The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  Daniyal Mueenuddin’s debut collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, was the winner of the Story Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Best First Book, Europe and South Asia). It was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a number of other awards. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Mueenuddin lives in Pakistan’s southern Punjab.

  Ron Rash on “Corrie” by Alice Munro

  When I agreed to be a juror for this year’s PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, I suspected choosing a single short story out of many excellent ones would be a daunting task, and so it has proven to be. A first reading narrowed my list to ten, a second to five, and a third to three: Anthony Doerr’s “The Deep,” Miroslav Penkov’s “East of the West,” and Alice Munro’s “Corrie.” As is always the case with the best short stories, each rereading only enhanced my appreciation of all three and made me more reluctant to choose one. I placed them on a couch in my living room, perhaps in hopes that two of them, like impatient suitors, would weary of my indecision and simply vanish. None left voluntarily, so after a few days I reread each a final time and made my decision.

  I have always believed that short stories are closer to poems than to novels, and no story in this volume is more poetic than Anthony Doerr’s “The Deep.” The level of the language is astonishing, both in its vividness and its cadences. The story is worth reading for the elegance of the language alone. Yet “The Deep” completely satisfies as a story. Not only are the characters fully realized but so are the time and the place. Doerr has the ability to render Depression-era Detroit as a vibrant presence, yet his research, which must have been considerable, is invisible within the story.

  Miroslav Penkov’s “East of the West” has many instances of memorable language, too, but what made this story most unforgettable is the scene in which Vera and Nose clutch the steeple of the drowned church. Serving as a visual refrain, this image resonates on many levels. Though the steeple and the clinging couple defy any pat interpretation, they clearly embody a whole culture’s tragedy.

  Alice Munro’s “Corrie,” however, is the story I chose as my favorite. As with “The Deep,” Munro’s narrative is constructed with the precision of a formal poem. Each time I read “Corrie,” I became more aware of how integral each detail is to the whole. As in Flannery O’connor’s best work, everything in “Corrie,” from paragraph breaks to commas, has been set down in its essential place. Account, accounting, and accountability. Money and religion are center stage at the story’s beginning, and they return at its conclusion when the revelation about the blackmail money occurs inside a church. (Another of the story’s many nuances is that the decrepit, nearly abandoned church at the story’s beginning, which we see only from the outside, is replaced by a bustling newer one at the end.) Corrie has always held a belief that there would be a reckoning, a payment due, for the affair. The crucial question is to whom. The answer may surprise the reader as much as Corrie, but the story’s architecture, beginning with the opening line, makes the denouement almost inevitable.

  And yet—and this may be Munro’s greatest gift as a writer—the story feels as if it is telling itself, operating at its own internal pace. Years and decades pass, and many other important events, inevitably, occur in the lovers’ lives, but the reader is not made aware of them because they are not important to the story. And I do mean to the story. Part of this organic effect is created by a seeming disinterestedness. The story doesn’t appear to care much if we find Corrie a sympathetic or unsympathetic character. Aspects that normally would elicit sympathy—Corrie’s polio, her mother’s early death—are muted, as are the less appealing aspects of her idle life of privilege. We do care though, because, like Corrie, we all must find ways to account for our actions as well as for the actions of others. We must, as Munro puts it at the story’s end, find a way of “making everything fit into a proper place.”

  “The role of the artist is to deepen the mystery,” Muriel Spark once said, echoing a quote of Francis Bacon’s. I kept thinking of that quote as I read and reread “Corrie,” for Munro’s story takes us deep into the mystery of how we make accommodations in our lives. Do we really know if we act out of selfishness or selflessness, this remarkable story asks us. Do we even know which is which?

  • • •

  Ron Rash was born in 1953 and grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. He is the author of four novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, The World Made Straight, and Serena; three collections of poems; and three collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, winner of the 2010 Frank O’connor International Short Story Award. Twice a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, he is a previous recipient of the PEN/O. Henry Prize as well as National Endowment for the Arts grants in poetry and fiction. He teaches at Western Carolina University and lives in Clemson, South Carolina.

  Writing The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

  The Writers on Their Work

  John Berger, “A Brush”

  I hope the story is most itself when read out loud. The hair of “the reader” still a little damp from the water of the swimming pool.

  John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included the novel G., which won the Man Booker Prize in 1972. His latest book is Bento’s Sketchbook. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and he lives in a small village in the French Alps.

  Wendell Berry, “Nothing Living Lives Alone”

  “Nothing Living Lives Alone,” published with much kindness and editorial indulgence by The Threepenny Review, seems to me to impose some strain on the term story. It belongs to a stretch of new work attempting to deal directly and explicitly with what I see as the paramount change in my time and place: Until the end of World War II, the life of the rural landscapes of my home country was predominately creaturely. The countryside then was mainly, as we would now say, solar-powered. The farms worked mainly by sunlight converted to usable energy by plants and the bodies of animals and people. After 1945, by the industrialization of farming, and of everything else, life here has become increasingly mechanical. Machines of various kinds now dominate work and economy, and also the thoughts and aspirations of the people. I would like, so far as I am able, to understand what is implied by this.

  Wendell Berry was born in Newcastle, Kentucky, in 1934. He is an essayist, poet, 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 Award, the Aiken Taylor Award, and the John Hay Award of the Orion Society. Forthcoming books include a volume of collected poems as well as a collection of twenty new stories, A Place in Time. Berry lives with his family on a farm in his native Henry County, Kentucky.

  Anthony Doerr, “The Deep”

  For pretty much all of human history, we’ve assumed the deep oceans were devoid of life. Plato concluded the sea bottom was “corroded by the brine, and there is no vegetation worth mentioning, and scarcely any degree of perfect formation, but only caverns and sand and measureless mud.”

  For millennia, no one bothered to disagree. Who would? Deep water is cold, food-poor, and utterly dark. And the pressure increases as we descend: Two and a half miles down, the pressure exerted on a square inch (picture your big toe) is 5,880 pounds (picture a Ford F-150 on your big toe). Oceanographers are fond of putting Styrofoam coffee cups in socks and attaching them to deepwater instruments. Sink a cup to 10,000 feet, and it will come back to the surface the size of a thimble.

  What could possibly live under those circumstances?

  Plenty, it turns out. “Untold billions of organisms,” as one oceanogra
pher puts it, and we have barely begun to understand what’s down there. There are coral reefs a quarter mile from the surface. There are vast feeding communities swirling above underwater mountaintops. The diversity of animal life on the deep seafloor alone, estimates one marine biologist, “may exceed that of the Amazon rain forest and the Great Barrier Reef combined.”

  So I started to write a story about how much was down there. That was four years ago. I dreamed up two oceanographers, one glamorous and redheaded, one slow and methodical and married. Early versions of the story included melodrama and sweaty submarine scenes and sentences like, “The storm comes in Indonesia.”

  It was heavy on atmosphere and light on humanity. I abandoned it for several months to write other stuff. Then in an airport one day I watched multiple faces on CNN say, “This is the worst recession since the Great Depression.” It made me want to try to understand: Are our lives really like the lives of Americans in the Great Depression?

  Eventually I decided to braid the two interests: the deep sea and the Great Depression. In some tenuous and inarticulable way they seemed linked to me. It took me another year to find the right pressure for the story, the F-150 on the big toe—Tom’s heart condition. Once I had those three concerns in place, I started making more headway.

  The story owes a debt to my friend Cort Conley, who gave me Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, which includes glimpses of a nurse washing newborn babies, as well as a very old pamphlet called A Book of Striking Similes, from which I wrenched much of Mr. Weems’s dialogue.

  Anthony Doerr was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He’s the author of four books: Memory Wall, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. His writing has won the Story Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and three previous O. Henry prizes. He also writes a column about science books for The Boston Globe. “The Deep” won the 2011 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award in the U.K. He lives in Boise, Idaho.

  Dagoberto Gilb, “Uncle Rock”

  My fiction always comes from an experience—personal or observed—that gets loaded onto and chipped away at and artistically distorted by the various obsessions I have. For example, it’s been pointed out even by nontherapists that I appear to have a bit of a mami issue. For a dude, that should be embarrassing. But what if, whenever you were broke, you knew you had a treasure chest of gold coins? So okay, the fact is that when I was around the age of Uncle Rock’s Erick, I was with my own single mom and her date, who’d paid for the baseball game we went to at Dodger Stadium, getting autographs from a busload of the famous New York Yankees. When I got a note not unlike the one Erick did, it was one of those pieces of paper that becomes light and moans hymnal, until moments later when I was pissed. I shouldn’t cash in that gold coin? Add the fact that I made Erick verging on mute, as Mexican Americans are both not heard and trained to feel, and the story’s on. I loved those years when Fernando Valenzuela was the biggest star in baseball—what pride there was in Los Angeles then! And that’s what I wanted the story to be.

  Dagoberto Gilb was born and raised in Los Angeles, and then lived in El Paso. He is the author of seven previous books, most recently Before the End, After the Beginning, as well as The Flowers, Gritos, Woodcuts of Women, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, and The Magic of Blood. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Threepenny Review, Callaloo, and many others. His work won the PEN/Hemingway Award and has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Austin, Texas.

  Karl Taro Greenfeld, “Mickey Mouse”

  In the fall of 2009 I was editing the English translation of my mother’s paired novellas Wasabi for Breakfast. My mother, Foumiko Kometani, is a well-known author in Japan, and the translator had done a fine job, but the book still needed some work. I was struggling to uncover in the novellas a voice that seemed organic and to sound like my mother. It was trying work, and I never quite got the book to where I would have liked.

  One character in my mother’s book is a graphic artist who goes back to a reunion of her old art school in Kyoto. The details about the art scene in postwar Japan got me thinking about what it must have been like during the war. Nazi Germany’s suppression of artists and condemnation of so-called degenerate art has been well-covered. But I hadn’t read much about the same period in Imperial Japan, which was every bit as fanatic as Nazi Germany. That was a period I wanted to write about. If I recall, I set out to write a story that was more about the corruption of the artist in those circumstances than the story I actually ended up writing.

  I think the germ of it came from reading about artists in postwar Japan in my mother’s novellas.

  Karl Taro Greenfeld was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1964. He is the author of six books, including the novel Triburbia, the story collection NowTrends, and the memoir Boy Alone, a Washington Post Best Book of 2009, about his autistic brother, Noah. His fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Paris Review, One Story, Commentary, and The Missouri Review, among other journals. His nonfiction has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best American Travel Writing, The Best American Sports Writing, and The Best Creative Nonfiction. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

  Lauren Groff, “Eyewall”

  Stories come to me differently, depending on their need. Sometimes a story or fragment that I read long ago will collide with a story or fragment I have just read; sometimes a character will just step in front of me; sometimes there’s an image that is so compelling that it gathers disparate parts of the story to it like an industrial-strength junkyard magneto. This particular story announced itself in terms of structure. I was baking in my little unair-conditioned writing studio behind my house in Florida, looking at a storm cloud roaring near and feeling unbearably fragile and exposed. It wasn’t a hurricane, but I thought it might have been—there are always hurricanes lurking like assassins here—and when the word hurricane came into my head, the structure did, too. I saw a despairing character who was at the center of some harsh circular winds that were, in turn, whipping enormously urgent leitmotifs around and around her at blinding speed. Everyone knows what the eye of a storm is; an eyewall is where the eye meets the storm again, the circle of terrifying black clouds where the weather is at its worst.

  Lauren Groff was born in Cooperstown, New York, in 1978. She is the author of the novel The Monsters of Templeton and the story collection Delicate Edible Birds. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Ploughshares, among other publications, and has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize anthology and two editions of The Best American Short Stories. Her second novel is Arcadia. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

  Yiyun Li, “Kindness”

  “Kindness” was inspired by William Trevor’s novella Nights at the Alexandra, which is narrated by an older Irish man in a provincial town who has never married; “Kindness” is narrated by a middle-aged woman in Beijing who has chosen not only to stay single but also not to love anyone. Nights at the Alexandra is one of my favorite books by Trevor, so I wrote “Kindness” as a homage to the book. I opened the novella with three sentences that echoed the opening sentences of Nights at the Alexandra, and while writing it, I imagined my narrator speaking to the narrator in Trevor’s novella—both characters lead a stoically solitary life, yet both are capable, and are proofs, of love and affection and loyalty. Their conversation would not have happened in reality, but I hope that by speaking to one person in her mind, my narrator, in the end, speaks to many.

  Yiyun Li is a native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the recipient of a 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, as well as the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her on
e of the best American novelists under thirty-five; in 2010, she was named as one of the top twenty fiction writers under forty by The New Yorker. She is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California.

  Hisham Matar, “Naima”

  “Naima” is a story about a family secret. Nuri, the boy protagonist of the story, is, in some subtle and poignant ways, detecting the echoes of a distant secret, a secret he was born into. Sometimes it is hard not to conclude that families are not only given to secrets but rely on them. The story picks a strand from my new novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance; it compresses and alters that strand slightly. I think it was Borges who once said that certain stories have more than one possibility. I enjoyed seeing how the light changes on the same characters.

  • • •

  Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. His first novel, In the Country of Men, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It won six international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Best First Book, Europe and South Asia), the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the inaugural Arab American Book Award. It has been translated into twenty-six languages. Anatomy of a Disappearance, his second novel, was published in 2011. Matar lives in London, Cairo, and New York, where he is a visiting associate professor at Barnard College.