The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  SERIES EDITORS

  2003– Laura Furman

  1997–2002 Larry Dark

  1967–1996 William Abrahams

  1961–1966 Richard Poirier

  1960 Mary Stegner

  1954–1959 Paul Engle

  1941–1951 Herschel Bricknell

  1933–1940 Harry Hansen

  1919–1932 Blanche Colton Williams

  PAST JURORS

  2012 Mary Gaitskill, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Ron Rash

  2011 A. M. Homes, Manuel Muñoz, Christine Schutt

  2010 Junot Díaz, Paula Fox, Yiyun Li

  2009 A. S. Byatt, Anthony Doerr, Tim O’Brien

  2008 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Leavitt, David Means

  2007 Charles D’Ambrosio, Ursula K. Le Guin, Lily Tuck

  2006 Kevin Brockmeier, Francine Prose, Colm Toíbín

  2005 Cristina García, Ann Patchett, Richard Russo

  2003 Jennifer Egan, David Guterson, Diane Johnson

  2002 Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, Colson Whitehead

  2001 Michael Chabon, Mary Gordon, Mona Simpson

  2000 Michael Cunningham, Pam Houston, George Saunders

  1999 Sherman Alexie, Stephen King, Lorrie Moore

  1998 Andrea Barrett, Mary Gaitskill, Rick Moody

  1997 Louise Erdrich, Thom Jones, David Foster Wallace

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Random House LLC

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Laura Furman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Permissions appear at the end of the book.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-80326-9

  www.anchorbooks.com

  Cover design by Mark Abrams

  v3.1

  To Susan Williamson, with thanks

  for friendship, stories, and Passovers.

  The staff of Anchor Books—editorial, design, production, publicity—is devoted to publishing the highest-quality literature. Their intelligence, dedication, respect for writers, and professional skill make it an honor to work with them and a pleasure to participate in each O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. Editor Diana Secker Tesdell is a gentle, steady force for good. The series editor is grateful for Anchor’s excellence.

  Mimi Chubb and Kate Finlinson were devoted, invaluable, and brilliant editorial assistants for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. The series editor is grateful to them for their acuteness and hard work.

  The Graduate School and Department of English of the University of Texas at Austin supports The O. Henry Prize Stories in many ways, especially with the editorial graduate fellowship. The series editor expresses her gratitude.

  —LF

  Publisher’s Note

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES

  Many readers have come to love the short story through the simple characters, easy narrative voice and humor, and compelling plotting in the work of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), best known as O. Henry. His surprise endings entertain readers, even those back for a second, third, or fourth look. Even now one can say “ ‘Gift of the Magi’ ” in a conversation about a love affair or marriage, and almost any literate person will know what is meant. It’s hard to think of many other American writers whose work has been so incorporated into our national shorthand.

  O. Henry was a newspaperman, skilled at hiding from his editors at deadline. A prolific writer, he wrote to make a living and to make sense of his life. He spent his childhood in Greensboro, North Carolina, his adolescence and young manhood in Texas, and his mature years in New York City. In between Texas and New York, he served out a prison sentence for bank fraud in Columbus, Ohio. Accounts of the origin of his pen name vary: one story dates from his days in Austin, where he was said to call the wandering family cat “Oh! Henry!”; another states that the name was inspired by the captain of the guard at the Ohio State Penitentiary, Orrin Henry.

  Porter had devoted friends, and it’s not hard to see why. He was charming and had an attractively gallant attitude. He drank too much and neglected his health, which caused his friends concern. He was often short of money; in a letter to a friend asking for a loan of fifteen dollars (his banker was out of town, he wrote), Porter added a postscript: “If it isn’t convenient, I’ll love you just the same.” The banker was unavailable most of Porter’s life. His sense of humor was always with him.

  Reportedly, Porter’s last words were from a popular song: “Turn up the light, for I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

  Eight years after O. Henry’s death, in April 1918, the Twilight Club (founded in 1883 and later known as the Society of Arts and Letters) held a dinner in his honor at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. His friends remembered him so enthusiastically that a group of them met at the Biltmore Hotel in December of that year to establish some kind of memorial to him. They decided to award annual prizes in his name for short-story writers, and formed a Committee of Award to read the short stories published in a year and to pick the winners. In the words of Blanche Colton Williams (1879–1944), the first of the nine series editors, the memorial was intended to “strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.”

  Doubleday, Page & Company was chosen to publish the first volume, O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories 1919. In 1927, the society sold all rights to the annual collection to Doubleday, Doran & Company. Doubleday published The O. Henry Prize Stories, as it came to be known, in hardcover, and from 1984 to 1996 its subsidiary, Anchor Books, published it simultaneously in paperback. Since 1997 The O. Henry Prize Stories has been published as an original Anchor Books paperback.

  HOW THE STORIES ARE CHOSEN

  As of 2003, the series editor chooses the twenty O. Henry Prize Stories, and each year three writers distinguished for their fiction are asked to evaluate the entire collection and to write an appreciation of the story they most admire. These three writers receive the twenty prize stories in manuscript form with no identification of author or publication. They make their choices independent of each other and the series editor.

  All stories originally written in the English language and published in an American or Canadian periodical are eligible for consideration. Individual stories may not be nominated; magazines must submit the year’s issues in their entirety by July 1. Editors are invited to submit online fiction for consideration. Such submissions must be sent to the series editor in hard copy. (Please see this page for details.)

  The goal of The O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.

  To Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

  A middle-aged businessman with slightly porcine features and an attractive young woman meet in the club car, then spend an afternoon drinking highballs (“gold in the glasses”) in his private compartment as the train carries them across the country. For propriety, they keep the door open. She forms many assumptions about him, socially, intellectually, emotionally; she prides herself on being perceptive and feels superior to him. When their bottle of whiskey is nearly empty, he interrupts her discourse on her many lovers and why none of them was quite right, and pronounces that she must still be in love with her ex-husband. The previously self-confident young woman changes: “ ‘Do you think so really?’ she asked, leaning forward. ‘Why?’ Perhaps at last she had found him, the one she kept looking for, the one who could
tell her what she was really like. For this she had gone to palmists and graphologists, hoping not for a dark man or a boat trip, but for some quick blaze of gypsy insight that would show her her own lineaments. If she once knew, she had no doubt that she could behave perfectly; it was merely a question of finding out.”

  For just such shifts and lightning understanding, we read Mary McCarthy now, more than one hundred years after her birth.

  When “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” was published in 1941, it caused a sensation. Those were the days in which a short story could make a stir, and the stir in this case was about the wantonness of the heroine and the openness of her sexual behavior. Today, a reader’s interest in the story is different.

  Though it seems at first that the story is about sex on a cross-country train, the hardened twenty-first-century reader notices that while there’s a lot of talk about sex and marriage, the secret, internal life of the protagonist is the real focus of the story. The young woman is not particularly likable. She is a snob who fancies herself a political radical; an independent thinker who nonetheless depends on the admiration and approval of men, both those she likes and those she dislikes; a woman who feels sexual desire and also repugnance, though what trumps her sexual feelings is her gratification at being desired. Sex for her is almost a business negotiation, one that can be analyzed and parsed endlessly.

  The young woman, in her confusion, self-consciousness, and constant theorizing about herself, the man, her past, her feelings, and her unrelenting conscience, draws us into her complicated mind.

  It is mind rather than sex that makes the story feel alive more than sixty years after its first publication. In the years since 1941, detailed and graphic descriptions and images of sex have become commonplace. What remains fresh and irresistible is a mind like Mary McCarthy’s. By writing with laser power about the workings of thought and sensation, she is able to create a character as complicated as the story’s protagonist.

  It isn’t a shock any longer that women feel sexual desire, but it is still fascinating to be put through a moral and intellectual wringer by Mary McCarthy’s young woman as she locks in amorous combat with the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Publisher’s Note

  To Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

  Introduction

  Laura Furman, Series Editor

  Your Duck Is My Duck

  Deborah Eisenberg, Fence

  Sugarcane

  Derek Palacio, The Kenyon Review

  The Summer People

  Kelly Link, Tin House

  Leaving Maverley

  Alice Munro, The New Yorker

  White Carnations

  Polly Rosenwaike, Prairie Schooner

  Sail

  Tash Aw, A Public Space

  Anecdotes

  Ann Beattie, Granta

  Lay My Head

  L. Annette Binder, Fairy Tale Review

  He Knew

  Donald Antrim, The New Yorker

  The Visitor

  Asako Serizawa, The Antioch Review

  Where Do You Go?

  Samar Farah Fitzgerald, New England Review

  Aphrodisiac

  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The New Yorker

  Two Opinions

  Joan Silber, Epoch

  They Find the Drowned

  Melinda Moustakis, Hobart: another literary journal

  The Mexican

  George McCormick, Epoch

  Tiger

  Nalini Jones, One Story

  Pérou

  Lily Tuck, Epoch

  Sinkhole

  Jamie Quatro, Ploughshares

  The History of Girls

  Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Witness

  The Particles

  Andrea Barrett, Tin House

  Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

  The Jurors on Their Favorites

  Lauren Groff

  Edith Pearlman

  Jim Shepard

  Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

  The Writers on Their Work

  Publications Submitted

  Permissions

  Introduction

  READING BLIND IS AN experience that we as readers most often have with a writer whose work is unknown to us. We feel exhilarated when we find a new writer; it’s like meeting a new friend, sometimes like falling in love. The verb “envy” is the one most often used when we see someone embarking on a first reading of Virginia Woolf or Henry James.

  Some of the stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories come from established writers, but they are given a chance to be read blind as well. Every year, a panel of three jurors reads a blind manuscript of the pieces selected as O. Henry Prize Stories; neither attribution nor provenance is given, so the jurors don’t know which magazines the stories appeared in or who the authors are. All of the stories are in the same typeface and format. From these, each juror picks a favorite story and writes about it in the section “Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories.”

  This isn’t to say that jurors don’t on occasion detect a writer’s identity. There can be clues in sentence structure, word choice, or subject matter. The biggest giveaway is what one might call the writer’s presence, which includes all evidence of craft and meaning but goes beyond those elements. Each writer has a unique way of finding details in the material and natural world to create the story. The writer’s presence—the way the writer sees—is as innate as the color of the writer’s eyes.

  Jim Shepard, a past O. Henry Prize winner and a 2013 juror, chose as his favorite story Andrea Barrett’s “The Particles.” He took note of the narrative’s pacing and what he calls the writer’s restraint. The word is a clue to a special quality of Barrett’s work. Though she often writes about scientists and the past, she uses restraint to hold back an avalanche of extraneous or excessive detail and authorial observation—explanations the reader doesn’t need. She restrains not only the superfluous but also the interesting when its presence would distract from her finely focused narrative. Implicit in her work is the fascination of what she leaves out (more science, more history), but we trust her to go on without it, pulled by the story exactly as she tells it. Her subject matter is often double—the human drama and the scientific. The reader can almost hear Barrett thinking.

  In “Anecdotes,” Ann Beattie traces the differences between friendship and acquaintanceship. Conversations between her characters, their overt sharing of anecdotes and the push and pull of their unspoken exchanges, are part of the pleasure of Beattie’s writing. Little by little, the narrator of “Anecdotes” pulls away from the complications of what she thinks about a friend’s mother, Lucia, and what the friend’s mother thinks she should think, complications that extend to a choice between annoying involvement and happy disengagement. During this process, Beattie makes use of a minor character passing by in pink Uggs, and the criticism of the fuzzy boots by the cashmere-wearing Lucia. Beattie’s combination of sharpness and humor might seem to add up to satire, but she doesn’t make fun of her characters or reduce them to generalizations. Rather, she shows us that they’re all worth a look, though some are worthier than others. Beattie’s body of work is a testimonial against the unexamined life, and the title of her 1991 story collection Secrets and Surprises gives a clue to what awaits the reader in “Anecdotes.”

  Tash Aw’s “Sail” is about a man who is isolated, estranged both from his country and his sense of who he is. Like the streamlined, arrowlike sailboat we see at the story’s beginning, Yanzu moves lightly and, it seems, effortlessly. When we are introduced to him, he is considering buying the sailboat to help himself over a failed love affair. He does not, however, know how to sail, and his ignorance is parallel to his inability to occupy or direct his own life. Yanzu is different from other people, as different as the boat he contemplates buying is elegant and mysterious. At thirty-nine,
he is a successful green businessman in Hong Kong, dresses in expensive “classic” clothing, and is married to a woman he doesn’t like very much. At twenty, he studied chemistry, which the author calls the “intricate study of change,” and left his native Beijing after minor participation in the Tiananmen Square protests. When Yanzu fled to Hong Kong, he wanted to become a writer who would reveal mainland China’s faults and crimes. Yet “the more he wrote about Beijing, the more distant it seemed,” until he gave up the idea of writing. Instead, through his ambitious, materialistic wife, he is introduced into a world of gain, and more or less accidentally makes money. He wishes to learn English, and at the advice of his wife, who treats him with less warmth than she would a designer handbag, he takes private lessons from a restless, rootless Englishwoman with whom he falls in love.

  Tash Aw’s story rings with the loneliness and absence of intimacy in Yanzu’s life. As the tale unfolds, Yanzu gains the world in the form of property, status, and bespoke suits, but never finds his own meaning or identity. Aw’s writing is elegant, guided by imagination, and skilled at showing how Yanzu appears to others in contrast to how he feels; the writer lets the reader understand how empty it feels inside Yanzu. Like the chemistry Yanzu once studied, “Sail” is an intricate study of change.

  In contrast to the chilly vacancy of the marriage in “Sail,” the marriage of Donald Antrim’s Stephen and Alice in “He Knew” is a perfect synthesis. Antrim’s skilled narration of their journey from Bergdorf Goodman to Madison Avenue and parts north reveals their marriage as a tight duet, perhaps a tango. The objects they covet, reject, and acquire are more than material; each has the shimmer of the spiritual, a communion made tangible. Stephen and Alice are tightly wound, both around each other and within their own screaming nervous systems. Drugged, alert, anxious, suffering, the two cling together during what at first looks like a shopping spree and eventually becomes a fantasy of fertility and stability. Antrim calibrates his story so perfectly that the walk up Madison Avenue past one luxury store after another resembles the Stations of the Cross. By the end of “He Knew,” the reader feels as strung out as the characters, and wishes as much as Stephen does to believe in his desperate hopefulness.