The process is much simplified now and fairer to writer and reader. Instead of the cascading sets of readers of the early years, the series editor alone chooses the stories, and while past volumes could contain sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, or twenty-one stories, the number has settled at twenty. Starting in 1997, a jury of three writers was convened by the series editor to determine the first-, second-, and third-prize winners, but in 2003, the rankings were eliminated and all the winners are now equally honored. The three jurors now read a blind manuscript separately; each chooses a single favorite and writes about it. This avoids decisions by committee and also makes the process more fun for the jurors since they don’t know who wrote the story or where it was published. Only twice in sixteen years has a story been recognized by a juror.
Looking back at the O. Henry Prize’s beginning decades, other differences jump out at one. Originally, most of the stories chosen for the collection were by white, male writers, though occasionally O. Henry readers could enjoy the likes of Dorothy Parker, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor. Over the years, the O. Henry has become more welcoming of different voices. So long as a story was originally composed in English it is eligible for consideration, no matter the nationality of the author. So long as a magazine is distributed in North America, it is welcome to submit stories to the O. Henry. As a result, the annual collection is increasingly international. Readers will find that the 2019 collection offers stories from a variety of writers and set all over the world, from Maui to the American West, from New York to Laos to the east bank of the river Jordan. The magazines that published the stories in the present collection range from the venerable New Yorker, Kenyon Review, and Sewanee Review to small magazines such as LitMag (in its second year of publication), Witness, and ZYZZYVA. Not all submitting publications are print ones; for instance, there’s a story this year from Granta’s online incarnation, Granta.com.
With all the changes the decades have brought, there is a consistent goal: to find exemplary stories and to celebrate the short story form. It’s been my privilege to be part of the O. Henry’s history since 2003, and editing the hundredth-anniversary edition has been as exciting as ever. In its hundredth year, The O. Henry Prize Stories is alive, well, and faithful to its original purpose—to strengthen the art of the short story.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019
John Edgar Wideman’s “Maps and Ledgers” is a marvel of connection and disconnection. In the beginning section, the one most conventionally storylike, a young academic just beginning his first university teaching job is called to the chairman’s office to take a personal telephone call. In a sentence that mixes careful self-control among strangers with the anguish of family tragedy, Wideman writes: “I did not slip up, say or do the wrong thing when the call that came in to the English department, through the secretary’s phone to the chairman’s phone, finally reached me, after the secretary had knocked and escorted me down the hall to the chair’s office, where I heard my mother crying because my father in jail for killing a man and she didn’t know what to do except she had to let me know.” His mother knows that in calling him at the university, she’s crossing a border she shouldn’t. The department chair—both a “Southern gentleman” and an “ole peckerwood,” as the narrator’s old aunt May would say—leaves the room so that the narrator has privacy to listen to his mother’s news and to speak in his home voice.
The narrator lives in both worlds—community and university, black and white. He’s trained himself, and been taught by family members, to switch between the “two languages, languages never quite mutually intelligible, one kind I talked at home when nearly always only colored folks listening, another kind spoken and written by white folks talking to no one or to one another or at us if they wanted something from us.” When his mother calls the English department, she blows his cover.
For the rest of the story the narrator is lost and tries to find his way by using maps of his “empire,” that is, the double world he’s constructed for himself. He also uses ledgers, a family and community history he constructs through letters that were composed by his grandmother Martha in her beautiful hand: “Not her flesh-and-blood hand. Her letters. Her writing. Perfect letter after letter in church ledgers and notebooks year after year.” He resurrects all kinds of letters, some from his mother when he was in college. “Letters I receive today from home beyond these pages. Home we share with all our dead.” Poetic, elegiac, angry, just, “Maps and Ledgers” rewards its reader with the spells that a master of language casts against sorrow. This is John Edgar Wideman’s third O. Henry Prize.
Every family has its own language of jokes, customs, and memories that bind them. (For an essential memoir on the subject, read Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings.) In “No Spanish” by Moira McCavana, the clash between two languages, Spanish and Basque, thoroughly disrupts family life. One morning when the narrator is twelve, her father orders her, her brother, and their mother not to speak Spanish ever again. Spanish is the language of the dictator Franco and not of the Basque Country in northern Spain, where they live. Franco has made it illegal to speak Basque. The Basque separatist movement inspires the father’s declaration, but in his enthusiasm, he overlooks a problem: no one in the family speaks a word of Basque. True, they can learn, but how to function without language in the meantime? Being deprived of Spanish threatens the family structure: “It was like removing our field of gravity, our established mode of relating to each other. Without Spanish, it seemed entirely possible that one of us might spin out into space.” Moira McCavana’s clear-as-water prose gives “No Spanish” a gentle, comic atmosphere while it engages the reader in the family’s particular way of loving.
Family love is startlingly absent from Tessa Hadley’s “Funny Little Snake.” Fate has dealt nine-year-old Robyn an inept crew to care for her; what mad examples of maturity she’s been given. Robyn’s father, Gil, has driven to London to pick the child up for a visit, then disappeared into his university office to work on his book, leaving Robyn with her young stepmother, Valerie. Though Valerie has never met Robyn’s mother, Marise, she has an idea of her as feckless and bohemian, and possibly glamorous: “Trust Robyn’s mother to have a child who couldn’t do up buttons, and then put her in a fancy plaid dress with hundreds of them, and frogging and leg-of-mutton sleeves, like a Victorian orphan, instead of ordinary slacks and a T-shirt so that she could play.” Robyn barely speaks, is unable to say what her favorite food is or even what she’s fed at home. Once Valerie gets a glimpse of Robyn’s home, this mystery is solved.
Sturdy Valerie was at first impressed by her superior husband, who’s climbed to a class above her own and seems to know a lot about the world that she doesn’t. They are a bad match. He’d like to live in a crumbling romantic mansion because it would project the right image of his intellectual authenticity. Valerie’s grateful to live in a new house where everything works. It’s part of the bargain of their marriage that she be ignorant, malleable, and useful, but Valerie’s docility masks a mind that’s busy figuring out just how bad her situation is. The wonder of “Funny Little Snake” is the slow and sure dawning of Valerie’s will and her involuntary goodness. Hadley’s story gives the reader hope that the meek might this once inherit the earth. This is Tessa Hadley’s third O. Henry Prize, and our juror Lara Vapnyar chose this story as her favorite.
“Goodnight Nobody” by Sarah Hall is narrated by Jem, a child who’s unusually alive to everything around her: her mostly absent father; her exhausted mother, called Mumm-Ra; her baby half brother; her gran; and the news report of a dog who’s killed a baby. The fascination of “Goodnight Nobody” is in following Jem’s intelligent absorption of her world. Mumm-Ra works night shifts in a hospital mortuary and Jem isn’t sure what she does. Gran explains that “what Mumm-Ra did was sort of what a beautician did, but much harder.” Jem knows that whatever it is that Mumm-Ra does will bring her trouble at school, so sh
e lies to the other children. The immortal Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown annoys and intrigues Jem as she reads it over and over to her half brother. Why say good night to Nobody? That’s a reasonable thing to wonder. So are Jem’s ponderings about the dog who’s going to be put down and his owner, taken away by the police, and Mumm-Ra’s night shifts, which Gran says will kill her—though Jem is sure that Mumm-Ra cannot die, unlike the other dead and near-dead in “Goodnight Nobody.” Jem’s curiosity is powerful, pulling her, and the reader, through the story. Little by little Jem analyzes the hints and half lies grown-ups tell her, putting together the bits and pieces of stories about her and her half brother’s absent fathers, about cruelty and bad luck.
Cheryl is the fifteen-year-old title character of Valerie O’Riordan’s story “Bad Girl.” She’s labeled in her school’s records as “withdrawn/hostile/uncooperative, but mainly, in block capitals, ABSENT.” According to the school counselor, Valerie can move along on the straight and narrow by attending a “therapeutic speech and drama course.” Or she could be expelled. Given the choice, Cheryl’s stepfather urges her to try. The problem Cheryl has won’t be cured by speech and drama, however therapeutic; her mother died eighteen months before and Cheryl is grieving. She’s also funny, smart, shrewd, and unsentimental. Some of the adults and other adolescents around Cheryl are innocent and clueless; others are clueless and out for themselves. Her stepfather, school counselor, and drama teacher are in the first category. Cheryl’s frenemy, Tan Malone, is richer, more rebellious, and far more ruthless than Cheryl could hope to be. Tan is in a hurry for sex, adulthood, and global fame. It’s easy to guess which of the three she’ll achieve first. Cheryl is helpless in the backdraft of Tan’s plans and conquests and soon enmeshed in a new kind of trouble. For Cheryl, youth isn’t wasted on the young, it’s inflicted on them, and the reader is left deciding whether to laugh or cry.
Rachel Kondo’s “Girl of Few Seasons” is set in Happy Valley on the Hawaiian island of Maui. It’s the night before Ebo leaves for basic training and the Vietnam War, and he faces the task of killing his favorite pet pigeon. The bird has a more distinguished lineage than Ebo: it’s “a cream barred homer from the old line of Stichelbaut. The bird was from a long strain of impressive racers, a gift from his mother when he was nine years old.” Ebo must kill all his pigeons because by nature and training they will return to their coop, and when he’s gone, there will be no one to care for them. Killing a favorite bird and heading for war might make Ebo sound like a violent person, or at least a young man setting out to be a warrior. On the contrary, his heart and mind are turned toward a different goal. Ebo was born and raised in Happy Valley, a place of beauty and poverty. Ebo hasn’t enlisted in the army out of patriotism. He knows nothing about the war or Vietnam. “He thought Vietnam might be like Maui, a place too quiet for fear. He thought the war might be a nameless river flowing strong after a heavy rain. If he let it, the war would take him away from Happy Valley to places he’d never been.” Ebo’s reason for enlisting is that on his way to report for duty he’ll be able to visit his little sister Momo at the Waimano Home for the Feebleminded. His flight from Maui will be paid for by the army, and that is the only way he can make the journey. He hasn’t seen Momo for nine years, not since she was five years old and suffered brain damage from a virus. All his love can’t change her condition, nor can he escape from his sense of responsibility for it. Rachel Kondo’s deliberate and graceful prose pulls the reader into Ebo’s world and his heartbreaking dilemma. Juror Elizabeth Strout chose “Girl of Few Seasons” as her favorite story.
“Flowers for America” by Doua Thao is set in Laos. Its three generations of characters were uprooted, some even destroyed, by the Vietnam War. The story begins in the market, where the narrator encounters her old friend Houa, who calls out, “Why are you running—so quickly, Goalia’s Mother?” Houa is addressed as Shengcua’s Mother, and the naming signifies their most important roles in equally difficult lives. The women grew up together. Both survived the war and both have daughters. The cries of the orchid sellers in the market punctuate their conversation—“Sweetest smelling! Softest in all of Laos! For you, the flower Asian!” The narrator tries to persuade her old friend to accept the gift of a frogfish, one she caught during her rough job helping a fisherman. Her offer is abruptly rejected. There’s a tension between the women that the reader does not at first understand but hints of its true meaning emerge throughout the story. When they discuss their daughters’ lives and their own, the decisions they’ve had to make and what they’ve done to survive, the narrator offers, “Maybe it’s just our luck.” To which her friend, angry for reasons we don’t yet understand, responds by telling the narrator how lucky she is. Other people’s troubles are much easier to bear than our own. Thao’s story winds through time and place, through Laos, a refugee camp in Thailand, and the lives of refugees in the United States. The beauty of Thao’s prose helps us to understand what remains meaningful, fresh, and sweet after the ordeals of war, life in a refugee camp, and the loss of home and family.
Immigration comes with its own gains and losses. Alexia Arthurs’s “Mermaid River” is the story of an adolescent boy whose mother leaves Jamaica when he’s a child and goes to New York to work. Eventually, she will bring her son to live with her. Meanwhile the son grows up in the care of his grandmother, a repository of stability and unchanging customs. By the time his mother takes him to America, mother and son are different people, changed by the time they’ve been apart. Of necessity, he will change even more as he adjusts to life in Brooklyn, and when he returns on a visit, he discovers that even Jamaica has changed in his absence. What is left to discover is what remains true in his heart.
In Kenan Orhan’s “Soma,” the narrator’s goal isn’t to leave his native place but to live above its ground. Soma is a town in the Aegean region of Turkey, where the work is either down in the coal mines or high above on the giant wind turbines. İzzet, who narrates the story, wishes above all to escape the darkness and dangers of being a coal miner, seeing in his father’s life the cost of that job. His father in his turn scorns his son’s dream: “Four years of school just so you can wear a bigger hardhat?” İzzet’s friend Mesut works in the coal mine and enjoys arguing with him about the merits of being high above the ground versus well below it. According to Mesut, “The same thing is done up there…the gathering of electricity. So you are in the air, or in the ocean, or underground, whatever. I want to be flatly on the ground. Safe.” The story’s counterpoint to the mine and turbines is water, for İzzet is training to enter an open-water race from Çanakkale across the Hellespont. It’s a famous and difficult course. Lord Byron swam it and so did the American adventurer and writer Richard Halliburton. İzzet, though, isn’t after glory. The prize money will pay for the training he needs to become an engineer for the turbines. The tragic event that takes place the morning of the race tests their friendship, İzzet’s concept of freedom, and Mesut’s of safety.
“Mr. Can’aan” by Isabella Hammad is another story with a friendship at its core. The story takes place in the Middle East and we’re told in the second sentence that it begins on the eastern bank of the Jordan River a week after the Six-Day War. The country of Jordan and the Golan Heights are on the eastern bank, and to the west is Israel and the West Bank.
Sam is a counselor at a day camp for boys. On his morning off, as he walks along the Jordan River, he discovers the bloated corpse of a middle-aged man in the water and pulls it onto land. Documents in the man’s wallet show that he is a Palestinian. Sam prepares the body for burial, then goes back to camp for another counselor. Together they pray, then bury the body. It’s a striking incident, and years later Sam tells his friend Jibril about it in Beirut, where they’re both students at the American University. Jibril, a Palestinian from the Israeli city of Haifa, has his own stories to tell, about his relatives in Jordanian refugee camps. “Freely he discussed his opinions of
the different factions, positing pros and cons, explaining the guerrilla movements and Nasser and the splits in the PFLP. In a measure, this openness was at the heart of Jibril’s charm, and Sam was just as captivated as the girls were.” The story of their bond takes the reader from Beirut to Switzerland, from their youth until the friends are in their sixties. Sam is a contented soul, Jibril more restless. Jibril is waiting—perhaps he will wait forever—for the last piece of research to complete his magnum opus, “Haifa, An Arab History.” “Mr. Can’aan” is a full-hearted story, its outer layer considering the realities of politics and place, and its inner layer exploring the radiance of an individual act of fidelity to tradition.
In Caoilinn Hughes’s “Prime,” it’s the end of the school year and the entire sixth class, all seven children, take the reader through the day, keeping their focus on Miss Lynch, their teacher, an eccentric who is as sharp as a tack. The children explain who is who, their expectations of one another, and their regard for their teacher. Miss Lynch’s dog has died, and so has Johnnie, a student from the previous year. The class takes Johnnie’s desk and chair to the beach and burn them like a funeral pyre. “Death,” the children tell us, “billows out like a stone plonked in water. We knew that. But we didn’t know if the safe thing was to step back out of its ripples. We surrounded Miss Lynch like a net seven souls wide.” Miss Lynch has her own harsh wisdom: “You should all know by now that mercy is an artificial flower. It looks very convincing and nice. But it has no nectar.” The children know what’s real and what isn’t, and in Hughes’s delightful, songlike story they lead us to the unanticipated joy of brilliant sunshine and skittering clouds “on their way to America.”
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 2