrees above zero and there are pickup trucks parked in front of Wally’s, home of the Wally Burger. The narrator knows that the “smart shepherds and collies” that would in warmer weather be in the trucks are in the motel’s warm rooms. Game three of the World Series is on TV. The narrator lays out these simple and ordinary conditions as if he were describing a moment in paradise.
 
The unhurried pace of the narration speaks of happiness as the narrator luxuriates in his modest way. He isn’t about to rush anything, not his descriptions of the weather, land, trees, water, trout, or deer. Even the cabin’s copper Levelor blinds have their moment. Happiness might glow and inspire, in memory and in its presence, but it doesn’t last, a truth here not stated but implied by the aesthetics of the story.
 
The one female character, the boys’ mother, isn’t there, though she’s present. She and the narrator are divorced, and we don’t know why or when. A letter she’s written to the narrator, which he receives from his son in the course of the story, is protected from the wet and treated with the same care as any other object. When the narrator tells family stories he includes her, calling her “your dear mother.” Their parental love, which is also a love for each other, reveals itself in the narrator’s careful patience as he instructs their sons.
 
By the time the vivid, beautifully written story reaches its end, the reader realizes why the narrator is determined to teach his sons how to take care of the cabin and wants them to know how to find a certain place on the land. The reason is more often the cause for tears and not happiness, though Carlson’s “Happiness” would have it otherwise.
 
Joe Donnelly’s “Bonus Baby” brings us to the ball game but from inside the very center, from the pitcher’s point of view. The story takes place during a game—not just any game but a possible perfect game. We see how the pitcher’s life has led him to this moment.
 
The pitcher’s tics, familiar to any baseball fan, are his way of controlling what little he can in the uncontrollable game and in his life. He uses his tug, wipe, and touch to his cap to “harness energy and deliver it.”
 
“Bonus Baby” is in the mythic tradition of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, in which baseball is treated as a variant on the Trojan War and the players like demigods and great warriors—but in Donnelly’s vision the pitcher is a Midwesterner and speaks with the inherent groundedness and modesty of that region. He’s the son of former athletes, homecoming king and queen, whose lives rolled downhill after high school. They spend their adult lives cooped up indoors, his mother as a secretary and his father as an alcoholic mechanic in a textile mill. Their positions are as different as can be from the pitcher’s at the center of the playing field. The lesson they teach their son is that glory will not come, and the pitcher must throw beyond his inheritance of failure in order to win. The reader is with him every inch of the way.
 
In Charles Haverty’s engaging “Storm Windows,” a son recalls his father’s enslavement to a house. Putting on storm windows and taking them down can be a strain even for those who love a house; Haverty’s choice of the necessary and tedious chore is a shrewd one, for the twice-yearly task embodies the quasi-matrimonial devotion that some houses demand.
 
The narrator, Lionel, dislikes the big old-fashioned house, as do his mother and sister. “Only my father, who traveled often on business and spent the least amount of time there, loved the house.” As an adult, Lionel is fated to take care of another demanding house because for his wife, “a child of divorce, the house represented a triumph over the chaos of her youth.” For Lionel, his own house demands repeated chores and rescue operations performed, with any luck, by others. Lionel has no talent or taste for home repair.
 
“Storm Windows” reaches through Lionel’s marriage with its tenderness and troubles, his daughters’ sweetness in childhood and reproachfulness as young adults, his father’s near-deaths, and his mother’s consistent bitterness. In a crucial scene, the first of his “deaths,” Lionel’s father asks that his record of “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot be played. The aria ends with “Vincèro” (I will win), a moving cry against cold nights, death, and the darkness of the sky. Both Lionel and his father are stuck in the darkness of marriage, adultery, and their imperfect love for each other.
 
Haverty mixes a protest against mortality with the comedy of a sick man welcoming the ambulance attendants who’ve come to rescue him and offering them pancakes. The best we can do, the story might be saying, is to try to protect and love one another, as clumsy at it as we turn out to be. The author’s combination of the quotidian and the unspoken gives “Storm Windows” its power.
 
Lydia Fitzpatrick’s “Safety” is about danger, and it begins in a setting of sleepy safety, a children’s gym class. It would be unfair in this case to give a précis of the story’s action. However, it gives nothing away to say that, aside from an intelligent and compassionate dissection of this particular danger, the story’s strength comes from the writer’s capacity to understand the mature and fantastical lives of children. The story within the story is about trust.
 
The story is told from the points of view of several children and takes place in an elementary school. Everything in the school has been designed by adults for the children, from the décor to the daily customs, the lining up for phases of the school day, staying silent when asked to be, not speaking out of turn. The children trust in the adults in exchange for the promised safety. It’s an agreement that honorable adults work hard to keep. Without the trust children are asked to give unquestioningly, the drama of “Safety” would be negated.
 
Though the story is about a type of violence that is hard to understand, its focus is not on harm. Rather, it concentrates on the ways in which characters relate, some at their best, others at their worst, and the story demonstrates that even the most evil character is capable of love.
 
Even stories categorized as fantastical are based on some level on familiar human life. In such stories it’s not only the entertaining and delightful details that keep us engaged but also the shadow of the familiar. In Geetha Iyer’s “The Mongerji Letters,” the eponymous family has been charged for generations with the preservation of places, weather, and botanical and animal specimens that are extinct or nearly so. New items for the Mongerji collection arrive in envelopes. Another family, the Chappalwalas, explores the world, capturing the rare and the endangered, and sending their treasures to the Mongerjis. So it’s been for many years. An ordinary letter in a matching envelope might contain the Arctic Ocean, complete with a polar bear. Storage was no problem for a long while—the many envelopes were filed away—but the world is changing, society degrading, and the Mongerji family is forced to retreat with the collection.
 
Time is both brief and elastic in Iyer’s tale. Extinction puts pressure on those who would preserve the world, yet for these characters years go by as one of our days might pass. “The Mongerji Letters” is told through a correspondence between young Mr. Chappalwala and various Mongerjis, and Iyer gracefully pushes along time and information about events and characters through the various voices. She creates a constant tension between the timelessness of the strange events and our overwhelming sense that we’re watching a dying planet, a very contemporary feeling. The tension is gently reinforced by the old-fashioned epistolary form and the style of the dates, for example, “September 7, —18.” Is it 1918? 2018? 3018? Iyer’s intricate story could be set at almost any time and be just as engrossing and as wise.
 
Robert Coover, a master storyteller, writes a small-town story that reads like a tale from the Brothers Grimm rather than a chapter of Winesburg, Ohio. “The Crabapple Tree” is narrated by a woman no better and no worse than her peers. Her parenting style can be summed up in her credo: “Children have to be allowed to grow up on their own—I’ve always believed that.” The subtext of “The Crabapple Tree” is the power and anarchy of neglect.
 
Our narrator tells two tales simultaneously, one of magic and murder, the other of the ordinary people in her town going along to get along. The children in question are her own daughter and her peculiar playmates, the possibly magical and probably evil Marleen and Dickie-boy, whose birth caused his mother’s death. Dickie-boy is sickly and weak, also lonely, and Marleen plays dangerous games with him, putting a leash around his neck and teaching him to act like a pet dog: “She even taught him to wee with his leg in the air.”
 
Childish meanness is one thing but both Marleen and Dickie-boy have special powers. He can find lost things and she speaks in a bird language only Dickie-boy can understand. Cassandra-like, Marleen tells stories full of casual cruelty and no one believes her. When the narrator’s daughter finds her friend playing with Dickie-boy’s bones and Marleen explains how and why she came to have them, it’s the end of their friendship and the beginning of more severe isolation for Marleen.
 
Very few children of any age really know their parents. In Marie-Helene Bertino’s “Exit Zero,” Jo, an events organizer, must deal with her dead father’s house and possessions. Jo hasn’t seen or heard from her father in years. It falls to her to erase the mess of his life, to clear out his house, and to sort through what he’s left to see if there’s anything worth keeping. Then she must clean the house—“ranch-style on a prim cul-de-sac”—and put it up for sale. She learns soon enough that she knew even less than she thought about her father.
 
When Jo tours the house, she finds “workout resistance bands” next to his bed. These surprise her but she’s distracted from interpreting small puzzles by planning out her work: one room a day and Bob’s your uncle.
 
More surprises await Jo, a big furry one in particular, and these make “Exit Zero” both funny and poignant. Her father’s death is an inconvenient disruption to Jo’s life, not least because it forces her into a relationship with him that’s badly timed and unwelcome. She must allow it to do what it will.
 
Strange things are happening in the college town where David H. Lynn’s “Divergence” takes place. Jeremy Matthis has just completed successfully his hero’s journey: the trials and tests of a tenure review. For the rest of his life, he will be a very privileged person and one who might stay exactly the same.
 
To celebrate his victory, Jeremy’s wife, Shivani, gives him a “blue-and-silver Italian bike” to replace his battered old ten-speed. The very first time Jeremy rides his new bike, his world changes.

Lynn chose well for “Divergence” when he gave his hero the achievement of tenure. The word itself implies not only holding, as in holding on to a job, but also being held by that job and its institution. Divergence isn’t always welcome at an institution that depends on the steadiness of its faculty, nor by an anxious academic who assumes that he can finally relax. “Divergence” is an unexpectedly spooky story.
 
Diane Cook’s “Bounty” is an imaginative meditation on privilege. Lust and greed enter the story, and chaos costars, but privilege plays the leading part. The story is postapocalyptic—the world is flooded—and the narrator is self-sufficient, very well prepared, and remains high and dry while all around people are drowning and starving. The narrator is condescending to those who’ve failed to plan ahead, and unmoved by their filth, illness, squalor, and even deaths. This is not the story of Noah; the well-appointed house is kept locked.
 
High-minded notions about compassion and charity aren’t part of the narrator’s outlook on the dying world. Men come to the door begging for food and shelter. Conditions worsen. Where once there were colonies above water, now they are “underwater, most of their inhabitants drowned.” As it turns out, the narrator may be right to refuse to help. That way lies disaster.
 
One of the pleasures of Cook’s tale of the nastiness of humanity under pressure is the comedy of possessions, of having just the right thing. The narrator is hopelessly materialistic and comments on the outfit of a drowning man, his nice suit, his interesting tie: “It was a kind of damask rose pattern, but nontraditional. Of course, only designers change designs. It’s why we used to pay so much for them. We paid for innovation.” Given its provisions of water, wood, gas, food, the narrator’s clean and dry house might be the one next door in any prosperous American neighborhood, stuffed with Costco-sized supplies. And that the narrator decides to carry a knife next time someone tries to get into the house isn’t exactly the stuff of science fiction: We’re a nation armed to the teeth.
 
The narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Slumming” is a schoolteacher on summer vacation in a derelict house she owns in a run-down town. Daily, she buys drugs from townspeople she calls zombies. She buys one foot-long sandwich per day. There’s nothing else to do in the hardscrabble town. The sidewalks are crumbling and the people barely get by. She can afford to own her house and pay the taxes and insurance, even on her salary from teaching high school English in the city. She prides herself on not being her sister, who is rich and has a country house where there is a lot to do in the way of museums and concerts, and more people like her. The narrator isn’t looking for neighbors or friends. She doesn’t want to be part of the place. She is, as the story’s title announces, slumming. The story takes its sinister turn when the narrator, despite her lackadaisical self, becomes involved with a native of the town, a girl much less fortunate than herself, younger and in need of a lot of help. The lure of the story is watching the narrator become a real neig...

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1101971118
• ISBN 13: 9781101971116
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400
• Editor: Furman Laura