The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  Alice Mattison, “The Vandercook”

  I’m not interested in writing about flawless people, and the people in “The Vandercook,” indeed, are all flawed. But in most of my stories and novels, the characters find in themselves some strength, however minimal or partial, that makes it possible to keep from doing the worst they are capable of. The people in “The Vandercook” can’t solve their problem, and I knew that about them as I wrote: it was this thought that I began with. Still, I wish they could.

  Alice Mattison grew up in Brooklyn. Her new novel, When We Argued All Night, will be published in 2012, and she is the author of five previous novels, four collections of stories, and a book of poems. Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and Ecotone. She teaches fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where she is a longtime volunteer in a soup kitchen.

  Steven Millhauser, “Phantoms”

  “Phantoms” began as an idea that at first excited me but gradually interested me less and less: the story of a young man and a phantom. I abandoned it—still only an idea—and began dreaming my way into a story that had nothing to do with phantoms. At some point, as if it had been taking shape secretly, without my knowledge, a new version of the phantom story sprang into my mind, and this is the one that demanded to be written down.

  Steven Millhauser was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Connecticut. His books include The Knife Thrower; Martin Dressler; Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright; and Dangerous Laughter. His work has appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. His most recent book is We Others: New and Collected Stories. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

  Alice Munro, “Corrie”

  I don’t remember whether I knew a Corrie, but I did know lonely, idle, small-town rich girls—just the outside of their lives. I was not at all interested in them, being of Sadie’s class myself. Then a cousin told me how she, working as a maid, saw a guest, plus his wife, dining in her employer’s house, and what a shock it was, because she had known him as the long-time gentleman caller of an unmarried, well-to-do woman in our town. This story came to me years after it happened, but it stuck. I put the foot on her quite naturally, no symbolic crap, then was embarrassed a bit but left it. Same in a way with Gatsby. Will anyone get that now?

  I must say I like these characters. Him, too. It would be too boring to make him an utter stinker.

  • • •

  Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published twelve collections of stories—Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; The View from Castle Rock; and Too Much Happiness—as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and a Selected Stories. During her distinguished career, she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.

  Ann Packer, “Things Said or Done”

  In “Things Said or Done” I did something I’d never done before: revisited characters from a previous work. Sasha and Dan and the rest of the Horowitz family started life in a novella, Walk for Mankind, which is about a teenage boy named Richard Appleby into whose life thirteen-year-old Sasha and her family intrude. I knew “Walk for Mankind” was going to be the opening piece in a collection of short fiction (ultimately published under the title Swim Back to Me), and even before I’d finished it I decided that the final story in the book would catch up with the same characters several decades later. I began the story by imagining the adult Sasha fielding health complaints from the elderly Dan, but in the first couple of drafts Dan was actually ill, and I had Sasha flying from Seattle (where she lived with a spouse who would not survive the writing process) to Boston (where he lived, also with a spouse who would not survive the writing process) so she could support him through some medical treatment. The only thing working at that point was the way they related to each other, and in a slash-and-burn revision I converted Dan’s complaining to hypochondria, extracted the spouses, resettled Sasha in western Massachusetts and Dan in Hartford, imagined Sasha’s brother and mother back into being, and transferred the action to a family wedding in California. After that, the story started to make sense, and I could devote myself to refining the characters’ interactions and deciding where I wanted to leave them. I had originally thought that Richard Appleby would reappear, too, but once I had the shape of the piece I found there wasn’t a place for him, which I think ended up benefitting both the story and the book.

  Ann Packer was born in Stanford, California, in 1959. She is the author of the novels The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words and two books of short fiction, Mendocino and Other Stories and Swim Back to Me. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, and Narrative Magazine, among other publications. The Dive from Clausen’s Pier received a Great Lakes Book Award, an American Library Association award, and the Kate Chopin Literary Award. A past recipient of support from the Michener Copernicus Society and the National Endowment for the Arts, she lives in San Carlos, California.

  Miroslav Penkov, “East of the West”

  I wanted to write a story about those Bulgarians who, at the will of the Great Powers, were severed from our country, and who inevitably will lose, if they haven’t already, their sense of being Bulgarian. At the same time, I wanted to write a story about myself, abroad and alone, with a huge body of water between me and the people I love.

  This is the only story I’ve ever written in which I’ve posed myself a question and tried to answer it. I believe that at the end of the story Nose is liberated—from his family, nationality, country—that he is ready to begin a new life, in freedom. A kind of freedom that he has earned through loss. I want to be like Nose, and yet I’m terrified of such a possibility. I lack the strength to lose, let go, and carry on—and in the comfort of my cowardice all I could do was imagine—a river where there is none, a drowned church, two lovers who would never reunite. And even if I myself lack the courage to break the chains, a part of me now roams the dirt roads of Bulgaria, already free.

  My deepest gratitude to Mr. Andrew Blechman and Orion for publishing the story. Thank you, dear reader, for reading.

  Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. His stories have won The Southern Review’s Eudora Welty Prize and have appeared in A Public Space, One Story, Orion, and The Best American Short Stories 2008. Author of the story collection East of the West, he teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is editor of the American Literary Review. He lives in Denton, Texas.

  Keith Ridgway, “Rothko Eggs”

  I used to sit and write in a coffee shop around the corner from where I lived in Finsbury Park, North London. And in the late afternoon I would see the kids coming out of school, and sometimes some would come into the coffee shop and I would eavesdrop on their conversations. And I was struck several times how, against expectations, these kids were gentle and funny and seemed to treat their friends with genuine kindness. And I used to see one girl who would sometimes meet a man who was obviously her father. And he always looked miserable before she arrived, and would light up when he saw her. There was something quite lovely but also fragile about all of that. So I stole it.<
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  • • •

  Keith Ridgway was born in 1965 in Dublin and brought up there. He lived in London for ten years. His first novel, The Long Falling, received the Prix Femina Étranger in 2001 and was made into a film directed by Martin Provost. Ridgway was awarded the Rooney Prize for his short-story collection Standard Time. He is also the author of the novels The Parts and Animals. His newest book is Hawthorn & Child. He lives in Edinburgh.

  Sam Ruddick, “Leak”

  The first draft of “Leak” was a solemn and dull affair. I showed it to Frederick Barthelme and he said, “This is a story that would benefit from being hit by a fiery rock from outer space.” It would be tedious to explain all the differences between the original version and the one you see here, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that he gave me a few ideas, and it led to a breakthrough in the way I think about writing. I used to be overly concerned with plausibility: The actions of my characters had to make sense. People don’t work that way. I don’t know why I thought fictional characters would. Ridding myself of the notion has made the work much more interesting.

  Sam Ruddick was born in 1971, in Chicago Heights, Illinois. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Threepenny Review, and Prairie Fire. He is a graduate of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He received the Henfield Prize for Fiction in 2007. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

  Salvatore Scibona, “The Woman Who Lived in the House”

  I had forgotten my computer at home in the States and wrote the story longhand at the Hotel Bergs in Riga, Latvia: in the ample bathtub, or on the balcony, or pacing the city through crowds of courteously misbehaving Swiss soccer hooligans. For a month I knew perfect urban solitude, punctuated by drink and dinner dates with absorbing raconteurs and speech makers and twentysomething dredging magnates worried about the Latvian real estate market, suspicious of Russia, enormously proud of their national language, gracious, and warm. Then I would go home to the hotel and take the sleek elevator up to the farm in the private Iceland inside my room.

  Salvatore Scibona was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1975. His first book, The End, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award. It is published or forthcoming in six languages. His work has appeared in The Pushcart Book of Short Stories, Best New American Voices, A Public Space, The Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, D di La Repubblica, and Il Sole 24 Ore. He has received a Fulbright fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Whiting Writers’ Award, and Guggenheim fellowship. In 2010, The New Yorker named him to its “20 Under 40” list of writers to watch. He administers the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and lives in Provincetown.

  Jim Shepard, “Boys Town”

  Lately it’s started to seem to me that here in America our fetishization of self-reliance has taken a wrong turn and has helped enable us to jettison compassion as a national value while still maintaining a vision of ourselves as essentially well-meaning. It hasn’t taken a whole lot of common sense, given the evidence of the last few years, to puzzle out the heartlessness of unregulated capitalism, and yet our political class has embraced even more fervently the notion of every man for himself, even given the ever-growing numbers such a philosophy leaves behind.

  I grew up around some of those people left behind, and I’m interested in the way somebody in that position whipsaws between blaming himself for having been unable to keep up and understanding that he never had a chance in the first place. Either way you start to get enraged at your own ineffectuality, and you start to consider acting on that rage and making a mark one way or the other.

  And of course, when we’re talking about the shit end of the stick, we’re also talking about those people who fight our wars now that we’ve abolished the semidemocracy of the draft.

  I’ve known my share of guys who sound like my narrator in “Boys Town,” but the story got its start when I came across a short piece by Calvin Trillin about Scott Johnson, an ex-serviceman convicted of the murder of three teenagers on the Wisconsin-Michigan border in 2008. That led me to the transcript of the police interview with Johnson once he was in custody, where I came across this moment in which he was trying to explain to his interrogators why he felt like he never got through to people: “I don’t know why people need to hear the same thing ten thousand times, but it seems like they want to hear anything but the truth.” And something just went off in me. I thought: That guy. I know that guy. And the story was off and running.

  Jim Shepard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including the latest, You Think That’s Bad. His third collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Story Prize. Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the Alex Award from the American Library Association. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. Four of his stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories and one for a Pushcart Prize. He’s won an artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Guggenheim fellowship. He teaches at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

  Mark Slouka, “The Hare’s Mask”

  At the heart of “The Hare’s Mask” are two historical facts: My father’s family sheltered a Jewish refugee in a rabbit hutch during the war, and as a boy my father had to kill rabbits for dinner. After that the imagination gets its foot in the door, and the story begins to shape itself to other needs. I’m the trout fisherman, not my father. Though there’s a picture of my father’s family on our mantelpiece, his actual parents and sister survived the war by some years. I never had a sister or a rabbit, while my son, now grown, had both.

  Who knows where our stories begin, really? I suppose, looking at the picture on the mantel, recalling the anecdotes my father told, listening to our daughter’s rabbit thumping around in the dark, I sensed a story about history’s losses, time’s compensations, and a child’s ability to misread the world. To get at it, I had to mix three generations. It was easy; in my heart, they had blurred already.

  Mark Slouka was born in New York City in 1958. His books, which have been translated into eighteen languages, include the story collection Lost Lake; the novels God’s Fool and The Visible World; and two works of nonfiction, War of the Worlds, a cultural critique of technological society, and, most recently, Essays from the Nick of Time, winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s, and his stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Granta, Agni, Orion, and The Paris Review, among other publications, as well as in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Canton, New York.

  Christine Sneed, “The First Wife”

  Movies are important to so many people, and some of us, whether we admit to it or not, have personal and often irrational attachments to movie stars and to other celebrities whom we’ve fallen a little in love with because we admire the way they sing or look or act. The famous also have attributes or opportunities that most of us don’t have but wish we did—whether it be extreme wealth or beauty or the most attractive lovers on the planet.

  Adding fuel to this bonfire is the rise of reality TV, which allows some participants, whether or not they have talent, to become famous overnight. One result of this phenomenon is that more people than ever before hope to become famous but don’t really have any idea what it’s like to be a celebrity. I have a few friends who work in Hollywood, and what I’ve learned from them is something that we’ve been told before, but it rarely ever se
ems to stick: All that glitters isn’t gold.

  Despite the somber tone of “The First Wife,” this short story was a lot of fun to write. I liked the formal challenge of writing a story that began at its chronological end and progressed backward. As I wrote it, I was thinking of a particular famous couple and the first wife who was left behind (and against her will was featured on tabloids the world over, often with an unflattering expression on her face). I felt compassion for this woman and for my title character, but not pity, because she’s smart and knows that she took an enormous risk by marrying a movie star, even if she is also somewhat famous. Like so many of us, she loves fairy tales and wanted to believe in them, too.

  Christine Sneed was born in 1971 in Berlin, Wisconsin. Her story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, won the 2009 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, first fiction category, and long-listed for the 2011 Frank O’connor International Short Story Award. Portraits also received Ploughshares’s 2011 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2008, The Southern Review, New England Review, Pleiades, TriQuarterly Online, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and a number of other journals. Her novel, Little Known Facts, is forthcoming. She teaches at DePaul University and Northwestern University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.