by Laura Furman
I read this story multiple times and was disturbed by it and quite honestly I went back to reread several of the other stories again because I wanted to select something more conventional, something less threatening, and yet each time I tried to walk away, “Sunshine” demanded that I return. And so it is for these qualities and the author’s careful balance of presence and absence, location and timelessness, what is said and left unsaid, which leaves the reader’s imagination to create a world familiar enough to enter and yet distant enough that the reader feels “other” that I chose “Sunshine.”
In “Sunshine,” a broken-winged girl, taken for a beast, triumphs and I am at once reminded of the necessity of moral and artistic challenge—of Dostoevsky and his murderous Raskolnikov, of Nabokov and the finely wrought Humbert Humbert and here I could go on, but suffice to say that it is with all that in mind—that I celebrate the dark art here, applaud the gruesome, the trans-gressive, the thing that does not let us escape from the side of ourselves that we would rather not see.
A. M. Homes was born in 1961 in Washington, D.C. She is a novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, journalist, and screenwriter. Her books include This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), and the story collections The Safety of Objects (1990) and Things You Should Know (2002). Homes has received fellowships from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. She lives in New York City.
Manuel Muñoz on “Something You Can’t Live Without” by Matthew Neill Null
For over ten years now, one of my favorite reading experiences has been to go through the two premier award anthologies that appear every year—The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories—and attempt to rank the stories for myself. It’s an effort to make myself read slowly, to measure why my enjoyment deepens with particular work. Often the exercise makes me aware of my own reading patterns, of the ways in which I’ve become more receptive to particular styles of storytelling, or even of my willingness to give a favorite writer a free pass on something that is clearly not his or her best. No matter what, it’s nearly always the most deeply fun reading I do all year, a surprising story never failing to emerge.
I kept this little habit to myself until around the time of the 2004 National Book Award nominations for fiction. That was the year when the five-book slate named only women writers—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Christine Schutt, Joan Silber, Lily Tuck, and Kate Walbert—and the uproar around this unusual circumstance lead to all sorts of shoot-from-the-hip speculation. None was more cutting (at least to me) than from The New York Times, which sniffed that the list shared “a short-story aesthetic” and that none of the books boasted a scope that was “big and sprawling.”
What the hell, I wondered, is wrong with such an aesthetic? Is there even such a thing? And since when are stories not “big”?
I went right out and got those books.
I still seethe over that article six years later, and can always turn to The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories for any number of examples of stories that are more than just big and sprawling—they overwhelm the page. This year, I’m happy to wave “Something You Can’t Live Without” as one such story that offers almost too much to fathom. Even its title seems to call out its essential nature.
It’s rare that a story makes use of nearly every part of speech, reminding us as readers that every part of our language—from verbs to adjectives—can gather awesome weight when coupled together. Pay attention, the pages seem to say. All over this story spring words chosen with accuracy and care, from words deeply wedded to the Appalachian geography (“ironweed” and “seven sisters” and “chert”) to the labor of the farm (“carded” and “planing” and “hand-forged”). Even the story’s time frame feels slickly yet unobtrusively referenced, with a word like “cipher,” with its faint hint of history, employed as a verb of literacy, or “conscription,” with a register that the more modern “draft” could never achieve.
But these are just words. Cartwright’s attempt to pass on a cheap piece of goods to the poor farmer McBride is as straightforward a plot as anyone could ask, and the surprise comes in the story’s largely silent battle of pride and comeuppance, two men thinking of the single way to emerge the better in the bargain. The real pleasure—and certainly not the only one—is in the sentences, as complex, deliberately assured, and lethal as Flannery O’Connor’s. What an authentic, confident story this is, soaked through with deceit and menace and the distinctly abrupt strain of American violence. Add in a startling ending—an unforgiving embrace of the nature of time and history, if not the devouring jaws of myth—and you’ve got a work ready to prove that short stories and short-story writers are the most sprawling and unruly of all myth-makers.
Manuel Muñoz was born in Dinuba, California, in 1972. He is the author of two short-story collections, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. His first novel, What You See in the Dark, was published in early 2011. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and a 2008 Whiting Writers’ Award, and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Christine Schutt on “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” by Jim Shepard
A great story announces itself entirely to start; its terms are then rolled over and over again, and the story is made larger for what new associations adhere until, by the end, the terms are profound. Every reading reveals some new, impossibly smart gesture, surely intended and cumulatively significant. I lose my way, snow-blind. A great story is as heavy as wet snow, the kind that rolls up like carpet and grows bigger for the binding of its parts.
Halfway through “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” the narrator of this story, Eckel—his first name is never given—explains in scientific language, then in easier, metaphoric terms, what might in fact account for avalanches: a degraded crystal, a stratum of which if slightly jarred can set tons of more recently fallen snow in motion. His mother calls such degraded crystal “sugar snow” because it will not bond. Even when compressed, the snow does not cohere, a phenomenon at odds with great story-making, in which the parts must cohere. And the parts. Sifted into this story are wondrous accounts of nature’s brute force, anecdotes, histories, avalanche lore recalled by Eckel or his companions in the course of their freezing work.
They call themselves “the Frozen Idiots.” They are four volunteers researching the complexities of snow; they conduct experiments on a viciously windy slope miles above Davos in efforts, all potentially deadly, to better understand and defend against avalanche. The year is 1939; they live in a hut; they have no heat and only kerosene for light. They are frozen idiots; they go about their work with reckless enthusiasm. They have started an avalanche and destroyed a church. Few of their fellows find their subject significant; nevertheless, they are close to finishing an important book on snow, and Eckel’s tone at the start of this authentic story is confident and self-deprecatory. His voice is more matter-of-fact when he recounts the catastrophes that have contributed to the researchers’ industry. An airborne avalanche, the most destructive category of all, killed the group leader’s father, and another avalanche, less severe perhaps but lethal, killed Eckel’s twin brother, Willi. The boys were sixteen.
Images of these assaults, the unnatural uprootings, flattened houses—a roof mistaken “for a terrazzo floor”—powerfully amass and add to the story’s gravity. An unbroken teacup bewitches while a broken girl unsettles as does a boy “entombed in his bed.” Napoleon’s little drummer is lost in a gorge and drums for days before he falls silent. Avalanches, the seductive enormity of them! How helpless we are, slight as flies before it, but must we die alone? “Seventeen people were dug out of a meetinghouse the following spring, huddled together in a circle facing inward.” A consolation, I think, companionship at the end.
Contrastively, Willi’s death is horrible. H
e dies twice: First, under an immensity of snow, alone in the dark for hours, he loses consciousness. The second time, an avalanche of fear triggered by Eckel when he puts out the light kills Willi. He is dead by the time his mother reaches him. As for the survivors, buffeted by gusts of rage, self-rebuke, and loneliness, they endure by contraction.
Even before the catastrophe of Willi’s death, the family terrain emerges as stark and severe as the slopes, dangerously unstable. An elder sister is dutiful but retreats to her room and her romance subscriptions. The father, an Alpine guide, claims to be “content only at altitudes over eleven thousand feet” although his sons know otherwise. They consider their father’s “homemade medicines” his sole pleasure, yet Eckel attends to his father’s every mood, negotiating the shifting terrain “even as disinterest emanated from him like a vapor.”
To be loved, it seems, is as fateful as any experience. “Why does anyone choose one brother and not another? I wanted to ask.” Significantly, Eckel does not ask this question aloud—not of his mother or of Ruth, the young woman to whom he is hopelessly devoted. He grudgingly accepts his mother’s preferential treatment of his twin and Ruth’s deception of him with Willi. Against the wintery heart there is no defense beyond contraction, a withdrawal from the world with a cruel, self-absorbed intention to endure. Contraction, silence. At the onset of an avalanche a survivor trick is to keep your mouth shut; this has been Eckel’s strategy throughout his life.
I underestimated how difficult it would be to act as a juror for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Beyond the challenge of making a selection from the forgathered, there has been the trauma of writing about the choice; my choice makes me sick. All great stories make me sick with their muchness. The parallel actions and anecdotes, repeats and reversals, all made with pickax accuracy, add breadth and bulk. Everything connects. The alpine landscape, God-like, brooding and indifferent, gives contour to the characters’ lives. The story of the old guide’s devotion to the empress mirrors Eckel’s devotion to Ruth; just so, the avalanche’s “fractures … stress lines … fusillades of pops and cracks” apply to the human drama. And how better to represent our essential helplessness in the universe than with the image of a researcher inadequately dressed, awake in his hammock, hanging in the cold dark? The harrumph a boy makes with his skis to signal to his brother “We’re so close” fatally severs and forever binds them. In Jim Shepard’s story, the snow coheres; it coheres for now. The hammock creaks. Someday, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next, Eckel and his fellows will—we all will—be overtaken by that white ambush.
Christine Schutt is the author of two short-story collections and two novels. Her first, Florida, was a 2004 National Book Award finalist; her second, All Souls, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Among other honors, Schutt’s work has twice been included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Schutt is a senior editor of the literary annual NOON. She lives and teaches in New York.
Writing The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011
The Writers on Their Work
Chris Adrian, “The Black Square”
This story was written for an issue of McSweeney’s that endeavored to imagine what the world will be like in fifteen years. Each story was to be set in a different location all around the world. This meant that the magazine would have sent me more or less wherever I would have liked to go to research the setting for the story—Paris, Berlin, Ho Chi Minh City, Bali—by means of funding provided by mysterious South American filmmakers. For a reason that had a lot to do with stalking my ex-boyfriend, I chose to go to Nantucket and took his dog with me (with the ex’s permission). I spent two days poking around the beaches and moors with the dog, but didn’t start writing until many months after I returned. I threw out five or six drafts about Nantucket sinking into the ocean or being overwhelmed by intelligent shoes before I finally discovered what the story was about—me, the ex, and the dog. Which is often how it works for me: I put in a bunch of work on a decoy story while waiting for the real story to sneak up and announce itself.
Chris Adrian was born in Washington, D.C., in 1970. He is the author of three novels, Gob’s Grief, The Children’s Hospital, and The Great Night, and a collection of stories, A Better Angel. He lives in San Francisco.
Kenneth Calhoun, “Nightblooming”
“Nightblooming” was one of my many attempts to write about music. Throughout my high school and college years, music was my life. I worked in a music store and played drums for a variety of projects—punk and funk bands, theatrical productions, even a wedding band. As a drummer, I was especially interested in patterns and beats. At some point, I got it in my head that everything that was seemingly random could in fact be the articulation of a grand, overarching rhythm, but that the count hadn’t yet been revealed because we hadn’t reached the end of a measure. I realized while writing “Nightblooming” that this could be a comforting, religious sort of idea, not just a whimsical speculation.
Kenneth Calhoun was born in Upland, California, in 1966. He has published stories in journals such as The Paris Review, Fence Magazine, Fiction International, St. Petersburg Review, Quick Fiction, and others. He is a recipient of the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction and a winner of the Summer Literary Seminars/Fence Magazine Fiction Contest. He lives in Boston.
Jennine Capó Crucet, “How to Leave Hialeah”
Somewhere in the beginning of my thinking of this story, I made a list of all the people I hated. Then I strung together versions of a few of these people—along with versions of people I loved and who loved me—and unleashed this narrator on them. A lot of my stories come from a place of anger, which is probably not the healthiest place, but it’s where I tend to start. Thankfully, because things so quickly become straight-up fiction once I’m actually writing, that’s never, ever where I finish. In writing “How to Leave Hialeah,” it wasn’t until the cousin showed up in my imagination and on the page that I knew this was a story I needed to hear.
Jennine Capó Crucet was born to Cuban parents in 1981 and raised in Miami, Florida. Her debut story collection, How to Leave Hialeah, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the John Gardner Memorial Prize, and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and was named a Best Book of the Year by The Miami Herald and the Miami New Times. Her stories have been published in Ploughshares, Epoch, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, The Los Angeles Review, and other magazines. A graduate of Cornell University and a former sketch comedian, she currently divides her time between Miami and Los Angeles.
Jane Delury, “Nothing of Consequence”
This story emerged from a description of sexual dynamics that I heard years ago from a French teacher who had volunteered in Senegal. But I recognize other elements from my lived experience as well: a snake that gave me a fright, an unfortunate episode with a bathing suit and a Pacific wave, and my recognition that for many, like Rado, writing is a long process of learning and refinement rather than a blazing ascension. Though each of the women making up the group of teachers has her own complexity, I was interested in the way that groups of people—especially those who find themselves outside of their familiar environment—can create a larger personality.
Jane Delury was born in 1972 in Sacramento, California. Her stories have appeared in journals including The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, and Prairie Schooner. She has received an award from the Maryland State Arts Council and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She teaches in the University of Baltimore’s MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program, and lives in Baltimore.
Tamas Dobozy, “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived”
The impulse to write is usually exactly that: an impulse. It starts for me in that need, experienced daily, a kind of negative drive, fueled by absence, that moves after something in the positive sense—a title, an image, an idea. For many, many years I’ve bee
n mining material on the siege of Budapest, a particularly dark period in what is the general darkness of Hungarian history, in the hope of putting together a collection. This story comes out of that endless seam.
I have some relatives who own an old villa in a suburb east of Budapest, called Mátyásföld, that I have always loved. It seems to me a place that still somehow retains its Austro-Hungarian character despite the ravages of two world wars, revolution, Soviet takeover, land reapportioning, and the sudden and in many ways catastrophic shift into wild capitalism.
When I started writing this story the image of the villa came up for me, almost as it does for László, as a kind of golden lure, a place of security, a final goal. Of course, for me it was a way to tell the story, while for László it was salvation, though maybe in some way this is the same thing—the desire to engage with something that will save what we do from futility, that promises everything will come out all right in the end, that the sacrifices will be worth it, only to realize that it was only really important for what we did—good and bad—along the way.
I do wonder sometimes about this use—misuse some might say—of history in fiction, the way there’s something both moral and amoral in it at the same time: a desire to write in a way that responsibly engages the world, and a desire to write about something simply because it makes for a marvelous story. Maybe this tension is productive and shouldn’t be reconciled. It is, at any rate, a question that haunts the writing of this story, and leaks out in László’s own uncertainties about what he’s doing.
