Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

But these are just words. Cartwright’s attempt to pass on a cheap piece of goods to the poor farmer McBride is as straightforward a plot as anyone could ask, and the surprise comes in the story’s largely silent battle of pride and comeuppance, two men thinking of the single way to emerge the better in the bargain. The real pleasure-and certainly not the only one-is in the sentences, as complex, deliberately assured, and lethal as Flannery O’Connor’s. What an authentic, confident story this is, soaked through with deceit and menace and the distinctly abrupt strain of American violence. Add in a startling ending-an unforgiving embrace of the nature of time and history, if not the devouring jaws of myth-and you’ve got a work ready to prove that short stories and short-story writers are the most sprawling and unruly of all myth-makers.

Manuel Muñoz was born in Dinuba, California, in 1972. He is the author of two short-story collections, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue , which was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. His first novel, What You See in the Dark , was published in early 2011. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and a 2008 Whiting Writers’ Award, and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Christine Schutt on “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” by Jim Shepard

A great story announces itself entirely to start; its terms are then rolled over and over again, and the story is made larger for what new associations adhere until, by the end, the terms are profound. Every reading reveals some new, impossibly smart gesture, surely intended and cumulatively significant. I lose my way, snow-blind. A great story is as heavy as wet snow, the kind that rolls up like carpet and grows bigger for the binding of its parts.

Halfway through “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” the narrator of this story, Eckel-his first name is never given-explains in scientific language, then in easier, metaphoric terms, what might in fact account for avalanches: a degraded crystal, a stratum of which if slightly jarred can set tons of more recently fallen snow in motion. His mother calls such degraded crystal “sugar snow” because it will not bond. Even when compressed, the snow does not cohere, a phenomenon at odds with great story-making, in which the parts must cohere. And the parts. Sifted into this story are wondrous accounts of nature’s brute force, anecdotes, histories, avalanche lore recalled by Eckel or his companions in the course of their freezing work.

They call themselves “the Frozen Idiots.” They are four volunteers researching the complexities of snow; they conduct experiments on a viciously windy slope miles above Davos in efforts, all potentially deadly, to better understand and defend against avalanche. The year is 1939; they live in a hut; they have no heat and only kerosene for light. They are frozen idiots; they go about their work with reckless enthusiasm. They have started an avalanche and destroyed a church. Few of their fellows find their subject significant; nevertheless, they are close to finishing an important book on snow, and Eckel’s tone at the start of this authentic story is confident and self-deprecatory. His voice is more matter-of-fact when he recounts the catastrophes that have contributed to the researchers’ industry. An airborne avalanche, the most destructive category of all, killed the group leader’s father, and another avalanche, less severe perhaps but lethal, killed Eckel’s twin brother, Willi. The boys were sixteen.

Images of these assaults, the unnatural uprootings, flattened houses-a roof mistaken “for a terrazzo floor”-powerfully amass and add to the story’s gravity. An unbroken teacup bewitches while a broken girl unsettles as does a boy “entombed in his bed.” Napoleon’s little drummer is lost in a gorge and drums for days before he falls silent. Avalanches, the seductive enormity of them! How helpless we are, slight as flies before it, but must we die alone? “Seventeen people were dug out of a meetinghouse the following spring, huddled together in a circle facing inward.” A consolation, I think, companionship at the end.

Contrastively, Willi’s death is horrible. He dies twice: First, under an immensity of snow, alone in the dark for hours, he loses consciousness. The second time, an avalanche of fear triggered by Eckel when he puts out the light kills Willi. He is dead by the time his mother reaches him. As for the survivors, buffeted by gusts of rage, self-rebuke, and loneliness, they endure by contraction.

Even before the catastrophe of Willi’s death, the family terrain emerges as stark and severe as the slopes, dangerously unstable. An elder sister is dutiful but retreats to her room and her romance subscriptions. The father, an Alpine guide, claims to be “content only at altitudes over eleven thousand feet” although his sons know otherwise. They consider their father’s “homemade medicines” his sole pleasure, yet Eckel attends to his father’s every mood, negotiating the shifting terrain “even as disinterest emanated from him like a vapor.”

To be loved, it seems, is as fateful as any experience. “Why does anyone choose one brother and not another? I wanted to ask.” Significantly, Eckel does not ask this question aloud-not of his mother or of Ruth, the young woman to whom he is hopelessly devoted. He grudgingly accepts his mother’s preferential treatment of his twin and Ruth’s deception of him with Willi. Against the wintery heart there is no defense beyond contraction, a withdrawal from the world with a cruel, self-absorbed intention to endure. Contraction, silence. At the onset of an avalanche a survivor trick is to keep your mouth shut; this has been Eckel’s strategy throughout his life.

I underestimated how difficult it would be to act as a juror for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Beyond the challenge of making a selection from the forgathered, there has been the trauma of writing about the choice; my choice makes me sick. All great stories make me sick with their muchness. The parallel actions and anecdotes, repeats and reversals, all made with pickax accuracy, add breadth and bulk. Everything connects. The alpine landscape, God-like, brooding and indifferent, gives contour to the characters’ lives. The story of the old guide’s devotion to the empress mirrors Eckel’s devotion to Ruth; just so, the avalanche’s “fractures … stress lines … fusillades of pops and cracks” apply to the human drama. And how better to represent our essential helplessness in the universe than with the image of a researcher inadequately dressed, awake in his hammock, hanging in the cold dark? The harrumph a boy makes with his skis to signal to his brother “We’re so close” fatally severs and forever binds them. In Jim Shepard’s story, the snow coheres; it coheres for now. The hammock creaks. Someday, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next, Eckel and his fellows will-we all will-be overtaken by that white ambush.

Christine Schutt is the author of two short-story collections and two novels. Her first, Florida , was a 2004 National Book Award finalist; her second, All Souls , a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Among other honors, Schutt’s work has twice been included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories . She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Schutt is a senior editor of the literary annual NOON . She lives and teaches in New York.

Chris Adrian, “The Black Square”