The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)
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SERIES EDITORS
2003–2019 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
2018 Fiona McFarlane, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elizabeth Tallent
2017 David Bradley, Elizabeth McCracken, Brad Watson
2016 Molly Antopol, Peter Cameron, Lionel Shriver
2015 Tessa Hadley, Kristen Iskandrian, Michael Parke
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 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
Introduction copyright © 2019 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 Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Permissions appear at the end of the book.
Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525565536
Ebook ISBN 9780525565543
Cover design by Mark Abrams
www.anchorbooks.com
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For Joel
Anchor Books first invited me to be series editor in 2002 and then included me in the company of the intelligent, literate, and knowledgeable people who carry out its work. My thanks to Alice Van Straalen, Lisa Weinert, Sloane Crosley, Russell Perreault, Mark Abrams, and Paige Smith. The breadth of Diana Secker Tesdell’s knowledge and her kindness to me gave meaning to making the smallest detail correct.
In 2003, the Jentel Foundation began offering a month-long residency in its beautiful setting in the Lower Piney Creek Valley of Wyoming to each O. Henry winner. Such generosity affirms the long connection between Jentel’s founder, Neltje, granddaughter of Frank Nelson Doubleday, whose company was the O. Henry’s original publisher, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Anchor Books originated as a division of Doubleday. Deep thanks for this opportunity for the O. Henry authors.
The Department of English of the University of Texas at Austin gave The O. Henry Prize Stories a home, and for sixteen years, talented graduate students from the Michener Center for Writers and the New Writers Project assisted me in reading the many submissions. I hope that they learned to be as demanding of their own work as I’ve been when choosing stories for The O. Henry Prize Stories, and I’m grateful for their help in understanding the stories that puzzled and intrigued us. Thanks in 2018 to Rachel Heng. For the third year in a row, Fatima Kola read countless stories for The O. Henry Prize Stories, finding many jewels and something to praise even in the semiprecious. She was generous with her time, brilliance, and friendship, and no thanks can ever be enough.
—Laura Furman
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, humor and easy narrative voice, and the 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.”
* * *
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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 Sciences) 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 they formed a committee to read the short stories published in a year and a smaller group 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 collectio
n 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
The series editor chooses the twenty O. Henry Prize Stories.
Each year, three writers distinguished for their fiction are asked to act as jurors, who read the twenty prize stories in manuscript form with no identification of either author or publication. The jurors make their choice of favorite independently of one another and the series editor, and write an appreciation of the story they most admire.
Stories published in American and Canadian magazines distributed in North America are eligible 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 to send all the fiction they publish and not to nominate individual stories. Stories should not be submitted by agents or writers.
(Please see this page for the submission address.)
The goal of The O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.
To Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927–2013)
It’s no wonder that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was superb at adapting the work of other writers for the screen. She was an exemplary writer herself, and she had the wisdom to see what was most brilliant in the work of other writers and to help it to shine. Her scripts for Merchant Ivory films of works by E. M. Forster and Henry James, and several of her own novels, step away from the written word to illuminate the author’s characters, settings, and mostly thorny plots.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was Jewish and born in Cologne, Germany. She escaped to England with her family in 1939. She wrote, “Attending school and university in London, I received an English education that has remained as the backbone to support me throughout all subsequent encounters in very varied circumstances.” She married C. S. H. Jhabvala in 1951, and they lived in India for twenty-five years. Collaborating for forty years with filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory meant living part of the year in New York, then mostly settling there.
Jhabvala wasn’t a cozy writer, though she was funny. Whatever she had experienced in her life, whatever feelings she harbored about her characters or the real human beings who might have inspired them, she kept herself in the background, and perhaps for this reason her readers were free to laugh, smile, or cry, or to put the book or story aside for a moment to feel the heat and the dust of India, or shiver from the damp chill of a London winter.
Central to her work, as to the work of Anton Chekhov, V. S. Pritchett, and William Trevor, was Jhabvala’s indifference to whether or not the reader might find her characters appealing. Many of her characters are frustrating, even distasteful, and those who shamelessly make use of others most often triumph in worldly terms. Meanwhile, the weak and the passive exhibit real tenacity, trapped though they are by their loyalty and love for the rotten ones; they are determined to persevere in their quiet lunacy. The weak don’t care for the world or its opinion. They are free in a way that the triumphant narcissists can never be.
Jhabvala won two O. Henry Prizes, the first in 2005 for “Refuge in London,” set in an English boardinghouse filled with European refugees. The narrator says that she’s in many ways the same as the other girls at her boarding school: “But I wasn’t, ever, quite like them, having grown up in this house of European émigrés, all of them so different from the parents of my schoolfellows and carrying a past, a country or countries—a continent—distinct from the one in which they now found themselves.” Jhabvala was both like and not like her narrator and the refugees who fascinated her.
Jhabvala’s second O. Henry, in 2013, was for “Aphrodisiac,” set in India and about the downfall of a rather silly, lazy man who develops a passion for his sister-in-law. Jhabvala wrote about “Aphrodisiac”: “The origin of this story was not an incident or a character but a situation—and one that has often fascinated me: someone’s desire for another turning into an obsession that destroys all of his nobler qualities and higher striving.” Her statement sums up a characteristic of her work, that behind the story is a human situation and her observation about it. Her fiction is based on the notice her keen mind took without judgment of the way some people live, even though her characters themselves are often quite concerned with morals and ethics and are quick to judge others. After describing the characters and conflicts in “Aphrodisiac,” Jhabvala wrote: “I have to admit that none of this came to me consciously but evolved within the situation itself: so by the time I had finished writing (as often happens to me at the end of a story) I looked at it and wondered: ‘So that’s what it was all about.’ ” Her fiction was driven by her intellect and instinct, and her curiosity about her characters, who often seem doomed, not by fate, but by themselves as they give in time and again to their obsessions and illusions.
Toward the end of her life, Jhabvala wrote about her love of the short story form: “And after all that writing, I now write only short stories, which I love for their potential of compressing and containing whatsoever I have learnt about writing, and about everything else.”
—Laura Furman
Austin, Texas
Contents
Cover
Series Editors and Past Jurors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Editor's Note
Publisher’s Note
To Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927–2013)
Introduction
Laura Furman, Series Editor
Funny Little Snake
Tessa Hadley, The New Yorker
Synchronicity
John Keeble, Harper's Magazine
No Spanish
Moira McCavana, Harvard Review
Girl of Few Seasons
Rachel Kondo, Ploughshares Solos
Julia and Sunny
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Ploughshares
Unstuck
Stephanie Reents, Witness
Mermaid River
Alexia Arthurs, The Sewanee Review
Bad Girl
Valerie O'Riordan, LitMag
Aguacero
Patricia Engel, Kenyon Review
Soma
Kenan Orhan, The Massachusetts Review
Goodnight Nobody
Sarah Hall, One Story
610 North, 610 West
Bryan Washington, Tin House
Mr. Can’aan
Isabella Hammad, The Paris Review
Omakase
Weike Wang, The New Yorker
Prime
Caoilinn Hughes, Granta.com
Slingshot
Souvankham Thammavongsa, Harper's Magazine
The Shrew Tree
Liza Ward, ZYZZYVA
Flowers for America
Doua Thao, Fiction
Lagomorph
Alexander MacLeod, Granta
Maps and Ledgers
John Edgar Wideman, Harper's Magazine
Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019
The Jurors on Their Favorites
Lynn Freed on “Omakase” by Weike Wang
Elizabeth Strout on “Girl of Few Seasons” by Rachel Kondo
Lara Vapnyar on “Funny Little Snake” by Tessa Hadley
Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019
The Writers on Their Work
Publications Submitted
Permissions
Introduction
A Century of the
O. Henry Prize
A hundred years ago, when O. Henry’s friends and admirers created an annual book of short stories in his honor, they surely had a different idea than we do today of what constitutes a good story. O. Henry was famous for his twist at the end of a tale, the unexpected turn or ironic revelation that made the insoluble problems and puzzles in his plot disappear in a puff of laughter or a few tears. Plots were generally more ornate in the early twentieth century, and so too was literary language. Furthermore, stories such as O. Henry’s weren’t expected to be ambivalent. The story’s meaning, often spelled out as a lesson for the reader, was a natural part of the ending.
Today, stories come in a greater variety of voices and forms. A story can be written in any tense; in first, second, or third person; composed entirely of dialogue or with no dialogue at all; in one paragraph; in play form; with footnotes; and so on. Sometimes the past of the characters is spelled out and sometimes it is nonexistent, an effort on the writer’s part to create an unending present. As for meaning, that’s left up to the reader. The short story is now an open field for writers, and some of the results might be unrecognizable to an early-twentieth-century reader. Still, elements of the form persist: a certain relationship between different pieces of the story, in particular, the passionate desire of the beginning and ending for reunion.
So, too, the inner workings of the collection have changed. The earliest O. Henry Prize stories were chosen by several committees of readers who started with six hundred stories and passed them on in smaller and smaller batches until the final three judges whittled the remaining contenders down to seventeen finalists. Among those seventeen, the judges then ranked three as first-, second-, and third-prize winners.