The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015From Furman, Laura (EDT)
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The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015From Furman, Laura (EDT)
Free Ebook PDF The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015From Furman, Laura (EDT)
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories span the globe—from the glamorous Riviera to an Eastern European shtetl, from a Native American reservation to a tiny village in Thailand. But their characters are universally recognizable and utterly compelling, whether they are ex-pats in Africa, migrant workers crossing the Mexican border, Armenian immigrants on the rough streets of East Hollywood, or pioneers in nineteenth-century Idaho. Accompanying the stories are the editor’s introduction, essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines. Finding Billy White Feather PERCIVAL EVERETT The Seals LYDIA DAVIS Kilifi Creek LIONEL SHRIVER The Happiest Girl in the Whole USAMANUEL MUÑOZ A Permanent Member of the Family RUSSELL BANKS A Ride out of Phrao DINA NAYERI OwlEMILY RUSKOVICH The Upside-Down World BECKY HAGENSTON The Way Things Are Going LYNN FREED The History of Happiness BRENDA PEYNADO The Kingsley Drive Chorus NAIRA KUZMICH Word of Mouth EMMA TÖRZS Cabins CHRISTOPHER MERKNER My Grandmother Tells Me This Story MOLLY ANTOPOL The Golden Rule LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ About My Aunt JOAN SILBER Ba Baboon THOMAS PIERCE Snow Blind ELIZABETH STROUT I, Buffalo VAUHINI VARA Birdsong from the Radio ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN For author interviews, photos, and more, go to www.ohenryprizestories.com
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015From Furman, Laura (EDT)- Amazon Sales Rank: #26077 in Books
- Brand: Furman, Laura (EDT)
- Published on: 2015-09-15
- Released on: 2015-09-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .90" w x 5.20" l, .79 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
Review "Widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction." —The Atlantic Monthly“Those who still cling to the promise of the short story can be glad that there is still someone willing to do the heavy lifting.” —Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Laura Furman, series editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories since 2003, is the winner of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for her fiction. The author of seven books, including her recent story collection The Mother Who Stayed, she taught writing for many years at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Central Texas.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IntroductionWhat is great prose to one person is wallpaper to another. As readers, we are all subjective and that is one of the pleasures of being a reader. This particular reader likes writing best when it is free of the looming presence of the writer, who, reasonably and humanly, wants the work to be liked, appreciated, praised, and rewarded. Sometimes that understandable desire casts a shadow. The best short stories don’t necessarily have the cleverest plots or the most ingenious twists, but they do have the best prose and a full creation of a fictional world. The reader of the short story often feels two things simultaneously, as with Russell Banks’s “A Permanent Member of the Family.” Just as you’re starting to understand how the characters are put together, you recognize the ways in which they’re unraveling. Banks’s narrator is driven by his desire to keep everything the same at the moment when everything is changing. He acknowledges that his actions are disrupting family life, but he and his soon-to-be ex-wife are working out their arrangements and disarrangements smoothly. A bit of self-congratulation seems only right. The bump comes when the family dog, Sarge, makes it known that she isn’t about to change her ways. The family is her pack, the narrator is the leader of the pack, and so Sarge goes where the narrator does, all human agreements aside. Sarge’s doggy devotion to family life as it used to be is the rift in the lute of the enlightened divorce. The pleasures of “A Permanent Member of the Family” are many. The narrator wants to “set the record straight, get the story told truthfully once and for all, even if it does in a vague way reflect badly on” him. He is thoughtful, judicious, and still, thirty-five years after the events of the story, hoping for a pass. He’s kidding himself about a number of things. If his version of the truth were the only one, that would be one thing; Banks’s skill and intelligence make it clear that his is only one version among several, and not the most important at that. The narrator of Emily Ruskovich’s “Owl” is devoted to his wife, Jane. At first we see her as a victim; a neighbor boy shot her, mistaking her for an owl. For much of the story the narrator seems to be his wife’s nurse and keeper, and while Jane appreciates his care, at the same time she keeps secrets and holds herself apart emotionally. Her actions and feelings are as opaque to the reader as they are to the narrator, though she grows less mysterious when we learn the harsh story of how they came to marry twelve years earlier and farm in Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho. Several boys from neighboring farms are also devoted to Jane, and the reader senses something dangerous about the boys and about Jane, though it isn’t clear at first if the danger originates with Jane herself, the boys, or the hapless narrator. “Owl” is a triumphant, heartbreaking visit to isolated rural life at the turn of the twentieth century. Occasionally the narrator harks back to worse times, to the one-room, dirt-floored house he grew up in, where dust destroyed his mother’s lungs. The difficulties of frontier life turned him into a workhorse, a man without vision or hope. When he marries fifteen-year-old Jane, who is pregnant by another man, she brings beauty to his narrow life. He tells us: “She was polite to me, my Jane.” The reader intuits that she’s been waiting all twelve years to make her escape, even if her adoring husband doesn’t. Lynn Freed’s chilling “The Way Things Are Going” is set in contemporary South Africa and California. The story is about transitions, all of them difficult: A fierce mother ages from a resourceful pirate to a fragile and delusional old woman; a country develops from unjust tyranny to lawlessness; love devolves into a memory. The narrator tries to make sense of her own story, in which she is both victim and perpetrator, an appendage of her failing mother and manipulative sister. She knows that her passivity and her allegiance to an idea of manners make her a witness to her own life, but she will not help herself. The disaster that’s befallen the narrator isn’t the violent incident that sets chaos in motion. It’s the title of the story that defines her. Freed has a gift for exposing the roots of her characters’ individual disaster, roots so deep that each one is inevitable. We might not like where the narrator of “The Way Things Are Going” ends up any more than she does but we can see no way out for her. Lionel Shriver starts her story “Kilifi Creek” in a more idyllic African setting. Liana, a tourist, is young and pretty enough to wheedle her way around East Africa in the care of distant acquaintances older and richer than herself. “Mature adulthood—and the experience of being imposed upon herself—might have encouraged her to consider what showing up as an uninvited, impecunious houseguest would require of her hosts.” Shriver narrates with an Olympian knowledge of her character’s fate and way of being; Liana in all her obliviousness is fun to watch as she risks her life and then forgets whatever lesson might have been gained from the experience. The combination of entertainment and lesson-drawing makes “Kilifi Creek” intriguing and, because of its ending, satisfying and shocking. What is the use of lessons in manners when life is so fragile and so temporary, and youth so much fun? In Dina Nayeri’s “A Ride Out of Phrao” the main character, Shirin Khalilipour-Anderson, might have learned some lessons along the way but everything in her resists conventional wisdom. Shirin carries her chaos wherever she goes. An exile from Iran after the fall of the shah, she goes to America and lives for fifteen years in Cedar Rapids. After she’s fired from her job, and lies shamelessly about why she’s unemployed, she joins the Peace Corps and is sent to a village in northern Thailand. The story revolves around a visit to the Thai village by Shirin’s estranged daughter, a young woman so exhausted by her mother’s lies that she believes almost nothing her mother says. Their relationship—tenuous and tentative, loving and hostile—is the heart of the story, for Shirin wishes above all else that her daughter would believe her, though Shirin lies the way other people breathe. As she sees it, her lies are for the convenience or pleasure of others. “A Ride Out of Phrao” is juror Tessa Hadley’s favorite story in this year’s collection, and she explains why in eloquent terms (pp. 351–53). Brenda Peynado’s “The History of Happiness” is about another traveler, who started her journey with her boyfriend. “We were both computer science majors and once we got a job we would spend the rest of our lives in a five-by-five box controlling machines and we wanted to see the real, human world.” Along the way, when it’s time to move on, the boyfriend decides to remain in India with Hindu monks. The narrator tells us, “I was angry at myself and doing things like couch surfing with strangers, stealing wallets, and lifting bank account passwords from Internet café computers, and I dared some terrible consequence to happen.” She’s absorbed by her dilemma of having no money, and by her loneliness and anger, interested in her boyfriend’s spiritual crisis only to make fun of it. She is tilting toward becoming a criminal perhaps destined for a confinement far worse than the five-by-five box of a computer programmer, or for worse punishment. The story takes place in Singapore, where, as one character says, “no one would be foolish enough to steal anything.”At the end of “The History of Happiness” Peynado creates an explosion and a revelation: The narrator’s anger breaks open, and she understands that she, like the boyfriend who stayed with the monks, must struggle with questions too large to answer or ignore. The peacefulness of the conclusion is both welcome and unexpected, and explains the word happiness in the title. Manuel Muñoz’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA” is the story of two women who meet by chance as they travel on the same mission: to find their husbands, who’ve just crossed the US-Mexico border illegally. The narrator, Griselda, knows her way around from long experience. She knows where to go, what shoes to wear, which motel to stay in for the night when her man doesn’t show up, and she knows too that happiness is temporary. The younger woman, Natalia, is naive, wears high heels she can hardly walk in, and has nowhere to spend the night; in short, she needs looking after, and Griselda reluctantly shares what she has. She stops short of advising the other woman to forget her man, and keeps to herself the many difficulties of “the whole drama of deportation and return” and the sacrifices she’s made. “Do something with your life, Griselda,” an observant teacher once told her, but she couldn’t follow that urgent advice, and she was too shy to ask how in the world she could. Once she fell in love with Timoteo, her options were even more constricted. In part, the story is about the many difficulties and limits of the particular life the characters—women, Mexican-American, poor—are leading, and that is enough, given the beauty of the writing, to make a fine story. But the story is an even greater gift to the reader for, with grace, generosity, and wisdom, Manuel Muñoz is telling us about the cost of love. “I, Buffalo” by Vauhini Vara begins on a bus in San Francisco. The narrator is horribly, blindingly, painfully hungover, and she engages in a conversation with a mother and her little boy that ends with the boy lobbing an imaginary hand grenade her way. There are faint echoes of Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” in its dark humor and edginess. The narrator, however impaired, is eager to share her story. She’s unlucky in love, she tells us, and now that she’s alone there is “a great and holy emptiness. It resembled the alarming emptiness that cathedrals and mosques hold for those of us who believe in nothing beyond what is proven to exist.” The narrator’s exuberance and delightful language seduce the reader, even as she details her drinking, which is the kind that ends up in blackouts. Slapstick ensues as the narrator tries to hide her condition from her visiting family. Little by little, the reader understands how dangerous the narrator is to herself and others, and the comedy thins and disappears. The mellifluous narrator reaches a stopping point where nothing will do but the silence of truth: “Enough with all these words. Enough with the endless questions and endless answers.” Thomas Pierce’s “Ba Baboon” has a similarly ingenious combination of tragedy and comedy, beginning as it does with a brother and sister—Brooks and Mary—trapped in the pantry of a house they’ve more or less broken into. The house belongs to a former lover of Mary’s and she is there to collect an embarrassing video. Brooks is there because he’s in her care. He’s recovering from a head injury; someone hit him with a brick. “ ‘A random act of violence,’ his mother called it. ‘A totally senseless thing.’ Unnecessary qualifiers, he sometimes wants to tell her, as the universe is inherently a random and senseless place.” Mary’s lover is away with his family, but he’s left behind a vicious pair of guard dogs who have trapped Mary and Brooks in the pantry. There are some code words that will make the dogs retreat but Mary and Brooks don’t know them. In a random and senseless universe, the existence of the powerful words makes complete sense, as does Mary and Brooks’s ignorance of them. They won’t be trapped in this situation forever, but the effects of Brooks’s brain injury are probably permanent. He might enjoy a “fuller” recovery, or he might not. His doctor assures him that whatever happens, Brooks will still be Brooks, in some form. If he can accept that, he might be happy. Or happier. “Ba Baboon” is filled with hopelessness and loss, and also with humor and affection. Maybe there are some magic words that will heal the damaged brain and the old Brooks will return. In a random and senseless universe, can there be limits to what might happen? Christopher Merkner’s “Cabins” is about men and divorce, written in numbered chapters and set in hookah bars, basketball courts, a men’s penitentiary, a house decorated with the heads of dead animals, and an imaginary cabin where the narrator is alone. (Juror Michael Parker chose “Cabins” as his favorite story and discusses it on pp. 356–58.) The cabin of solitary existence isn’t, of course, an exclusively masculine province. It is imagined in opposition to the elusive intimacy and inexorable commitment of marriage. The narrator is surrounded, he believes, by men who are divorcing, friends he thought he knew and doesn’t. There are other threats to the narrator’s peace: He had a heart attack a year before and his wife is about to give birth to their first child. The story is a disquisition on fear and various ways of trying to talk your way out of being afraid, and it ends with tenderness and loneliness in equal measure. In Becky Hagenston’s “The Upside-Down World,” Jim has flown to Nice to rescue his sister, Gertrude. The middle-aged pair is not especially close, and the story’s jaunty title is at odds with the emotions at play between brother and sister—crippling anxiety, frustration, fretfulness, and bewilderment. Jim last saw Gertrude three years before but she’s called him in the middle of the night to ask his opinion: “ ‘I just took a seven-hundred-euro taxi ride to Monte Carlo in my nightgown. Do you think I’m losing it again?’ ” Jim’s wife, Jeannie, is offended by his willingness to rescue Gertrude. Jeannie can always predict precisely how things will go wrong, and as the story moves along, her self-assurance works nicely against Jim’s hesitations. He’s come on a rescue mission but his sister is an octopus of evasion. Time and again, Jim tries to understand how she must feel, as though his understanding will bring him closer to getting her back to a psychiatric hospital in America. The second thread of the story concerns Elodie, a French runaway, and her companion Ted, who spot Jim and Gertrude as easy marks. They have their own form of disorder, not in mental confusion but in lethal mutual misunderstanding. Elodie is running from her mother’s death; she witnesses a terrible accident and perceives nothing but the advantage it might give her. In the end, Elodie is the character most at risk of being turned upside down permanently. In Lydia Davis’s “The Seals” the narrator mourns her older sister, once beloved and now dead, as are their parents. The narrator questions why she loved her sister so much and wonders what they shared—a love of animals, perhaps, for she remembers “animal-themed presents” and wonders about them. There was a “mobile made of china penguins—why? Another time, a seagull of balsa wood that hung on strings . . . Another time, a dish towel with badgers on it.” She seems to be describing someone she knew only in the distant past but as the story goes on we learn that though she saw her sister infrequently, they always kept in touch. Part of the beauty of “The Seals” is the slow meditative consideration of the sister, of her death, her life, her gifts, her witholdings, and then of what it feels like to miss her. “There was also some confusion in my mind, in the months afterward. It was not that I thought she was still alive. But at the same time I couldn’t believe that she was actually gone. Suddenly the choice wasn’t so simple: either alive or not alive. It was as though not being alive did not have to mean she was dead, as though there were some third possibility.” Molly Antopol’s “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story” is also a meditation on the past punctuated by brief returns to the present, during which the grandmother-narrator questions why the granddaughter wants to know about the part she and her husband played as teenagers in the Jewish resistance to the Nazis in Belarus, and how she met her husband, and how they came to America. Her granddaughter’s curiosity is as incomprehensible to her as it is that she hasn’t made an adult life for herself and clings to family history as if there’s an answer in it for her own young troubles. Though the grandmother has a war story of courage and daring, of risking death and surviving when so many died, she doesn’t have a love story to tell. Whether or not she even likes her husband, the courageous resistance fighter and immigrant failure, is in question. The raw passion we feel in the story is for her lost youth and opportunities, for a world gone by, and for her choicelessness in the world she’s in now. The story ends with a final harangue at her granddaughter’s failures to make friends, find a husband, make her way, be happy, her insistence on “scratching at ugly things that have nothing to do with” her. The granddaughter is silent, yet we argue on her behalf that these things have everything to do with who she is. All these “horrible things that happened before [she was] born” speak to trust and love, and to the damage that was done and preserved like a sacred relic. In Percival Everett’s “Finding Billy White Feather,” set in Wyoming, Oliver Campbell finds a note on his door, left maybe by a ghost; Oliver’s dog doesn’t alert him to a visitor. The note is from Billy White Feather, which sounds like an Indian name, though Oliver finds out soon enough from people in town that Billy White Feather (not his real name) is “a tall, skinny white boy with blue eyes and a blond ponytail and he come up here a couple of years ago and started hanging around acting like he was a full blood or something.” Or he’s “a big guy with red hair and a big mustache.” Or else he’s “an Indian. Got a jet-black braid down to his narrow ass.” Still, Billy’s note told the truth about twin Appaloosa foals born on the reservation. The story rolls on, taking Oliver to the unusual twins and their mother, and to more stories about Billy White Feather’s shortcomings. Little by little, in the vastness of the western landscape, Oliver comes to see the elusive Billy as a threat. He tells his wife, “He came to our home, Lauren. Stood on our porch.” The story pulls you right into the life of the characters and to the odd pursuit of a phantom by the solid citizen Oliver Campbell. The shift in the story’s tone from beginning to end is a demonstration both of Percival Everett’s mastery and of the difference between the pull of curiosity and the power of the shape-shifting unknown. Emma Törzs’s “Word of Mouth” is another Western, this one set in Montana. The narrator, Jenny, tells us: “I’d been raised in the city . . . and I still couldn’t believe I was allowed to live here among healthy streams and molting birches and the constant upsurge of rocky earth. The land made me feel blindly cared for.” Recently, Jenny was the caretaker of her grandmother, a woman who didn’t take anything easily. When her grandmother dies, Jenny is free, though for what she isn’t sure. She finds a job as a waitress at the Whole Hog, an unsuccessful restaurant whose owner abhors advertising and waits for word of mouth to kick in, showing a faith in things invisible. There’s a woman missing from the area, possibly murdered, and her husband, possibly her murderer, comes to the Whole Hog. Törzs’s story deals with various forms of power: one lover over another, men over women, a terrible disease over a body, Jenny’s grandmother over her. The writing is clear and down-to-earth, and “Word of Mouth” ends with a great tenderness that encloses the story, the characters, and even Montana. In Elizabeth Strout’s “Snow Blind,” the Appleby family is a study in secret-keeping. The youngest child, Annie, is an imaginative chatterbox: “Our teacher says if you look at the fields right after it snows and the sun is shining hard you can get blind.” Annie craned her neck to see out the window.“Then don’t look,” her grandmother said. What should the Appleby children look at? What should they avoid seeing? There’s a mystery in their family life that’s like the rumble of far-off thunder. At first, “Snow Blind” seems to be about the whole family and their rural world. In a swerve in narrative direction, the story concentrates on Annie, the only one of the Appleby children to notice that an unnamed shame holds the family together. Annie leaves home and establishes a celebrated life far away, returning to face the revelations of her family’s secrets. By the end, she knows what it costs to dare to look at the light. Naira Kuzmich’s “The Kingsley Drive Chorus” is told in first-person plural, appropriate because the community’s eyes, hearts, and voices are one—all are the immigrant mothers of daring young men. In Greek tragedy, the chorus sees all, knows past and present, and is helpless to change anything. “We had done what we could, all the things we told ourselves we could have done. We resigned ourselves to our windows. We wiped down the glass. We waved.”The tragic hero enacts and embodies the community’s dangers and suffers for everybody. In the Armenian community Kuzmich has created, the enormous sacrifice of one mother resonates through all of them and makes them question if indeed they really did all they could or if they lacked the courage of their love. Another community comes under scrutiny in “The Golden Rule,” by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, a previous O. Henry winner. Every aspect of the dictum “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is examined through the story of Amanda, a sensible, chic widow who seems to be doing unto herself very well. She has her own business, a successful boutique, a boyfriend whose company and lovemaking she enjoys, and a good relationship with her only child, a daughter who lives abroad. Amanda “felt herself in a permanent battle with time and nature, and though in the end she would lose, as everyone does, she resolved to fight valiantly to the death.” Amanda is good to the “frail old neighbor” who lives on the same floor in their apartment house, and does Maria the kind of small favors that can make another’s life easier and cost one little to perform. Maria is a complainer, ten years older than Amanda, and a little bit paranoid; such qualities don’t seem at first to matter. “How could she refuse?” As Maria’s health deteriorates and her demands grow, Amanda begins to compare herself to Maria, and, it seems, her own troubles also increase. She misses her daughter but refuses to ask for more contact. She might be faced soon with closing her business. The boyfriend is fine but at heart Amanda is haunted by the illness and death of her beloved husband; worst of all, she misses him. As Schwartz moves the story along irresistibly, the reader begins to see Amanda’s own demise coming, if not actually caused by her querulous neighbor. The ending of “The Golden Rule” is a convincing cry of courage against inevitable defeat. Joan Silber has been an O. Henry winner before, and her work is widely praised for its honesty, ingenuity, and beauty. The reader is immediately involved in the questions Reyna, the narrator of “About My Aunt,” asks about life in general and in particular. There’s a lot to say about Reyna’s aunt Kiki—the eight years she lived in rural Turkey, her ability to recover and even triumph in tight spot after tight spot, including Hurricane Sandy. Reyna, who has a young son, Oliver, is less adept at landing on her feet. In talking about a new tattoo, she says, “Some people design their body art so it all fits together, but I did mine piecemeal, like my life, and it looked fine.” Reyna’s boyfriend, Boyd, is in jail on Rikers Island, and the complications of visiting him bring Reyna and Kiki together in a new intimacy. Eventually, Kiki tries to get Reyna to leave New York and Boyd. As the conflict plays out, the reader contemplates the differences between the women. Both are worth caring about, and each has wishes for the other one’s life, wishes that, the reader knows, will never come true. “Birdsong from the Radio” by Elizabeth McCracken, according to juror Kristen Iskandrian, who chose it as her favorite (pp. 354–56), “has the aura of a fairy tale.” Fairy tales fascinate, enchant, and frighten us. Leonora is a loving mother who wants to eat her children. “Children long to be eaten,” the authorial voice tells us. “Everyone knows that.” But Leonora terrorizes her children, Dolly, Marco, and Rosa, and then she becomes another kind of monster altogether, a monster of grief. McCracken merges the impossible with the all-too-real in her story of a woman bolstering herself against the worst of all possible losses. “Details,” V. S. Pritchett tells us, “make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.” As you read The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, look for the details that fill all the stories with human beings.—Laura FurmanAustin, Texas
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful. A short story collection that is absolutely essential for anyone who loves words and stories--a triumph in the art of fiction! By Autumn Title: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015Editor: Laura FurmanAge Group: AdultGenre: Short Story CollectionSeries: N/AStar Rating: 5 out of 5 StarsThis book was given to me by the publisher, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review--thank you so much!Lately, though I love novels as much as the next girl, I've been craving collections of short stories. There's just something so lovely to me, about an author that can create a tiny world in the span of only a few pages. It's been a talent I've always craved and wanted, and it never fails to enthrall me entirely. Another bonus with short story collections such as this one? There's always an opportunity to find new authors, to read new work later. In short, this short story collection was absolutely fantastic, in fact, so much so that it deserves a gif of Jack Frost:Overall, this collection is worth all five stars, but the OCD tendencies in me demand that I review and rate each story at a time, so here goes:Finding Billy Whitefeather by Percival Everett: 3.5 out of 5 stars. The first story in the collection, this story was slightly confusing; the main character finds a mysterious note about a pair of horses for sale from the mysterious and elusive Billy Whitefeather. A serious musing about the threat of not knowing one's neighbors, I liked the story, even though it was slightly hard to follow.The Seals by Lydia Davis: 5 out of 5 stars. A musing and thoughtful story on the impact of grief, from the point of view of a sister, mourning the loss of her sister, who more or less raised her, and remembering their sometimes tumultuous relationship. I really enjoyed this story--it was wistful, sad, and sweet, gentle and wonderful, as the narrator ponders if she ever really knew her sister at all.Kilifi Creek by Lionel Shriver: 4 out of 5 stars. For the most part, I enjoyed this story. The writing was beautiful, if a little heavy-headed. There were a lot of big words that I didn't quite understand, but what made this story for me was the character, someone in her early twenties who makes a habit of flirting with disaster, and takes it too far. (I'd already been planning to look into We Need to Talk About Kevin, and this just spurs me further.)The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA by Manuel Munoz: 5 out of 5 stars. This story was wonderful, both a rumination on the consequences and lives of being an immigrant in this country, even in this day and age. Two women, one old, one young, one weary with the routine and the other just coming in to the ways of this crazy life, in the middle of bustling Los Angeles. I really liked this story, but what really made it shine, for me, was the relationship between the two women central to the story.A Permanent Member of the Family by Russell Banks: 5 out of 5 stars. This story, among others, vies for my favorite of the whole collection. A sad tale of a divorce, (well, actually, multiple divorces) the shattering of a family, and a loss that is nearly insurmountable. God, this story. It was brutal, beautiful, and tender, told with a gentle hand despite the heavy subject matter. Will be looking into this author's work immediately.A Ride out of Phrao by Dina Nayeri: 4 out of 5 stars. This is one of the few authors that was familiar to me, and this tale, of travel, Thailand, the often tempestuous relationship between a mother and her daughter, was, at times, almost painful to read. Regardless, despite the narrative being slightly confusing at times, I really enjoyed it. Wonderful!Owl by Emily Ruskovich: 5 out of 5 stars. Yet another contender for my favorite story of the collection, this tale of shapeshifters, infidelity, a husband's suspicion, and thieving young men, with gorgeous prose and flesh and blood characters, this story of secrets and darkness completely captured my imagination. As with Banks, I will be looking into more of this author's work as soon as possible.The Upside Down World by Becky Hagenston: 2 out of 5 stars. This story was confusing and hard to follow, and the plot and the moral of the story wasn't very clear. It was just 'meh'.The Way Things are Going by Lynn Freed: 4 out of 5 stars. A thoughtful story on the power of change, as well as apathy. The two characters in this lovely, well-thought out story were ones that were flawed and I really related to them a lot.The History of Happiness by Brenda Peynado: 3.5 out of 5 stars. Kind of confusing and odd, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.The Kingsley Drive Chorus by Naira Kuzmich: 5 out of 5 stars. This story, yet another contender for my favorite story of the collection, was an unabashed, glaringly honest portrait of the relationship between mothers and sons. This story took my heart and stomped on it. It was painful, beautiful, and real--a triumph of short fiction. Amazing!Word of Mouth by Emma Torzs: 4 out of 5 stars. An entertaining, slightly scary romp about a barbeque restaurant doomed for failure, and a man who seeks out facts, despite the characters of the story being frightened of him. Beautiful prose, odd plot, but wonderful.Cabins by Christopher Merkner: 5 out of 5 stars. A wonderfully entertaining and gentle story about the trials of marriage, and wanting to be a separate person from your spouse. The main character dreams of solitude and peace in a cabin in the woods, and, though thinking of them, discovers they are empty. A worthy musing of marriage, identity, and what peace and fulfillment really is. Wonderful!My Grandmother Tells Me This Story by Molly Antopol: 5 out of 5 stars. This story was definitely one of my favorites, if not the favorite of the whole bunch. A granddaughter sits with her grandmother on a hot, sunny day, and learns of the other woman's sacrifices, as well as the beginning of her relationship with her grandfather, in war torn Poland. One of my very favorite pieces of fiction, of all time!The Golden Rule by Lynne Sharon Schwartz: 4.5 out of 5 stars. A tale of neighbors, and what it really means to have respect, and love, for another person, even in times of trouble. I really enjoyed this story, not just because of its theme, the reverence with which we are expected to show to the older generation. But what happens when that person, who you counted on, disappears? Wonderful.About My Aunt by Joan Silber: 5 out of 5 stars. The narrator's relationship with her aunt, at times rocky and fraught with problems, at others, full of love and understanding, takes the stage in this story of family bonds. It was at turns, funny and scary and deep, and I enjoyed it--really wonderful. I loved the characters!Ba Baboon by Thomas Pierce: 4.5 out of 5 stars. This was really the most humorous piece of fiction in the collection. A pair of siblings break into an ex's home to retrieve a taboo sex tape, and the ex's fierce guard dogs collide with them: hilarity ensues, and in doing so, their familial bond deepens. I loved that the author took somewhat heavy subject matter and made it humorous.Snow Blind by Elizabeth Strout: 5 out of 5 stars. God, this story was heavy. But it was also beautiful, and terrifying. A young girl finds peace and solitude in the forest, and ends up inadvertently revealing a secret that tears her entire family apart. I loved this story, and I honestly cannot wait until I can look into more of Strout's work!I, Buffalo by Vauhini Vara: 4.5 out of 5 stars. I really liked this story, where the narrator is fascinated with the buffalo that frolic around the land on which she lives through college. I really liked this story because it was central to the narrator connecting with nature.Birdsong from the Radio by Elizabeth McCracken: 5 out of 5 stars. Yet another contender for my favorite of the volume. This story tells the tale of a mother, Leonora, who wants nothing more than to gobble up her children. I really enjoyed this story, for its fairy tale elements, the ending, and the way monsters were handled. Amazing!This story collection is a must-have for those of you who love words and stories--a triumph in the fickle art of fiction writing! I loved almost every single one of these stories, meant to be savored and enjoyed bit by wonderful bit! Next on deck: Unteachable by Leah Raeder!
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful. Enough Gems to Make This Worthwhile Reading By M. JEFFREY MCMAHON It’s hard to give stars to an annual prize short story contest for two reasons: The stories are so diverse they are bound to be hit and miss. Secondly, since these are presumably the best of the best, expectations are going to be high, an invitation to some letdown.While I admit, there was a letdown factor owing to some middling stories in the collection and while there were more stories written by MFA creative workshop grads than I would have liked (surely there must be great stories written by non-MFA grads), there is enough diversity and a few gems to make this collection worth recommending. Here are some favorites, which have the quality of having been written of necessity:“A Permanent Member of the Family” by Russell Banks: This is an autobiographical masterpiece about a beloved family dog that becomes the focus of family love and struggle during a divorce. Banks waited many decades, to sort everything out so to speak, before he sat down and wrote this heartbreaking (albeit without a trace of sentimentality) story.“Word of Mouth” by Emma Torzs: One of the benefits of reading a collection like this is being introduced to new, young writers. I had never heard of Emma Torzs, but it was a privilege and pleasure to read her short (too short) story in which a college student waiting tables in Montana (a restaurant called The Whole Hog) finds herself mired in a circle of grotesquely funny characters. With the narrator’s natural humor, the characters came to life in their own lugubrious fashion. Torzs has a talent for comedy and I could have easily enjoyed a 250-page novel version of this story. I can only hope she’s working on that novel right now.“Cabins” by Christopher Merkner: This is a brilliant short story in which the narrator juxtaposes his own marriage and his own integrity (or lack thereof) as a good husband with a myriad of “friends” who come out of the woodwork to explain in excruciating detail why they’re getting divorced.“Ba Baboon” by Thomas Pierce: I’ve read this story now three times as it’s been published in The New Yorker, Pierce’s short story collection (which I reviewed), and here. A car accident renders a brother not quite 100% as he sneaks into a house with his sister to get a scandalous video taken by the sister’s perverse (and married with guard dogs) ex-boyfriend. This is one of the most original and compelling stories I’ve read this year.There are other strong stories in this collection and combined with the gems mentioned above, I can say The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2015 is a collection worth reading.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Gluttony for the Voracious Reader By SeattleBookMama Well of course it’s a five-star book; these stories are the winners! And having just read them, and changed my mind over and over as to which was my real favorite, rather like being at a banquet and being served all of one’s favorite foods, I was at something of a loss to find one that rose above the others…until the very end, and if I had to choose one of them, that would be it. That one, or Russell Banks’s “A Permanent Member of the Family”, a poignant, terrible, magnificent story that I had actually already read and reviewed about a year ago in a collection by that author. So, it goes without saying that Banks is a giant, and I just sort of set him aside with the knowledge that he was untouchable, and then read and compared the rest. But why take my word for it? Don’t just listen to me! Look here at how I’ve rambled on forever without mentioning that I got this book scot free (lucky me) from Net Galley and Knopf Doubleday Publishers in exchange for an honest review. This outstanding collection will be available for purchase September 15. I don’t know how you can bear to wait that long!Okay, let’s try this again. See, it’s almost impossible to compare them, but here are some things I can say about the collection as a whole: first, that it is a multicultural collection, but it doesn’t appear to me as if anybody laid out special rules that said anyone had to vote for this, that, the other culture. They’re all really strong. There was never a moment where something went thud and I wondered how the hell that story got in here. I obsessively made notes on my kindle whenever I came to something that was funny, interesting, or—oh especially this!—when I found incredibly effective, purposeful figurative language. If I still taught (well okay, if I still taught, I wouldn’t have time to read galleys), but if I still taught, I would get a good hard copy of this book to slide under the projector in order to illuminate what the various types of figurative language look like when they’ve been used well. If I still taught and had an actual book buying budget, I would get an entire class set so that students could go through and find the passages for themselves, which is actually a much more powerful way to teach, and then I’d have them write their own stories and be gob-smacked by how much they had improved over the course of a week or so, just from reading a few choice, selected stories.But I don’t teach anymore, and I do read a lot of books and write a lot of reviews, and I am telling you, this is better than what I generally read, and I’ve been reading good stuff, too. The last story in the collection, “Birdsong from the Radio”, by Elizabeth McCracken, is not only outstanding, but it’s chilling, horrifying, and absolutely fabulous read-aloud material for the month of October.But if, like me, you no longer have anyone except other adults surrounding you now, you should get this collection for yourself. Read it on the beach; in a chilly, air-conditioned motel room; or snug by the fire this fall. Because this is what excellence looks like. It’s gluttony for the voracious reader, and extremely tempting, I should think, for the reluctant one.
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