Prize Stories 1986: The O. Henry Awards

by William Abrahams (Editor)

Overview

“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”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385231565
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/12/1986
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

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.

Table of Contents

	Publisher's Note	vii
	Introduction	ix
	First Prize: Alice Walker, "Kindred Spirits" Esquire, August 1985	1
	"Pet Milk" The New Yorker, August 13, 1984	12
	"Crazy Ladies" Southern Humanities Review, Spring 1985	17
	"The Comedian" The Atlantic, November 1984	31
	"Offerings" The Georgia Review, Spring 1985	44
	"The Costa Brava, 1959" The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1985	55
	"Uncle George and Uncle Stefan" The Apalachee Quarterly, No. 22, 1985	70
	"Big Bertha Stories" Mother Jones, April 1985	80
	"'I Don't Believe This'" The Atlantic, October 1984	95
	"Resurrection" The Pennsylvania Review, Spring 1985	105
	"Excerpts from Swan Lake" The Kenyon Review, Spring 1985	110
	"Molly's Dog" The Ontario Review, Fall/Winter 1984-85	118
	"Transactions in a Foreign Currency" The New Yorker, January 21, 1985	130
	"The Garden of Redemption" St. Anthony Messenger, November 1984	152
	"Dirt Angel" The North American Review, March 1985	162
	"The Cousins" The Southern Review, Spring 1985	175
	"The Year of the Hot Jock" Confrontation	208
	"Kid MacArthur" The New Yorker, December 17, 1984	226
	Special Award for Continuing Achievement: "Master Race" The Partisan Review	245
	Magazines Consulted	269

Editorial Reviews

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. (April)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This 66th volume in the O. Henry-award series gives first prize to ``Kindred Spirits,'' a personal, subtle story of family perceptions by Alice Walker. The collection also contains solid entries by such well-known authors as Alice Adams, Bobbie Ann Mason, Gordon Lish, and Joyce Carol Oates (who is honored with a Special Award for Continuing Achievement for her haunting story ``Master Race''). There are also some gems from newcomers: for example, Deborah Eisenberg's ``Transactions in a Foreign Currency,'' set in chilly Montreal, follows a woman's poignant realization of her lover's inability to commit himself to her. So: nothing sizzling, but many finely crafted pieces forming a most worthwhile whole. Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.

Library Journal