The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018
Page 39
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Michael Powers was born in Connecticut and raised there and in central New York State. He is at work on a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Barrelhouse. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Lara Vapnyar, “Deaf and Blind”
“Deaf and Blind” is the most autobiographical of my stories. When I was seven or eight, my mother’s friend left her husband to be with a deaf and blind man. I was absolutely enchanted by this couple. I thought that their relationship was the essence of true love.
When they came to dinner once, I was bent on impressing that man. My mother’s friend suggested that I sing for him. He couldn’t hear the words or the tune, but she assured me that he would be able to feel the vibrations if I sang loud enough. So I walked right up to him and started to scream the Russian Christmas song into his ear: “A little tree was born in the woods, and there it grew and greeeeew!!!” I hope that what he felt was the vibrations and not hot spurts of my saliva. Afterward, he graciously hand-signed how much he had enjoyed the performance.
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Lara Vapnyar emigrated from Russia to New York in 1994. She is a recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and was awarded the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and Vogue. She lives in New York City.
Stephanie A. Vega, “We Keep Them Anyway”
It takes courage to name things, to write them down.
I first approached the story of Ña Meli, a medium working at small-town fairs, wondering about her. I wondered about her life, the social structures she was embedded in, and in particular what she had to say. What is the danger in saying things we already sense or suspect? Why do we write them down? Create a record? Why is it not enough to pass a knowing look and keep quiet?
The story came to life when I found the perspective of the neighbor, a person who both did and did not know Ña Meli well—a person for whom her words mattered. He also had something to say, and I listened. But the story only became complete once I pushed through the hints and oblique references and named the particular, horrible truth lurking in the background.
Ña Meli, the medium in my story, violates the expected silence, the complicity of both victims and perpetrators in trying to move on as if nothing has happened. For me the story, any story, has to violate the expected silence. The story has to name what we would rather gloss over if it hopes to speak truth.
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Stephanie A. Vega was born in Paraguay and moved to the United States to study. She later completed graduate degrees in economics and Latin American policy at Oxford University. She spent time in Paraguay before returning to the United States to teach economics. Recently, she completed an MFA in creative writing at Chatham University. Her fiction has appeared in The Normal School and The Capilano Review. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Brenda Walker, “The Houses That Are Left Behind”
The story began with strands of long pale hair that my husband and I found on a sofa we’d bought for convenience when we acquired our apartment. This mysterious hair, we discovered, was not easy to eradicate, and in my mind it became an emblem of everything that ties my characters to the past or releases them into the future. It is an emblem, too, of romance and passion. The central love in the story is conducted high up, at the level of passing birds, but it is shadowed by the provisional, since the lives that are visible at street level are marked by loss and ruin, and even the birds in the story can fall to earth. The story is about the strange alignments of different lives, about love and refuge, watchful judiciousness and, finally, unexpected happiness.
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Brenda Walker was born in Grafton, New South Wales. She has written four novels, including Poe’s Cat and The Wing of Night, and a memoir, Reading by Moonlight. Her work has won numerous awards in Australia. Her short fiction has appeared in Stand, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Literary Review, The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, and The Best Australian Stories. She was the recipient of the H. C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University and the 1996–97 University of Western Australia Stanford Women’s Fellowship. She lives in Western Australia.
Jenny Zhang, “Why Were They Throwing Bricks?”
Love seems simple, beyond debate—one should give and receive as much of it as possible. What is the harm, I used to think, in loving someone? But it was often fraught. Love became inseparable from demand, expectation, pain, baggage. Sometimes, it was suffocating, one-sided; the more someone demanded it of me and demanded me to accept their love, the more defiant I became, at times even cruel. As I got older, I began to be wary of those who were the showiest and most insistent with their love—why did they need me to love them? Why did they need everyone to love them? I began to realize that love, like everything else, could be weaponized.
I find childhood endlessly interesting because it’s such a blurry time yet so easy to idealize through nostalgia. Still, others look back at that time and remember nothing, or only the nightmarish experience of being so helpless and reliant on adults for care.
“Why Were They Throwing Bricks?” tracks Stacey’s relationship with her grandmother, who is both manipulative and inspiring, though as Stacey gets older, she brushes off the latter and clings to the former. I was interested in the ways children idealize and attach themselves to the adults who are tasked with caring for them and the painful process of growing up and realizing that some of these adults are not at all fit, some cannot help but imprint their own unprocessed traumas onto the children under their care. It’s also a story of how trauma is passed down, inherited, rejected. For so long, I wanted to believe the world was cleanly cleaved into two kinds of people—those who have been traumatized and those who traumatize others. In other words, I believed some people deserved total sympathy and others none. How quickly that notion was destroyed for me when I realized that some people who have suffered the most can be insufferable to be around! How do we hold people accountable for the harm they cause when they themselves have been victims of violence? How do we reconcile the ways love and tenderness can be entangled with power and dominance? These were the questions I had when I began this story and still have years after I finished.
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Jenny Zhang was born in Shanghai and grew up in New York City. She is the author of the short-story collection Sour Heart and the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, New York, and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in New York City.
Publications Submitted
Stories published in American and Canadian magazines are eligible for consideration for inclusion in The O. Henry Prize Stories. Stories must be written originally in the English language. No translations are considered. Sections of novels are not considered. Editors are asked not to nominate individual stories. Stories may not be submitted by agents or writers.
Editors are invited to submit online fiction for consideration, but such submissions must be sent to the address on the next page in the form of a legible hard copy. The publication’s contact information and the date of the story’s publication must accompany the submission.
Because of production deadlines for the 2020 collection, it is essential that stories reach the series editor by June 1, 2019. If a finished magazine is unavailable before the deadline, magazine editors are welcome to submit scheduled stories in proof or in manuscript. Publications received after June 1, 2019, will automatically be considered for The O. Henry Prize Stories 202
1.
Please see our website, www.ohenryprizestories.com, for more information about submissions to The O. Henry Prize Stories.
The address for submission is:
Laura Furman, Series Editor, The O. Henry Prize Stories
The University of Texas at Austin
English Department, B5000
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712
The information listed below was up-to-date when The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 went to press. Inclusion in this listing does not constitute endorsement or recommendation by The O. Henry Prize Stories or Anchor Books.
Able Muse
www.ablemuse.com
submission@ablemuse.com
Editor: Alex People
Two or three times a year
AGNI
www.bu.edu/agni
agni@bu.edu
Editor: Sven Birkerts
Biannual (print)
Alaska Quarterly Review
aqreview.org
uaa_aqr@uaa.alaska.edu
Editor: Ronald Spatz
Biannual
American Book Review
americanbookreview.org
americanbookreview@uhv.edu
Editor: Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Six times a year
American Short Fiction
americanshortfiction.org
editors@americanshortfiction.org
Editors: Rebecca Markovits and Adeena Reitberger
Triannual
The Antioch Review
review.antiochcollege.org/antioch-review-home
cdunlevy@antiochcollege.edu
Editor: Robert S. Fogarty
Quarterly
Antipodes
www.wsupress.wayne.edu/journals/detail/antipodes-0
antipodesfiction@gmail.com
Editor: Nicholas Birns
Biannual
Apalachee Review
www.apalacheereview.org
mtrammell@cob.fsu.edu
Editor: Michael Trammell
Biannual
Apogee
apogeejournal.org
editors@apogeejournal.org
Editor: Alexandra Watson
Biannual
Arcadia
arcadiapress.org [inactive]
editors@arcadiapress.org [inactive]
Editor: Roy Giles
Quarterly
Arkansas Review
arkreview.org
mtribbet@astate.edu
Editor: Marcus Tribbett
Triannual
ArLiJo
arlijo.com
givalpress@yahoo.com
Editor: Robert L. Giron
Ten issues a year
The Asian American Literary Review
aalr.binghamton.edu
editors@aalrmag.org
Editors: Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis and Gerald Maa
Biannual
Aster(ix)
asterixjournal.com
Editor: Angie Cruz
Triannual
Baltimore Review
baltimorereview.org
editor@baltimorereview.org
Editor: Barbara Westwood Diehl
Quarterly
Bat City Review
www.batcityreview.org
editor@batcityreview.org
Editor: Nick Almeida Miller
Annual
Bellevue Literary Review
blr.med.nyu.edu
info@BLReview.org
Editor: Danielle Ofri
Biannual
Bennington Review
www.benningtonreview.org
BenningtonReview@Bennington.edu
Editor: Michael Dumanis
Biannual
Black Warrior Review
bwr.ua.edu
blackwarriorreview@gmail.com
Editor: Gail Aronson
Biannual
BOMB
bombmagazine.org
betsy@bombsite.com
Editor: Betsy Sussler
Quarterly
Boulevard
boulevardmagazine.org
editors@boulevardmagazine.org
Editor: Richard Burgin
Triannual
The Briar Cliff Review
www.bcreview.org
3303 Rebecca Street
Sioux City, IA 51104
Editor: Tricia Currans-Sheehan
Annual
CALYX
www.calyxpress.org
editor@calyxpress.org
Editors: C. Lill Ahrens, Rachel Barton, Marjorie Coffey, Judith Edelstein, Emily Elbom, Carole Kalk, Christine Rhea
Biannual
The Carolina Quarterly
thecarolinaquarterly.com
carolina.quarterly@gmail.com
Editor: Moira Marquis
Triannual
Carve
www.carvezine.com
azumbahlen@carvezine.com
Editor: Matthew Limpede
Quarterly
Catamaran Literary Reader
catamaranliteraryreader.com
editor@catamaranliteraryreader.com
Editor: Catherine Serguson
Quarterly
Cherry Tree
www.washcoll.edu/centers/lithouse/cherry-tree
llusby2@washcoll.edu
Editor: James Allen Hall
Annual
Chicago Quarterly Review
www.chicagoquarterlyreview.com
cqr@icogitate.com
Editors: S. Afzal Haider and Elizabeth McKenzie
Quarterly
Chicago Review
chicagoreview.org
editors@chicagoreview.org
Editor: Andrew Peart
Triannual
China Grove
www.chinagrovepress.com/china-grove-journal
chinagrovepress@gmail.com
Editors: Luke Lampton and R. Scott Anderson
Annual
Cimarron Review
cimarronreview.com
cimarronreview@okstate.edu
Editor: Toni Graham
Quarterly
The Cincinnati Review
www.cincinnatireview.com
editors@cincinnatireview.com
Editor: Lisa Ampleman