The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 Read online

  SERIES EDITORS

  2003– Laura Furman

  1997–2002 Larry Dark

  1967–1996 William Abrahams

  1961–1966 Richard Poirier

  1960 Mary Stegner

  1954–1959 Paul Engle

  1941–1951 Herschel Bricknell

  1933–1940 Harry Hansen

  1919–1932 Blanche Colton Williams

  PAST JURORS

  2014 Tash Aw, James Lasdun, Joan Silber

  2013 Lauren Groff, Edith Pearlman, Jim Shepard

  2012 Mary Gaitskill, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Ron Rash

  2011 A. M. Homes, Manuel Muñoz, Christine Schutt

  2010 Junot Díaz, Paula Fox, Yiyun Li

  2009 A. S. Byatt, Anthony Doerr, Tim O’Brien

  2008 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Leavitt, David Means

  2007 Charles D’Ambrosio, Ursula Le Guin, Lily Tuck

  2006 Kevin Brockmeier, Francine Prose, Colm Toíbín

  2005 Cristina García, Ann Patchett, Richard Russo

  2003 Jennifer Egan, David Guterson, Diane Johnson

  2002 Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, Colson Whitehead

  2001 Michael Chabon, Mary Gordon, Mona Simpson

  2000 Michael Cunningham, Pam Houston, George Saunders

  1999 Sherman Alexie, Stephen King, Lorrie Moore

  1998 Andrea Barrett, Mary Gaitskill, Rick Moody

  1997 Louise Erdrich, Thom Jones, David Foster Wallace

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 2015

  Copyright © 2015 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House LLC

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Laura Furman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Permissions appear at the end of the book.

  Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101872314

  eBook ISBN 9781101872321

  www.anchorbooks.com

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  To Ellen and Karl Sklar with sisterly love

  The staff of Anchor Books is devoted to publishing excellent books. Their collective intelligence, dedication, and professional skill make it a pleasure to work with them. Jennifer Marshall’s unflagging enthusiasm and experience reveal The O. Henry Prize Stories to the world each year anew. Diana Secker Tesdell shows the series editor each year how it should be done.

  Taylor Flory Ogletree and Marissa Colon-Margolies were the editorial assistants for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015. The series editor is grateful to them for their sharpness and honesty, and for the fun of being with them.

  The graduate school and Department of English of the University of Texas at Austin support The O. Henry Prize Stories in many ways. The series editor thanks the university and especially Elizabeth Cullingford and Oscar Cásares.

  —LF

  Publisher’s Note

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES

  Many readers have come to love the short story through the simple characters, easy narrative voice and humor, and compelling plotting in the work of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), best known as O. Henry. His surprise endings entertain readers, including those back for a second, third, or fourth look. Even now one can say “Gift of the Magi” in a conversation about a love affair or marriage, and almost any literate person will know what is meant. It’s hard to think of many other American writers whose work has been so incorporated into our national shorthand.

  O. Henry was a newspaperman, skilled at hiding from his editors at deadline. A prolific writer, he wrote to make a living and to make sense of his life. He spent his childhood in Greensboro, North Carolina, his adolescence and young manhood in Texas, and his mature years in New York City. In between Texas and New York, he served out a prison sentence for bank fraud in Columbus, Ohio. Accounts of the origin of his pen name vary: One story dates from his days in Austin, where he was said to call the wandering family cat “Oh! Henry!”; another states that the name was inspired by the captain of the guard at the Ohio State Penitentiary, Orrin Henry.

  Porter had devoted friends, and it’s not hard to see why. He was charming and had an attractively gallant attitude. He drank too much and neglected his health, which caused his friends concern. He was often short of money; in a letter to a friend asking for a loan of $15 (his banker was out of town, he wrote), Porter added a postscript: “If it isn’t convenient, I’ll love you just the same.” His banker was unavailable most of Porter’s life. His sense of humor was always with him.

  Reportedly, Porter’s last words were from a popular song: “Turn up the light, for I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

  —

  Eight years after O. Henry’s death, in April 1918, the Twilight Club (founded in 1883 and later known as the Society of Arts and 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.

  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 July 1. Editors are invited to submit online fiction for consideration. Such submissions must be sent to the series editor in hard copy. (Please see this page for details.)

  As of 2003, the series editor chooses the twenty O. Henry Prize Stories, and each year three writers distinguished for their fiction are asked to evaluate the entire collection and to write an appreciation of the story they most admire. These three writers receive the twenty prize stories in manuscript form with no identification of author or publication. They make their choices independent of one another and the series editor.

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

  To V. S. Pritchett (1900–1997)

  The shelf within arm’s reach of my desk holds several books by V. S. Pritchett, though not all by any means; his life’s work includes many volumes of story collections, essays, criticism, and biographies. My acquaintance with Pritchett’s writing began when I was too young to know anything but that he was the real thing. Nowadays, what once seemed a harsh view of mankind strikes me as calm and clear-sighted.

  Late in life Pritchett wrote a biography of Anton Chekhov, a writer to whom he is often compared. The impetus for the book might have come from fellow feeling. Both Chekhov and Pritchett are praised for their compassion, which means to this reader that neither ever loses interest or sums up a character in a dismissive way. Both are scrupulous in their portrayals of
minor characters, the lower class of the fictional world. Both are unsentimental and see their characters whole.

  Pritchett’s characters are often motivated by desire, especially sexual desire, and he is alert to signals and cross-signals, frustration and cunning. The latter plays a special role in the celebrated story “On the Edge of the Cliff.” Harry is in his seventies and his beautiful lover, Rowena, in her twenties. He’s a widower and has always had young lovers: “When young girls turned into women, they lost his interest; he had always lived for reverie.” At the story’s beginning, Rowena and Harry are preparing to leave his house, first to go to a fair for Rowena’s enjoyment, and then to walk on a cliff above a cove where Harry went when he was younger and his wife alive. Rowena loves the tales he tells her about his past, which she glamorizes for her own reasons.

  Harry is on guard and takes care to keep Rowena from seeing him as a decrepit old man, and he’s right to be careful. En route to the carnival he entertains her with historical facts and fancies about “carnival, Celtic gods and devils. He was old Father Time, she said now, and he humored her with a small laugh. It was part of the game. He was not Father Time, for in one’s seventies one is a miser of time, putting it by, hiding the minutes, while she spent it fast, not knowing she was living in time at all.”

  At the fair they encounter Doris, a former fling and now a widow, and her handsome young companion, Steven, who they take to be her son. Harry is thrown off his stride by the chance meeting and snubs Doris. Later, he descends the hillside to the cove, strips off his clothes, and triumphantly swims in the cold sea, breaking a rule of his old man’s game by letting Rowena see him naked. They return home, and for the first time she comes into Harry’s bed. He guesses that she’s jealous of Doris and of his past. Harry’s game is almost despicable, almost touching, manipulative, and a little desperate; he knows that this girl might be his last.

  The story shifts when Doris comes to visit while Rowena is away. In another writer’s hand, the middle of the story might center on Rowena and Harry. Is she restless or disenchanted after his stumbles in the old man’s game? Looking down into the cove reminds Rowena of looking into the empty hole of his mouth when he wasn’t wearing his dentures. Or does Rowena, as Harry imagines, love him? If so, what does Harry make of that and might he be able to tolerate her aging into a woman?

  By mirroring Harry and Rowena with Doris and Steven, Pritchett takes another path. He complicates the story with Doris, who reveals that at the fair she wasn’t with her son but her much younger lover; she insists that she and Harry keep their lovers apart because they are beautiful and young, and attraction would be inevitable. Hers is an old woman’s game, one more realistic than Harry’s. Doris isn’t dreaming and she isn’t playing. If her young lover leaves her, she’ll throw herself off that cliff. She would choose death rather than try to fool time.

  Doris leaves, Rowena returns, and Harry makes another mistake. He tells Rowena that the young man they saw wasn’t Doris’s son but her lover, and Rowena protests: “She’s old enough—” She stops herself from finishing the sentence, but it’s the beginning of the end for her and Harry: “Instead of giving him one of her light hugs, she rumpled his hair.”

  That small detail indicates greater changes to come, and disaster for the old man. Harry is vain, manipulative, and human, for who wants to grow old and who wants to die?

  Like him or not, we can’t stop watching.

  Contents

  Cover

  Series Editors and Past Jurors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Editor’s Note

  Publisher’s Note

  To V. S. Pritchett (1900–1997)

  Introduction

  Laura Furman, Series Editor

  Finding Billy White Feather

  Percival Everett, Virginia Quarterly Review

  The Seals

  Lydia Davis, The Paris Review

  Kilifi Creek

  Lionel Shriver, The New Yorker

  The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA

  Manuel Muñoz, Glimmer Train

  A Permanent Member of the Family

  Russell Banks, Conjunctions

  A Ride Out of Phrao

  Dina Nayeri, Alaska Quarterly Review

  Owl

  Emily Ruskovich, One Story

  The Upside-Down World

  Becky Hagenston, Subtropics

  The Way Things Are Going

  Lynn Freed, Harper’s

  The History of Happiness

  Brenda Peynado, Cimarron Review

  The Kingsley Drive Chorus

  Naira Kuzmich, Salamander

  Word of Mouth

  Emma Törzs, The Threepenny Review

  Cabins

  Christopher Merkner, Subtropics

  My Grandmother Tells Me This Story

  Molly Antopol, Ecotone

  The Golden Rule

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Fifth Wednesday Journal

  About My Aunt

  Joan Silber, Tin House

  Ba Baboon

  Thomas Pierce, The New Yorker

  Snow Blind

  Elizabeth Strout, Virginia Quarterly Review

  I, Buffalo

  Vauhini Vara, Tin House

  Birdsong from the Radio

  Elizabeth McCracken, Zoetrope: All-Story

  Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

  The Jurors on Their Favorites

  Tessa Hadley on “A Ride Out of Phrao” by Dina Nayeri

  Kristen Iskandrian on “Birdsong from the Radio” by Elizabeth McCracken

  Michael Parker on “Cabins” by Christopher Merkner

  Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

  The Writers on Their Work

  Publications Submitted

  Permissions

  Introduction

  What 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.