The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016
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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
2015 Tessa Hadley, Kristen Iskandrian, Michael Parker
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 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 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
Introduction copyright © 2016 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 Canada Limited, 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 9781101971116
Ebook ISBN 9781101971123
Cover design by Mark Abrams
www.anchorbooks.com
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Contents
Cover
Other Titles
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Editor's Note
Publisher’s Note
To Jean Rhys (1890–1979)
Introduction
Laura Furman, Series Editor
Irises
Elizabeth Genovise, Cimarron Review
The Mongerji Letters
Geetha Iyer, Orion
Narrator
Elizabeth Tallent, The Threepenny Review
Bonus Baby
Joe Donnelly, ZYZZYVA
Divergence
David H. Lynn, Glimmer Train
A Simple Composition
Shruti Swamy, Agni
Storm Windows
Charles Haverty, One Story
Train to Harbin
Asako Serizawa, The Hudson Review
Dismemberment
Wendell Berry, The Threepenny Review
Exit Zero
Marie-Helene Bertino, Epoch
Cigarettes
Sam Savage, The Paris Review
Temples
Adrienne Celt, Epoch
Lydia Fitzpatrick
Lydia Fitzpatrick, One Story
Bounty
Diane Cook, Harper’s
A Single Deliberate Thing
Zebbie Watson, The Threepenny Review
The Crabapple Tree
Robert Coover, The New Yorker
Winter, 1965
Frederic Tuten, Bomb
They Were Awake
Rebecca Evanhoe, Harper’s
Slumming
Ottessa Moshfegh, The Paris Review
Happiness
Ron Carlson, Ecotone
Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016
The Jurors on Their Favorites
Molly Antopol on “Train to Harbin” by Asako Serizawa
Peter Cameron on “Winter, 1965” by Frederic Tuten
Lionel Shriver on “Irises” by Elizabeth Genovise
Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016
The Writers on Their Work
Publications Submitted
Permissions
To Glenn and Kathleen Cambor, with love
Publishing is a profession and also a calling, and the series editor is grateful to the skilled and dedicated editorial, production, and publicity staff at Anchor Books. Each year, Diana Secker Tesdell edits the series editor with grace and patience.
Kelly Luce was the editorial assistant for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016, and the series editor enjoyed her intelligence, broad taste, and keen sense of the importance of literature.
The graduate school and Department of English of the University of Texas at Austin supports The O. Henry Prize Stories in many ways. The series editor thanks the university and especially Professor Elizabeth Cullingford.
—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 each other and the series editor.
The goal of The O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.
To Jean Rhys (1890–1979)
Some mornings, just to brace myself, I look at the jacket photograph on Jean Rhys’s 1976 story collection Sleep It Off, Lady. Rhys was eighty-six in Fay Godwin’s photo, her fingers arthritic, head cocked, one eye larger than the other, grooves from nose to chin, staring back at whoever dares to stare at her in her chic beat-up hat and jacket. She might be saying, “Go ahead and look if you dare.” She looks back just as sharply and with as little expectation as she might have done in life. Her look defines the phrase gimlet-eyed.
And so it is with her writing, her brief and searing novels, and her short stories that are delivered like taps that slice the reader at the end.
The title story of Sleep It Off, Lady begins with two ladies at tea, Mrs. Baker and Miss Verney, having a chat about a proposed village project, when Miss Verney says that lately she’s been thinking “a great deal about death.” Here the subversion of the cozy English village begins.
Mrs. Baker answers that it isn’t so strange that Miss Verney thinks of death:
“We old people are rather like children, we live in the present as a rule. A merciful dispensation of providence.”
“Perhaps,” said Miss Verney doubtfully.
Like many of Rhys’s stories, “Sleep It Off, Lady” centers on a character who understands very little about the world and is in turn not much understood. Rhys’s early heroines, young women alone, lack an instinct for self-preservation and they are always strangers, wherever they are. They trust the wrong person, usually a man, and they end up more isolated and wounded than ever. One story, set on a Caribbean island like Dominica (where Rhys was born and raised), has the same clueless, innocent character missing the niceties of not shooting sitting birds. Whatever everyone else knows and takes for granted, a Rhys heroine will not.
In “Sleep It Off, Lady,” even the children are judgmental, mean, and exceedingly unhelpful. In her bitter innocence, the main character has no gift for the sort of politeness that would make a bearable life of tea and non sequiturs. She cannot stand to ask for help and she gets none. Indeed, the villagers condemn her for drinking, which she does often and early. When she needs their aid, they ignore her.
The photographic portrait was taken near the end of Rhys’s life when she was rediscovered and republished, rescued by the efforts and publicity campaign of her editor Diana Athill and the writer Francis Wyndham. Her rescue came too late, Rhys told an interviewer.
Jean Rhys’s stories would only be painful were it not for the beauty of her prose. She writes simply and clearly. There is never a pretense of style or stylishness. Her tales of alcoholics, petty criminals, and perpetual losers in love are lit by the intimacy of her voice. Her reader is one of her losers. Who in the world that Jean Rhys created would care to be one of the heartless winners?
—Laura Furman
Austin, Texas
Introduction
This year, as always, when the reading got under way for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016, the stories in the just-published 2015 collection whispered in my ear that this would be the year when I wouldn’t find another twenty worthy of succeeding them. The haunting prediction held for a while, and then the first right one appeared. This year, Ron Carlson’s “Happiness” reassured me that once again there were more wonderful stories to discover for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016.
A story with that title might be greeted with skepticism. Happiness? Really? The word’s in our Declaration of Independence but most of us can’t say what it means to be happy, though we know the feeling when it’s there and we miss it when it’s gone.
Carlson’s characters—the narrator, his brother, and two sons—are meeting at the family’s mountain cabin in October to secure the place for the winter. When the narrator and his son stop for the night in Wyoming, it’s five degrees above zero and there are pickup trucks parked in front of Wally’s, home of the Wally Burger. The narrator knows that the “smart shepherds and collies” that would in warmer weather be in the trucks are in the motel’s warm rooms. Game three of the World Series is on TV. The narrator lays out these simple and ordinary conditions as if he were describing a moment in paradise.
The unhurried pace of the narration speaks of happiness as the narrator luxuriates in his modest way. He isn’t about to rush anything, not his descriptions of the weather, land, trees, water, trout, or deer. Even the cabin’s copper Levelor blinds have their moment. Happiness might glow and inspire, in memory and in its presence, but it doesn’t last, a truth here not stated but implied by the aesthetics of the story.
The one female character, the boys’ mother, isn’t there, though she’s present. She and the narrator are divorced, and we don’t know why or when. A letter she’s written to the narrator, which he receives from his son in the course of the story, is protected from the wet and treated with the same care as any other object. When the narrator tells family stories he includes her, calling her “your dear mother.” Their parental love, which is also a love for each other, reveals itself in the narrator’s careful patience as he instructs their sons.
By the time the vivid, beautifully written story reaches its end, the reader realizes why the narrator is determined to teach his sons how to take care of the cabin and wants them to know how to find a certain place on the land. The reason is more often the cause for tears and not happiness, though Carlson’s “Happiness” would have it otherwise.
—
Joe Donnelly’s “Bonus Baby” brings us to the ball game but from inside the very center, from the pitcher’s point of view. The story takes place during a game—not just any game but a possible perfect game. We see how the pitcher’s life has led him to this moment.
The pitcher’s tics, familiar to any baseball fan, are his way of controlling what little he can in the uncontrollable game and in his life. He uses his tug, wipe, and touch to his cap to “harness energy and deliver it.”
“Bonus Baby” is in the mythic tradition of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, in which baseball is treated as a variant on the Trojan War and the players like demigods and great warriors—but in Donnelly’s vision the pitcher is a Midwesterner and speaks with the inherent groundedness and modesty of that region. He’s the son of former athletes, homecoming king and queen, whose lives rolled downhill after high school. They spend their adult lives cooped up indoors, his mother as a secretary and his father as an alcoholic mechanic in a textile mill. Their positions are a
s different as can be from the pitcher’s at the center of the playing field. The lesson they teach their son is that glory will not come, and the pitcher must throw beyond his inheritance of failure in order to win. The reader is with him every inch of the way.
—
In Charles Haverty’s engaging “Storm Windows,” a son recalls his father’s enslavement to a house. Putting on storm windows and taking them down can be a strain even for those who love a house; Haverty’s choice of the necessary and tedious chore is a shrewd one, for the twice-yearly task embodies the quasi-matrimonial devotion that some houses demand.
The narrator, Lionel, dislikes the big old-fashioned house, as do his mother and sister. “Only my father, who traveled often on business and spent the least amount of time there, loved the house.” As an adult, Lionel is fated to take care of another demanding house because for his wife, “a child of divorce, the house represented a triumph over the chaos of her youth.” For Lionel, his own house demands repeated chores and rescue operations performed, with any luck, by others. Lionel has no talent or taste for home repair.
“Storm Windows” reaches through Lionel’s marriage with its tenderness and troubles, his daughters’ sweetness in childhood and reproachfulness as young adults, his father’s near-deaths, and his mother’s consistent bitterness. In a crucial scene, the first of his “deaths,” Lionel’s father asks that his record of “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot be played. The aria ends with “Vincèro” (I will win), a moving cry against cold nights, death, and the darkness of the sky. Both Lionel and his father are stuck in the darkness of marriage, adultery, and their imperfect love for each other.