The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 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

  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 K. 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 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Random House LLC

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Laura Furman

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

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

  Permissions appear at the end of the book.

  Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-345-80731-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-80732-8

  Cover design by Mark Abrams

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  To Willard Spiegelman

  The staff of Anchor Books in every department is devoted to publishing excellent books and publishing them well. Their intelligence, dedication, and professional skill make it an honor to work with them. Diana Secker Tesdell shows the series editor each year how it’s done.

  Taylor Flory Ogletree was the editorial assistant for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014. The series editor is grateful to her for her steadiness, kindness, and sharpness.

  The graduate school and Department of English of the University of Texas at Austin supports The O. Henry Prize Stories in many ways, and the series editor expresses her gratitude.

  —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, 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 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 Alice Munro

  The announcement was made on October 10, 2013: Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro was the Nobel laureate in Literature. A great many writers and readers were elated at the news, perhaps feeling that they were part of the happy moment. The glory wasn’t Alice Munro’s alone but that of the short story as well.

  The Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, Peter Englund, said, “She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection.”

  Alice Munro has long contrasted the short story and the novel.

  “For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation.”

  When she was told the news of her Nobel, she said, “I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a no
vel.”

  In financial terms, the short story is the weak sister, more like an even less remunerative literary form, poetry, than like the novel. In the book-publishing world, the norm is that story collections get smaller advances than novels. Few magazines pay much, if anything, for a short story. Perhaps the short story’s place in the novel’s shadow is in part due to its lower earnings.

  In the end, though, the money doesn’t really count. The argument, if there is one, about which form is superior and which is inferior doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the individual work.

  Alice Munro’s body of work is superb, and it’s been the honor of The O. Henry Prize Stories to include her work time and again. For her readers, her Nobel Prize is a validation of the profound and vivid experience of reading her work.

  Congratulations, Alice Munro. You did all you could, and we’re grateful. Thank you for the stories.

  Contents

  Cover

  Series Editors and Past Jurors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Publisher’s Note

  To Alice Munro

  Introduction

  Laura Furman, Series Editor

  The Gun

  Mark Haddon, Granta

  Talk

  Stephen Dixon, The American Reader

  Valentine

  Tessa Hadley, The New Yorker

  Pétur

  Olivia Clare, Ecotone

  You Remember the Pin Mill

  David Bradley, Narrative

  Nemecia

  Kirstin Valdez Quade, Narrative​Magazine.​com

  Trust

  Dylan Landis, Tin House

  Old Houses

  Allison Alsup, New Orleans Review

  Fatherland

  Halina Duraj, Harvard Review

  West of the Known

  Chanelle Benz, The American Reader

  The Women

  William Trevor, The New Yorker

  Good Faith

  Colleen Morrissey, The Cincinnati Review

  The Right Imaginary Person

  Robert Anthony Siegel, Tin House

  Nero

  Louise Erdrich, The New Yorker

  A Golden Light

  Rebecca Hirsch Garcia, The Threepenny Review

  Fairness

  Chinelo Okparanta, Subtropics

  The Inheritors

  Kristen Iskandrian, Tin House

  Deep Eddy

  Michael Parker, Southwest Review

  Oh Shenandoah

  Maura Stanton, New England Review

  Opa-locka

  Laura van den Berg, The Southern Review

  Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

  The Jurors on Their Favorites

  Tash Aw

  James Lasdun

  Joan Silber

  Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

  The Writers on Their Work

  Publications Submitted

  Permissions

  Introduction

  The mission since 1919 of The O. Henry Prize Stories has been to encourage the art of the short story. By calling attention to their gifts, we encourage short-story writers. When we put a story between book covers, we give it a longer life and a wider readership.

  Because each story’s crucial first publication was in a magazine (print or online), we list the magazines that have submitted their short fiction in the back of each collection (this page). We hope that with the information provided, new readers will find and enjoy the magazines and perhaps subscribe to one or two. These days, a reader also has the opportunity to be a patron of the arts and donate to a magazine, which helps keep the little magazines alive.

  Some of the listed magazines are not struggling. The New Yorker publishes fiction weekly and has a sterling history of cultivating and supporting writers over the long haul, as does Harper’s. But some fit the classic notion of a little magazine: circulation well under one thousand, inventive design, eccentric and centrist fiction published side by side. Noon, for example, is an annual always filled with challenging fiction and always a pleasure to see and hold.

  Some excellent magazines—Granta, Tin House, Narrative, and The American Reader, founded in September 2012—are brought into being by the vision and ambition of private benefactors. Tin House is a rare literary magazine that’s a commercial success. American nonprofit magazines with 501(c)(3) status such as A Public Space are eligible for support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a perennial pincushion when it comes to federal funding. The Threepenny Review publishes consistently readable and challenging essays, poetry, and fiction with the support of “subscriber-donors,” whose subscriptions make up about 35 percent of the annual budget, along with their donations (40 percent), according to editor Wendy Lesser. The rest of the broadsheet’s funding comes from grants, advertising, single-copy sales, and digital sales. Narrative (and Narrative​Magazine.​com) is the product of its two editors, Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks, who supported it themselves at first and gradually built a board, an advisory council, and a base of donors.

  Many magazines are funded by public and private academic institutions. Shrinking state budgets may put a magazine in mortal danger, as those in charge question whether a small magazine is the best use of public funding. Does it aid the institution as, say, a winning football team does? Measuring the value of art, not to mention the value of prestige, is a trickier score to keep than that of the Cotton Bowl. Still, some institutions, private and public, continue year after year to support the magazines that give established and new writers a chance. In recent years, Ecotone has emerged as a solidly interesting magazine. The Publishing Laboratory of the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington founded the magazine in 2005 and also supports its small press, Lookout Books. New England Review was founded in 1978 at Middlebury College, a small liberal-arts school in Vermont. New Orleans Review (1968) is sponsored by the English Department of Loyola University, New Orleans, and Subtropics by the University of Florida. Since 1915, Southwest Review has been Southern Methodist University’s pride. The exquisite Southern Review is supported by Louisiana State University.

  Many little magazines seek help from donors, joining schools, hospitals, scientific research institutions, museums, and a myriad of organizations that do not make a profit but add immeasurably to our lives. Your subscriptions to such magazines help keep them alive. The editors and staff of little magazines don’t enjoy big salaries. Some have no salaries at all. They work with such devotion because the idea of publishing new literary work is a powerful motivation, profit or no profit. The real success of a magazine lies in the quality of the work chosen and published.

  This year’s jurors are Tash Aw, James Lasdun, and Joan Silber, all previous O. Henry winners. Each read a blind manuscript and chose a favorite without consultation with one another or me. In the “Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014” section (this page), you’ll find their essays.

  Years ago, my family drove to Colorado for a break from the Central Texas summer. We’d brought way too much stuff, and our rented Aztek was weighed down by the extra container on its roof. On the way, I got gasoline on my favorite white shirt and parted with it. Along Highway 90, still in Texas, we slept in a dank cement-block motel with mold-filled air-conditioning. But when we reached the rented house in Gunnison, where we could finally stop traveling, instead of flinging open the car doors and escaping, we stayed in the Aztek so we could keep listening to the audio recording of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Haddon’s story in this collection, “The Gun,” was chosen by juror Tash Aw as his favorite. One quality the story shares with the novel is Haddon’s ability to involve the reader in the improbable, sometimes confounding events of his characters’ lives.

  The relationship between the two boys whose adventure forms the bulk of the action isn’t profound. They are together a
nd then they part, for many reasons and with some feeling, all unstated. Their nonchalant friendship leaves both boys unprepared for the arbitrary violence and emotion to come. “The Gun” is a story made up of curious incidents that, when put together with Haddon’s skill, bring the characters so close that the action of the story seems to have happened to us.

  The primary relationship in “Pétur” by Olivia Clare is between mother and son, in Iceland to celebrate the mother’s birthday. They, and the reader, are in a realm of “unworldly weather.” The story streams past unfamiliar words such as fjalls and hrossagaukur, and a weather report—“ash from Eyjafjallajökull”—before we’re sure exactly who and where the characters are. Our ignorance is dispensed with abruptly:

  Adam was a data systems analyst. He was thirty-six. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, where Laura was, in a house she’d once shared with Adam’s father on the other side of town. Iceland for two weeks had been her idea for her birthday. She’d just turned sixty-one, and she’d told Adam she didn’t believe it, and he shouldn’t, either. She’d said, You look in the mirror and acknowledge you’re as old as you like. She felt nineteen, mostly. She looked fifty.

  Mother and son, on vacation in a land of ash and icebabies, are introduced with quite a few numbers (thirty-six, one, two, sixty-one, nineteen, fifty). We’ve been given what looks like information, though the numbers urge us to pause, add, and subtract before we go on. This odd timing is a risk for the author. Short-story beginnings are crucial, and often writers take great trouble to be as clear and simple as possible to usher the reader into the story. Clare does the opposite, giving her reader firm ground to stand on and then taking it away. The passage of the mother’s birthday and the spooky volcanic ash falling everywhere seem like part of the same unpredictable event. The reader is then immersed in what is most important in “Pétur”: the characters’ knowledge and ignorance of each other; the transformation of a woman from a mildly negligent mother into a woman either unhinged or unloosed in her own new reality. The reader watches the son as he watches his mother drift further from him than ever before.