The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction

by Larry Dark (Editor)

Overview

"You don’t often get collections, or even anthologies where every story knocks you out, but I’ve been bewildered in the best way over each one [in The Story Prize] so far." —Lillian Li, author of Number One Chinese Restaurant

This anthology of short stories marks the fifteenth anniversary of The Story Prize and includes one story from each of the annual winning collections, beginning with Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker and concluding with Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible.

The founder of The Story Prize, Julie Lindsey, and its director, Larry Dark, created this award to address the lack of one specifically for collections of stories. Together they choose three finalists from the previous year’s publications, which are sent to three judges—an author, a bookseller or librarian, and a critic or editor—who, independently of one another, relay their choices.

The prize is then presented at an annual celebration in New York, where the finalists read from their books and then discuss their work with Dark. Excerpts from these interviews—or, in a few cases, the judges’ citations—introduce each story in the book. The authors chose the stories included to read at the annual Story Prize event.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936787647
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	665 KB

About the Author

LARRY DARK has been the director of The Story Prize since its inception in 2004. Before that, he served as series editor for six volumes of The O. Henry Prize Stories (1997–2002) and compiled, edited, and introduced four other anthologies: Literary Outtakes, The Literary Ghost,The Literary Lover, and The Literary Traveler.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
Larry Dark, Director, The Story Prize

Edwidge Danticat
“The Book of Miracles”
from The Dew Breaker

Patrick O’Keeffe
“The Postman’s Cottage”
from The Hill Road

Mary Gordon
“My Podiatrist Tells Me a Story About a Boy and a Dog”
from The Stories of Mary Gordon

Jim Shepard
“The Zero Meter Diving Team”
from Like You’d Understand, Anyway

Tobias Wolff
“Bullet in the Brain”
from Our Story Begins

Daniyal Mueenuddin
“Saleema”
from In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Anthony Doerr
“Memory Wall”
from Memory Wall

Steven Millhauser
“Snowmen”
from We Others

Claire Vaye Watkins
“Ghosts, Cowboys”
from Battleborn

George Saunders
“Tenth of December”
from Tenth of December

Elizabeth McCracken
“Something Amazing”
from Thunderstruck&Other Stories

Adam Johnson
“Nirvana”
from Fortune Smiles

Rick Bass
“How She Remembers It”
from For a Little While: New and Selected Stories

Elizabeth Strout
“The Sign”
from Anything Is Possible

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

About The Story Prize

Winners, Finalists, and Judges of The Story Prize (2004–2018)

Permissions

Editorial Reviews

Winter 2018

As director of the Story Prize, which honors an outstanding collection of short fiction each year, Dark (editor, The O. Henry Prize Stories, 1997–2002) has been a tireless advocate for the form. Here he compiles in chronological order the story read at the awards ceremony by each winner, from Edwidge Danticat's "The Dew Breakers" to Elizabeth Strout's "Anything Is Possible," showcasing 14 outstanding American short stories. This "greatest hits" selection focuses on style rather than topicality, ranging widely in setting—the beautifully rendered Cape Town of Anthony Doerr's "Memory Wall," a ravaged Chernobyl in Jim Shepard's "The Zero Meter Diving Team," the Manson Ranch in Claire Vaye Watkins's "Ghosts, Cowboys"—and subject—from Elizabeth McCracken's (literally) haunting tale of grief, "Something Amazing," to a platitude-spouting holographic president in Adam Johnson's "Nirvana," to Rick Bass's tender father-daughter road trip in "How She Remembers It." What each has in common, however, is a deep dedication to craft. This sampler will delight lovers of elegant, accomplished writing. VERDICT Both fans of the genre and those looking for an introduction to the form will relish this anthology, which has something for everyone.—Lisa Peet, Library Journal

Library Journal

Praise for The Story Prize

"You don’t often get collections, or even anthologies where every story knocks you out, but I’ve been bewildered in the best way over each one [in The Story Prize] so far." —Lillian Li, author of Number One Chinese Restaurant

"Skillful distillations . . . A pleasure for students of the genre." —Kirkus Reviews

"A beautiful celebration of works from the famous and celebrated . . . to newer voices . . . Absorbing and contextualizing the strength of these stories takes time and effort and will reap great rewards." —Christopher John Stephens, PopMatters

From the Publisher

2018-12-11

An anthology marking the 15th anniversary of the annual prize celebrating collections of short stories.

There is not much unity to be found in these pages; as volume editor Dark writes of the stories in this volume: "Each is distinctive, sometimes jarringly different in tone, scope, and language from the story that precedes or follows it." All, however, are skillful distillations, sometimes of whole lives—Patrick O'Keeffe's evocation, for instance, of gloomy rural Ireland and its generations of secrets kept ("You know the way them older people are, can't say a word or ask them anything ever, excuse me now for saying so, Missus")—and sometimes of smaller moments, such as Steven Millhauser's lyrical description of a rainstorm that melts away the snowmen the narrator and a clutch of fellow children have made ("Already, it seemed to me, our snowmen were showing evidence of a skill so excessive, an elaboration so painfully and exquisitely minute, that it could scarcely conceal a desperate restlessness"). Most of the writers are well-published and relatively well-known, though not always for short stories: Rick Bass, for instance, though his stories are often anthologized, is thought of first as a novelist, as are Edwige Danticat, George Saunders, and Tobias Wolff. Dark finds room for a few writers who are earlier on in their careers, such as Daniyal Mueenuddin, a Pakistani-American writer who writes of a love affair that takes on complicated dimensions when the young woman finds that she is pregnant: "The old midwife from the village," Mueenuddin writes ominously, "with filthy hands and a greedy heart, brought the baby into the world, a tiny little boy." The baby will be fighting against the odds, it appears, but then happiness is not a commodity that flows in abundance in many of these stories, with the possible exception of Mary Gordon's literal shaggy dog story, a delight to read.

A touch less diverse than the Best American Short Story and Pushcart Prize annuals but still a pleasure for students of the genre.

Kirkus Reviews