The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

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 Brickell

  1933–1940 Harry Hansen

  1919–1932 Blanche Colton Williams

  PAST JURORS

  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 David Guterson, Diane Johnson, Jennifer Egan

  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, MAY 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc. Introduction copyright © 2011 by Laura Furman

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

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Permissions appear at the end of the book.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data for The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 is available at the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80594-2

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  For FJK and WW, again and always

  The series editor wishes to thank the staff of Anchor Books for making each new collection a pleasure to work on and to read, and to the staff of PEN American Center for the work they do for writers all over the world and for our collection.

  Jessica Becht and Benjamin Healy read, wrote, thought, talked, and made this collection one deserving of their intelligence and talent. The series editor thanks them more than they can imagine.

  Publisher’s Note

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PEN/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 in 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.” 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, retitled The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories in 2009.

  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 May 1. Only stories appearing in a printed periodical are considered. No online-only publications are eligible for inclusion.

  As of 2003, the series editor chooses the twenty PEN/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 read 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.

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

  To William Trevor

  In the past seven PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, work by William Trevor has appeared five times; this dedication comes in a year when we are Trevor-less.

  Trevor was born in Ireland and his work is identified with the literature of that country. Trevor’s greatest gift sometimes seems to be distance. He can write as heartbreakingly about young love as he can about the weight of political troubles on obscure individual lives. He is capable of creating a character both unattractive and despicable, such as Mr. Hilditch in Felicia’s Journey, side by side with Felicia herself, an incorrigibly gullible young woman who becomes, by the end of that excellent novel, nearly saintly in her martyrdom and humility. Painful and involving as the novel is to read, the most disturbing moment comes when the reader begins to feel for the horrible Mr. Hilditch. Often Trevor’s deep intelligence and unobtrusively beautiful prose works coercively. In his many novels and short stories, Trevor pulls his reader out of the comfortable complacency of not being someone like Mr. Hilditch. In exchange for our discomfort, we gain insight into the criminal and unlikable, and we feel compassion, whether we want to or not. In a collection of essays, Excursions in the Real World, Trevor wrote that a writer “needs space and cool; sentiment is suspect. Awkward questions, posed to himself, are his stock-in-trade.… he has to stand back—so far that he finds himself beyond the pale, outside the society he comments upon in order to get a better view of it. Time, simply by pa
ssing, does not supply that distance.…”

  We can rejoice that however far William Trevor ventures beyond the pale to create his fictional world, he still returns to tell us the tale.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgment

  Publisher’s Note

  Introduction

  Laura Furman, Series Editor

  Your Fate Hurtles Down at You

  Jim Shepard, Electric Literature

  Diary of an Interesting Year

  Helen Simpson, The New Yorker

  Melinda

  Judy Doenges, The Kenyon Review

  Nightblooming

  Kenneth Calhoun, The Paris Review

  The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived

  Tamas Dobozy, One Story

  Ice

  Lily Tuck, The American Scholar

  How to Leave Hialeah

  Jennine Capó Crucet, Epoch

  The Junction

  David Means, Ecotone

  Pole, Pole

  Susan Minot, The Kenyon Review

  Alamo Plaza

  Brad Watson, Ecotone

  The Black Square

  Chris Adrian, McSweeney’s

  Nothing of Consequence

  Jane Delury, Narrative Magazine

  The Rules Are the Rules

  Adam Foulds, Granta

  The Vanishing American

  Leslie Parry, Virginia Quarterly Review

  Crossing

  Mark Slouka, The Paris Review

  Bed Death

  Lori Ostlund, The Kenyon Review

  Windeye

  Brian Evenson, PEN America

  Sunshine

  Lynn Freed, Narrative Magazine

  Never Come Back

  Elizabeth Tallent, The Threepenny Review

  Something You Can’t Live Without

  Matthew Neill Null, Oxford American

  Reading The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

  The Jurors on Their Favorites

  A. M. Homes

  Manuel Muñoz

  Christine Schutt

  Writing The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

  The Writers on Their Work

  Recommended Story 2011

  Publications Submitted

  Permissions

  Introduction

  Every year, after the long process ends of choosing the twenty PEN/O. Henry Prize stories from the many submitted, friends ask me what trends were revealed by all that reading and deliberation. The question doesn’t have to do with aesthetics or literary technique but with subject matter: What do this year’s stories show about our world?

  Those who pose the question seem to believe that short-story writers are prophets or seers, or at the very least mirrors reflecting the joys and horrors of our time. It’s a common notion that writers are society’s canaries in the coal mine, sensitive and intelligent canaries who bring us news about the way we live now. Many are known for doing exactly that; Charles Dickens springs to mind, and so many other writers with a social vision such as Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Margaret Atwood. And who could have done a better job than Herman Melville of portraying the multiracial, multiethnic mix that was his America and is ours?

  But for many writers, an explicit social agenda and social commentary—even contemporary life itself—are of limited interest. The relevance of a good writer transcends time and place. We continue to read Charles Dickens even though we don’t live in Victorian England. Fyodor Dostoyevsky thrills us not because we recognize czarist Russia but because we recognize the struggle of our own souls.

  Literature—writing that lasts because of its superior quality—does have a way of seeming both predictive and definitive. When we see a suburb of a certain type, we see Cheever Country or the Land of Yates; literature over time defines life. When we reread the best short stories, we recognize both their technical power and the true-to-life human crises embedded in them.

  Of course, one practical obstacle to the idea that stories have something to tell us about our moment is that often they are written long before they are published. The moment they arrive in print before the reader’s eyes might make a writer seem prescient, but the excellent timing is more often than not a happenstance. There have always been apocalyptic stories, but one published on September 10, 2001, would have a predictive power unavailable to the same story if published much earlier or later.

  That said, it’s hard to deny that some stories capture the zeitgeist perfectly, and in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 the mood is a savage fierceness, which seems apt at the moment. Many of the stories are laden with a convincing sense of doom and intimations of what civilization looks like minus the civilization. All of this year’s stories are written with end-of-the-world honesty.

  One example of such intensity is Lynn Freed’s “Sunshine.” Because the author is a native of South Africa, her brilliant, rock-hard prose might seem to be expressing metaphorically the horrors of that nation’s past, but “Sunshine” is larger than recent political history. Its true subject is evil. Its world is an eternal, almost mythic, struggle of Master and Slave. The story’s drama is about the breaking of a wild spirit by a spoiled creature too used to getting his way. The manner in which the struggle ends is haunting and frightening—and rings true. Our juror A. M. Homes was also struck by these strengths, and she chose “Sunshine” as her favorite.

  Helen Simpson’s “Diary of an Interesting Year” brings the reader into a postapocalyptic world that seems at first familiar from screen incarnations. Yet the quotidian, middle-class voice of the narrator is in powerful contrast to the dramatic privations of a society’s collapse. The story is funny until it is distinctly not, and then it is powerful and unnerving.

  “The Black Square” by Chris Adrian is about the limits of love of all kinds, except the love of death. Its central conceit—a black square one can enter but never return from—is an invention of brooding, Rothko-like minimalism, and suggests a different world from ours, one in which suicide is accepted, perhaps even respectable. This is the way the world ends—through a small black square, one person at a time.

  In “Melinda” by Judy Doenges the violence, as well as the melancholic monotony of a degrading world, is supplied by methamphetamine, to which Melinda has devoted her young life and what’s left of her mind. The cool, matter-of-fact tone of Melinda’s narrative is perfect for the destruction she describes: her world that will end before she knows it, as she loses her sense of time and her capacity to care about anything but the drug and what it takes to get it.

  The stories of David Means are not unacquainted with destruction. (A previous Means story was included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2006.) In “The Junction” Means layers two narratives of hobo life in the American Midwest: one is the tale Lockjaw tells one freezing night to a bunch of cynical kibitzers permanently down on their luck—a tale about hot cherry pie, fresh-baked bread, and home; the other is the story of Lockjaw’s audience of fellow hobos and his relationship to them. Lockjaw is a talker because “you had to spin out a yarn and keep spinning until the food was in your belly and you were out the door.” But Lockjaw’s peers are way beyond home, fresh cherry pie, and Lockjaw’s gift of gab.

  In “Ice” by Lily Tuck, we’re in the Antarctic. On a cruise ship the quiet drama of a frozen marriage acts as a diversion to the real iciness to come, the coldness of death. Tuck’s characteristic compression and elegant brevity shape a dangerous world that has shrunk to one element—the ice that surrounds the boat and defines the characters’ lives.

  Another kind of isolation overwhelms a young couple in Lori Ostlund’s “Bed Death.” Two American women arrive in Malaysia to find work and to be together. In the end, they are alienated both from the place and from each other, separated not just by the “bed death” of the title—the end of their lovemaking—but by the end of their mutual tolerance
.

  In what might be the sweetest story in the collection, “Night-blooming” by Kenneth Calhoun, a young musician, filled with doubts and condescension, plays a gig with the Nightblooming Jazzmen, a band of elderly musicians who are “marching the saints and balling the jack.” The illusions crushed by the end of the night are those of the youth, who loses a new home he’s surprised to find he wanted.

  Three other stories in the collection revolve around varieties of love, or rather its impossibility, power, and elusiveness: “Pole, Pole” by Susan Minot, “Nothing of Consequence” by Jane Delury, and “The Rules Are the Rules” by Adam Foulds.

  Susan Minot’s story is set in Kenya and centers on the accidental, sexually heated meeting of a young woman, newly arrived, and a man whose elusiveness is soon made plain, as is the tenuousness of the woman’s reason for being in Africa. The story begins with a passionate coupling of strangers and ends in isolation.

  In Jane Delury’s “Nothing of Consequence” a widowed French schoolteacher goes to Madagascar and meets a young man. The important transformation in the story comes, surprisingly, to the young man. The encounter allows him to understand his own story, and gives the Frenchwoman a measure of justice for a grave wound in her past. The story reveals with delicacy and humor how incidentally yet significantly the lovers touch each other’s lives.

  In Adam Foulds’s “The Rules Are the Rules” the life of Reverend Peter and his congregation in suburban London is complicated by his closeted homosexuality and his loss of faith. “Off the grid. That was how Peter thought of himself when he lost contact with God, when Jesus was a dead man and he was alone. Then the world was vast and contained nothing, nothing real, only his loneliness between hard surfaces.” He finds refuge in anger and in petty cruelty to those smaller than he, and despair at what he sees as the coming loss of his lover, Steve, who is free to go to bars and clubs for casual sex. The story conveys without sentimentality Peter’s aching imprisonment. The intensity in the story derives from the awful sense that there is no escape from the rules because they are the only ones Peter accepts.