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
2017 David Bradley, Elizabeth McCracken, Brad Watson
2016 Molly Antopol, Peter Cameron, Lionel Shriver
2015 Tessa Hadley, Kristen Iskandrian, Michael Parke
2014 Tash Aw, James Lasdun, Joan Silber
2013 Lauren Groff, Edith Pearlman, Jim Shepard
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 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
Introduction copyright © 2018 by Laura Furman
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Permissions appear on this page.
Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525436584
Ebook ISBN 9780525436591
Cover design by Mark Abrams
www.anchorbooks.com
v5.3.2
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For Margaret Perry
As you set out for Ithaka
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 reflects the integrity, patience, and editorial skill of Diana Secker Tesdell as well as Anchor’s art, production, digital, and publicity departments. The series editor thanks each and every person involved in making this book.
The editorial assistants for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 were Fatima Kola and Darri Farr. We worked together in harmony and with respect for our differences in taste. Our conversations were a great pleasure.
The Department of English of the University of Texas at Austin gives The O. Henry Prize Stories a home and research libraries beyond compare and, with the Michener Center and the New Writers Project, provides support for the editorial assistants. The series editor thanks the university and especially Professor Elizabeth Cullingford.
—Laura Furman
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, including 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 $15 (his banker was out of town, he wrote), Porter added a postscript: “If it isn’t convenient, I’ll love you just the same.” His 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 Sciences) 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 they 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
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 June 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, and www.ohenryprizestories.com, for details.)
As of 2003, the series editor chooses the twenty O. Henry Prize Stories, and each year three writers distinguished for their fiction are as
ked to be jurors and to evaluate the entire collection and 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. The jurors make their choices independent of each other and the series editor.
The goal of The O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.
To Gina Berriault (1926–1999)
Gina Berriault is often called a “writer’s writer,” and one critic called her sentences “jewel-box perfect.” Such praise is heartfelt and true, yet it makes Berriault’s work sound dull and virtuous. In truth, virtue is the last thing Berriault’s stories care about, and they are anything but dull.
In the short story, the writing is everything. Too much style, too many leaps in language for the fun of it, and the story deflates. Berriault’s prose immediately awakens you, but if you look back to find out how she pulled you into her story, there’s nothing obvious to tell you how she did it.
The opening of “Bastille Day,” from her collection The Infinite Passion of Expectation, lures you in but waits to stop your heart until the very end. It begins at one in the morning in San Francisco when Teresa reaches San Gotardo, “the last bar on her round of bars this night of her fortieth birthday, July 14, 1970.” Teresa is on an odyssey, a quest to find what it means to be forty. Others insist that the number has meaning, but “all her life, she’d refused to conform to popular delusions. With her, the sense of mortality hadn’t waited to take her by surprise at forty. It had been with her always, a seventh sense, along with the absolute preciousness of life, hers and everybody’s.”
Teresa’s odyssey differs from the Homeric original. For one thing, she’s not trying to get home. (If anything she’s running away from home, and her mate, Ralph, if only for a night.) The war in the background of the story is the Vietnam War, not the Trojan one. And in her description of herself, Teresa is neither noble nor heroic, nor does she encounter on her journey lotus-eaters, Sirens, or an angry goddess who turns men into swine.
Instead, the bar she enters is full of regulars, just as Teresa expected, and some strangers. All the characters—even the unnamed, the drunk, the foolish—are distinct and important, especially to themselves, evoking in their particularity Teresa’s sense of how precious life is. There is a trio of women who especially intrigue her. A beautiful girl, whom Teresa names the fairy-tale woman, reminds her of being young and foolish, in a glad way. “A girl out of a fairy tale after she had come alive and become a woman and lost some teeth but not yet all her beauty.” An old woman dances to Hawaiian music. A woman “neatly dressed in a gray suit and hat, her pumps dangling from her toes,” sits at the bar spewing know-it-all reminiscences of her journalism career, laced with casual racist slurs.
A fight breaks out and is ended by a man with a quiet authority, whom Teresa recognizes. She knew this man, Mayer, from left-wing meetings, from a time when she, like the woman at the bar, thought she knew everything. He reminds her of her warm-fleshed youth. “She wondered if she had looked at him with desire, in the past. She had felt desire toward a number of men in that time when they had all conferred over how to right the world. Once in that time she might have made love with him in a dream.”
The half-remembered possibility of desire stands in contrast to her feelings about Ralph, who, she explains later to Mayer, followed his own lengthy odyssey to becoming a professor. “ ‘Well, first it was going to be Philosophy. He switched over to Economics and then he switched over to Modern European History. We felt it was all right for him to take so long. I had jobs. Anyway, I always felt he was like the favorite child of Time.’ ” She tells Mayer about their radical friends who became prosperous, who were blessed by Time: “ ‘They just had to wait to get over their bleeding heart phase, if you know what I mean.’ ” Teresa does not see herself as a favorite child of Time. Time has gotten the best of her.
The fairy-tale woman, as it turns out, hasn’t quite escaped either. She asks Teresa to walk home with her to show her guardian, a wealthy older man, that she wasn’t out with a man. In the glimpse Berriault gives us, he is cold and frightening, and almost imperial. After the fairy-tale woman goes to him, Teresa and Mayer keep walking, until she realizes that it is now too late to leave the city.
“ ‘I can’t make it home,’ she said. ‘Over the bridge to Berkeley and another bus stop in the heart of darkness. Nothing’s running this time of night. Or far between. I think I’m scared.’ ” She is scared, tired, far from home, and wanting someone else to take over. Her fortieth birthday is ending with her acting like a child.
Mayer takes her to his apartment. Teresa knows he wishes she weren’t there. He’s living in neat but reduced circumstances, just separated from his wife. They end up in bed, Teresa under the covers, Mayer on top.
“She listened to his breath change as he fell asleep. She heard his breath take over for him and, in that secretive way the sleeper knows nothing about, carry on his life.” The word secretive is stunning here. Berriault emphasizes that the sleeper doesn’t know the secret and neither will Teresa.
Often, short stories end on a rising note, with a new and abstract image that illuminates the story. Gina Berriault’s endings are more often than not devastating, without a rising note to be heard. “Bastille Day” ends with Teresa once more alone, really alone, though inches from another person. Forty has brought her different intimations of her own mortality than she’s had before.
—Laura Furman
Austin, Texas
Contents
Cover
Series Editors and Past Jurors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Editor’s Note
Publisher’s Note
To Gina Berriault (1926–1999)
Introduction
Laura Furman, Series Editor
The Tomb of Wrestling
Jo Ann Beard, Tin House
Counterblast
Marjorie Celona, The Southern Review
Nayla
Youmna Chlala, Prairie Schooner
Lucky Dragon
Viet Dinh, Ploughshares
Stop ’n’ Go
Michael Parker, New England Review
Past Perfect Continuous
Dounia Choukri, Chicago Quarterly Review
Inversion of Marcia
Thomas Bolt, n+1
Nights in Logar
Jamil Jan Kochai, A Public Space
How We Eat
Mark Jude Poirier, Epoch
Deaf and Blind
Lara Vapnyar, The New Yorker
Why Were They Throwing Bricks?
Jenny Zhang, n+1
An Amount of Discretion
Lauren Alwan, The Southern Review
Queen Elizabeth
Brad Felver, One Story
The Stamp Collector
Dave King, Fence
More or Less Like a Man
Michael Powers, The Threepenny Review
The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies
Jo Lloyd, Zoetrope
Up Here
Tristan Hughes, Ploughshares
The Houses That Are Left Behind
Brenda Walker, Kenyon Review
We Keep Them Anyway
Stephanie A. Vega, The Threepenny Review
Solstice
Anne Enright, The New Yorker
Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018
The Jurors on Their Favorites
Fiona McFarlane on “The Tomb of Wrestling” by Jo Ann Beard
Ottessa Moshfegh on “Counterblast” by Marjorie Celona
Elizabeth Tallent on “The Tomb of Wrestling” by Jo Ann Beard
&n
bsp; Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018
The Writers on Their Work
Publications Submitted
Permissions
Introduction
The subject matter of the twenty stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 is so varied that even naming it feels reductive: a violent home invasion, an illiterate writer of letters from the dead, a retrospective homage to a failed marriage, an inconspicuous man in a very small town who bears witness to the great world’s horrors.
It becomes second nature for passionate readers to identify and consider the elements of fiction: plot, language, characters, setting. Subject matter seems like the most obvious one yet is perhaps the least important in the long run. While an interesting subject might initially attract readers, it won’t keep them there unless the formal elements are in balance.
For the author, subject matter is more complicated. Each element of a story can seem to have its own notion of its importance, so that the writer often feels in control of nothing. Add to this the fact that a writer can start with one idea of what the story is about and end by realizing that it’s about something else entirely. Many authors say that they write to understand their own lives, so that even when a writer thinks she’s creating a unique, completely invented character, she isn’t surprised to recognize someone she knows lurking in the portrait—or even herself.
Nothing matters in the end except the story itself.
After you have completed a story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018, you might find you have two different answers to the questions “What is the subject matter?” and “What is the heart of the story?” And if you turn to “Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018,” you can see what answers the authors themselves have to offer.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Page 1
