The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2016 (retail) (epub)

  Peter Cameron on “Winter, 1965” by Frederic Tuten

  I’m usually very wary of stories about writers, and a story about a writer writing a story is really pushing my boundaries. But I loved “Winter, 1965.” Perhaps it was the setting of New York City half a century ago, evoked with such detail and immediacy, that charmed me: Another world, another time, but also achingly real and familiar. The way a snowstorm stills and softens the city is timeless, and its evocation here is beautiful, hushing and finally almost burying the story in its silence. And despite the winter chill, I liked the story’s warmth and generosity, its wealth of character and lack of villains, its deft compression of time. As a reader, I felt gently welcomed into this story, and well attended to.

  I had exactly the opposite response to another story I admired in this collection, “Slumming” by Ottessa Moshfegh. Although not my favorite, this story startled me. I was impressed by its uncompromising honesty and its scrupulous avoidance of pandering to the reader’s sympathies. “Slumming” stuck with me in an unsettling way, and it was good to be moved in such a different direction. It reminded me that stories can work in infinite ways. That the possibilities for good stories are endless.

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  Peter Cameron was born in Pompton Plains, New Jersey. He is the author of two collections of short stories (One Way or Another and Far-flung) and six novels, including his latest, Coral Glynn. His novels The Weekend, The City of Your Final Destination, and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You have been made into films. His short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Cameron lives in New York City.

  Lionel Shriver on “Irises” by Elizabeth Genovise

  Ordinarily, I’d resist the conceit that Elizabeth Genovise asks us to accept in “Irises”: that our narrator is an unborn fetus whose mother is planning an abortion. On the face of it, this premise sounds either precious, or politically partisan; perhaps we should brace ourselves for a pointed pro-life morality tale. (Typically, given the polarization of this issue, we pro-choice readers resist having our sleeves tugged.) Yet I didn’t rebel at that first line, “I am eight weeks in the womb and my life is forfeit,” owing purely to the elegance of that second phrase. “My life is forfeit” is such an artful, subtly archaic expression of impending doom, and so efficiently introduces the fact that the mother does not cherish this pregnancy and intends to be quit of it, that my defenses dropped just like that.

  I was not disappointed as the story unfolded. The quality of the prose is unflaggingly high, while the style is cut-glass clear. The sentences that stand out as unusually fine do so because they marry formal grace with trenchant content. The mother’s husband, Dan Ryan, “shares his name with a Chicago highway that is always thick with cars coming and going to work, and like the highway he is predictable, practical, a man of straight lines.” Later in the same paragraph, Dan’s frustrated wife, Rosalie, forced to leave behind an exhilarating life as a dancer due to a knee injury and now facing unwelcome motherhood-cum-relocation from Chicago to a nowheresville farm in Tennessee, “sees the remainder of her life in a flash, like a child’s flip book, the pages rushing forward and the pencil-thin illustrations slimming down her choices as the years go by.” The metaphor is apt and evocative. With Dan, “She is docile with him, a sweetness emerging from some part of herself she hadn’t formerly known. It alternately pleases and sickens her.” That’s in some ways very simple writing, but its meaning is dense, rich, complex.

  Though their interests conflict, all three principals in this drama draw on the reader’s sympathy: the stifled wife, the good-hearted but limited husband, and the wife’s passionate, talented lover Joaquin, a composer who plays the piano for the little girls’ dance class she teaches in lieu of being able to perform. We identify with Rosalie’s yearning for her more stimulating past—a past that her husband finds suspicious, alien, as much a rival as the lover about whose existence he is innocent—even as we know as well as she does that she can never return to it. Her aspiration to run off to a New Age West Coast cooperative with Joaquin seems unrealistic, and we credit her for the insight that “the singularity of his genius would only cause problems in a commune.”

  The cuckolded husband works hard, tries to please, and doesn’t deserve his wife’s betrayal. Especially when getting cold feet right before he and Rosalie have arranged to flee together, Joaquin is sympathetic also. Lost in a museum, he stumbles across an exhibit about the development of the human fetus and suddenly takes on the enormity of what they are about to do. For inevitably in a story whose narrator is an unborn child on the way to the medical waste bin, we’re torn about Rosalie’s and Joaquin’s intentions to dispatch the baby. We’re queasy about Rosalie’s reasoning, which seems a bit cavalier, just as her conviction that an abortion and a new life with Joaquin in a commune will ease her career disappointment seems delusional.

  The story’s setup is classic, of course, and has a Chekhovian character, as in some ways does the prose. Yet neither the plot nor the writing feels hackneyed. The tension “Irises” explores is eternal: between the solid, reliable, repetitive life that Rosalie would reject and the riskier, more exciting, but perhaps impractically romantic life that she would embrace with her lover. (Indeed, I wrote a novel about that duality: The Post-Birthday World.) Besides, this story takes one of those sudden turns at the end that freshens our scenario, rescues the premise from any danger of cutesiness or political advocacy, and takes advantage of one of the most satisfying techniques that the short-story form affords: the dizzying fast-forward.

  More than one tale in this collection commanded my admiration, and my runners-up included “Exit Zero” by Marie-Helene Bertino, “Safety” by Lydia Fitzpatrick, “Slumming” by Ottessa Moshfegh, and “Winter, 1965” by Frederic Tuten—all hugely enjoyable. But Elizabeth Genovise’s contribution crossed the finish line by a nose. Both as a whole and line by line, “Irises” is stunningly accomplished.

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  Born and raised in North Carolina, Lionel Shriver has resided primarily in the United Kingdom since 1987. Shriver is best known for the New York Times bestsellers So Much for That (a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize) and The Post-Birthday World (Entertainment Weekly’s Book of the Year and one of Time’s top ten for 2007), as well as the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. The 2005 Orange Prize winner, Kevin was adapted for an award-winning feature film starring Tilda Swinton in 2011. Both Kevin and So Much for That have been dramatized for BBC Radio 4. Shriver’s work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. She writes for The Guardian, The New York Times, London’s Sunday Times, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Her more recent novel is Big Brother. “Kilifi Creek,” which is included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, won the BBC National Short Story contest in 2014. She lives in London, England, and Brooklyn, New York.

  Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

  The Writers on Their Work

  Wendell Berry, “Dismemberment”

  My story “Dismemberment” is about Andy Catlett’s recovery after losing his right hand to a corn picker in 1974. That story was told in a different way, with a different interest, in my small novel, Remembering. The question here is whether or not this story is worth telling twice. My own belief, supported by much local conversation, is that a story worth telling is worth telling any number of times.

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  Wendell Berry was born in Newcastle, Kentucky, in 1934. He is an essayist, poet, farmer, environmental activist, and fiction writer, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and also the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, and the John Hay Award of the Orion Society. He is a 2013 Fellow of the American Acade
my of Arts and Sciences, and has received many prizes and awards in recognition of his long and fruitful career. Berry lives with his family on a farm in his native Henry County, Kentucky.

  Marie-Helene Bertino, “Exit Zero”

  When my father passed away a few years ago, I found myself in the same position my character Jo does—on my hands and knees, cleaning out a freezer. I had joined the sad club of people who’ve lost parents, and this distinction, though dubious, made me privy to new information. Ideas about life I had suspected I now knew, and ideas I knew I double knew. I realized my relationship with my father was not, as I’d have guessed, over, but that it continued in a way that felt more intimate. Like someone whispering in your ear.

  What I double knew was that there are only so many chances to spontaneously buy a ticket to Paris. So a few weeks after the funeral, I did just that. Thinking back on it, in a place I keep hidden even to myself, I hoped I’d find him there.

  I spent ten days walking the Seine but he never showed.

  On my last afternoon in Paris, I visited the Musée de Cluny. For the sake of those who haven’t read “Exit Zero,” I won’t name the famous mythological animal I found on the tapestries there. I sat in the room with her for over an hour, casting out my imagination. By the time I returned home, I knew I wanted to write a story that featured her, but I’d have to upend the expectation her presence would bring. Muddy her up a bit. That particular creature enjoys a reputation for being pure and docile, which wouldn’t do for what I wanted to say.

  What did I want to say?

  Fathers can be hard to believe in. Family can be anywhere. Grief, like New Jersey, is a strange place, but that doesn’t mean it’s without magic. Death, pain, and violence—trauma, essentially—can sometimes act as a portal we do not see as we are passing through.

  I suppose I too passed through a portal after my father died, one that delivered me to Paris, and to ______. She gave me a lot of laughter and comfort during a complicated time, not to mention the first scatologically focused scene I’d ever written.

  I said my father never showed in Paris. Thinking back on it now, maybe he did.

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  Marie-Helene Bertino was born and raised in Philadelphia. She is the author of the collection Safe as Houses, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and named Outstanding Collection by the Story Prize; and the novel 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. A Pushcart Prize recipient, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Center for Fiction in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Ron Carlson, “Happiness”

  I was on a fishing trip one recent fall with my son. We were on our way to a mountain cabin to meet up with my other son and my brother. We were the only vehicle on Wyoming Route 414, driving past Lonetree, a road which every time I’m on it fills my heart with the ages. I was first there with my father sixty years ago. In October the sun had fallen away but was still trying, and the lonely world lay empty. We had the radio on and the announcer in a football game said that the team had good field position. Seriously, that was it. I thought we had good field position. To the north we could see a river wandering between the cottonwoods and haystacks in the fields. I had a feeling under my ribs and I realized I was happy. The affection for the moment took and I began writing the story when I got home the next week, wanting to stay close enough to each small event that I could feel each again in my ribs. The ending of the story was a surprise to me.

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  Ron Carlson was born in Logan, Utah. His most recent novel is Return to Oakpine. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and others; they have been performed on National Public Radio’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

  Adrienne Celt, “Temples”

  A few years ago I reread Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin and became interested in the way Nabokov disguises his first-person narrator as a third-person voice for most of the novel, telegraphing the true point of view only in small breaths. I also (more simply) loved the character Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, who is so vulnerable and doughty—indeed, noble—despite the tyranny of the voice telling his story and trying to make him look like a fool. One of my interests, then, in writing “Temples,” was to play with the idea of hiding a lovely person behind a less lovely speaker, and in that way playing with audience expectations of whom to be closest to, whom to trust.

  Of course, as is the way with most fiction, the story didn’t exactly stick to the plan. (Most stories, after all, are bigger on the inside.) For instance, I couldn’t have guessed, at the outset, how important the church would be to these characters, or how the narrator’s voice would bleed into the first person whenever she began relinquishing control. But mostly, I was surprised by how much I ended up loving my judgmental narrator—quite as much as her aunt Marjorie, perhaps because the narrator ended up being the really fragile one in this case.

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  Adrienne Celt was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. She’s the author of the novel The Daughters, and her short fiction and comics have appeared in numerous publications, including Esquire, Kenyon Review, Epoch, Prairie Schooner, Bat City Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Rumpus. The recipient of residencies and awards from the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the Willapa Bay AiR, and the Esquire and Aspen Writers’ Foundation Short Short Fiction Contest, Celt lives in Tucson, Arizona.

  Diane Cook, “Bounty”

  The idea for the story originated with the simple desire to look at the last two neighbors after an end of the world flood. Neighborliness and the forced interaction of neighbors is a thing I’ve always been intrigued by.

  I wanted the neighbors to hold differing opinions as to how to live out the end of days. I love Robert Frost and especially “Mending Wall.” The neighbor in the poem likes doing what has always been done and the speaker has a bit of disdain for that. A flood that wipes away all of our man-made boundaries can be a stand-in for the loss of the fence that makes good neighbors in the poem. It puts a familiar pressure onto two people living out an unfamiliar nightmare.

  But this was all in the beginning. An idea, a scenario, a voice to get started. Early ideas just give you a framework. They aren’t a story. Once I began writing, I discovered more of what I really wanted to write about and I got to a place with the writing where I was surprising myself with things. For instance, with Gary.

  I love Gary. He was not a planned character, but he must have shown up when I lost steam just playing around with the scenario and the voice. Gary brings out the humanity in the narrator. And he brings out the real conflict, which isn’t between the neighbors but within the narrator. Companionship or survival, our narrator ponders. Which is more important? That quandary has no stakes without Gary. To me, Gary is the star of the show. He presses on the narrator to change, but it’s Gary who changes.

  Last note of possible interest: the narrator is a man. A number of readers have gotten this wrong, but I think it’s fairly obvious. You be the judge.

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  Diane Cook is the author of the story collection Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, received Honorable Mention for the Pen/Hemingway Award, and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. She was awarded the 2012 Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, and in Tin House, Granta, and elsewhere. She was a producer for the radio show This American Life. She lives in Oakland, California.

  Robert Coover, “The Crabapple Tree”

  Began with the desire to set the Grimm brothers story, “The Juniper Tree,” on the American prairie. It’s a story about cannibalism, murder rewarded,
brutality of the “good” people, punishment by millstone, and a blasé acceptance of the extraordinary, which seemed about right for such a setting. The narrator is an old Midwestern girlfriend of mine.

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  Robert Coover was born in 1932, in Charles City, Iowa. He attended Southern Illinois University, Indiana University, and the University of Chicago. His many awards include the William Faulkner Foundation Award for The Origin of the Brunists, REA Award for the Short Story, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Clifton Fadiman Medal for Pricksongs & Descants, and Independent Press Storyteller of the Year, 2006. His most recent book is The Brunist Day of Wrath. He divides his time between Providence, Rhode Island, and Barcelona.

  Joe Donnelly, “Bonus Baby”

  The only way I ever finish anything is if I can feel the guillotine of a deadline hanging over my neck. As for “Bonus Baby,” I promised my wife I’d finish it before the birth of our daughter, Olivia, as a gift for her. True to form, I read a just-finished draft to my wife just after her epidural kicked in following twelve hours of back labor.

  “Bonus Baby” is obviously a loaded title. A somewhat anachronistic baseball reference, the phrase also denotes to me a late and grateful passage into parenthood. For Olivia, I suppose I wanted to commemorate how her parents bonded over watching the Dodgers and listening to Vin Scully. Part of our connection was a mutual affinity for a pitcher who had old-school style, obvious intelligence, and a deep talent he couldn’t quite master. The story was inspired by imagining what it might be like to be alone on that mound attempting to come to terms with oneself and the game of baseball at the same time. As I got into it, the story showed it could contain a lot more than the game itself…much like the game itself.