Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

Leslie Parry was born in Los Angeles in 1979. She is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. “The Vanishing American” is her first published story. She lives in Los Angeles.

Jim Shepard, “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You”

“Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” began as many of my stories begin lately-with my browsing around endlessly in an utterly nerdy and bizarre subject and then finding my imagination caught by a particular moment that resonates with me emotionally in unexpected ways. In this case I was reading about the history of the science of avalanches-I know, I know; imagine how my wife feels-and I was struck by the notion that a skier or hiker might cross a given area with no effect and then the next skier or hiker might, when doing the same thing, start an avalanche that carried away any number of those in his group. That desire that must follow to penetrate the capriciousness of such an event-as in, I must have done something different, something to cause such a catastrophe-seemed to me to have all sorts of crucially useful analogues, in emotional terms. I imagined someone at the very dawn of avalanche science who found himself wondering about his responsibility for the fate of someone he loved. And the story proceeded from there.

Jim Shepard was born in 1956 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X , and four story collections, including You Think That’s Bad . His third collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway , was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the Alex Award from the American Library Association. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story , and Playboy , and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer . Four of his stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories and one has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. He’s won an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Helen Simpson, “Diary of an Interesting Year”

It’s always fun when you’re writing to zoom in on what’s uncomfortable-on what causes a silence to fall-and one such touchy subject now is whether we ought to cut back on our rate of consumption for the sake of the future. This suggestion never fails to annoy. Anyway, I wanted to see if I could make interesting fiction from climate change. It’s an undeniably important subject-it’s the elephant on the horizon-but it’s also undeniably difficult, boring (for the nonscientists among us), and horrifying to contemplate. Yes, I thought, that would be really difficult to do, make climate change interesting. Still, I like a challenge, and I went at it from different angles for my fifth story collection, In-Flight Entertainment , treating it as a love story, a dramatic monologue, a satirical comedy, a sales pitch and-the story included here-a dystopian diary. Having said this, I ought to add that I’m not interested in writing polemic. As a reader, I resent fiction that has designs on me. I think the only duty of a writer is to resist writing about what they think they ought to write about-and to write about what stimulates their imagination. Oddly, the subject of climate change did this for me. I sensed dark rich comic pickings, and I wasn’t wrong.

Helen Simpson was born in Bristol, England, in 1956 and grew up near Croydon. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from Oxford with two degrees. She is the author of five collections of stories and a recipient of the Hawthornden Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award. Her collection In-Flight Entertainment will be published in the United States in 2012. She lives in London.

Mark Slouka, “Crossing”

“Crossing” emerged, after a fifteen-year dormancy period, from an act of near-biblical stupidity on my part: in 1994, while crossing a river in the Pacific Northwest with my five-year-old son on my back, I found myself, very quickly, in serious trouble. It didn’t matter that I’d forded the same river many times before without incident; this time, for whatever reason, was different. Even now I don’t like to think about it. There are few things more excruciating than realizing you’ve put your child’s life in danger.

Over the years that followed, I thought about the incident more than once; I knew I wanted to write about it, but I couldn’t find the release, the spring, the image or phrase or note-often dissonant, almost always unexpected-that brings a story to life. Though the organic symbolism of the thing appealed to me, it felt too easy, too finished, inert. So I let it be.

It wasn’t until I came across the anecdote about the medieval priest that flashes through the father’s mind on the story’s last page that I felt the tumblers fall. Of course! I had to leave him midstream, tricked by life, prey once again to his old fears and insecurities. A man poised between his past and his future, between the impossibility of going on and the necessity of it.

On some level, it feels almost ungrateful; I made it out, after all, and today my son could carry me across that river a good deal more easily than I could him. But fiction, I remind myself, is an act of trespass on the territory of the past, and those who have no stomach for it, whose reverence for apparent truths, as opposed to created ones, is too great, probably shouldn’t play.

Both are equally true: We made it. And we’re still, all of us, hip-deep in the current.

Mark Slouka was born in New York City in 1958. He is the author of a collection of stories, Lost Lake; two novels, God’s Fool and The Visible World , which have been translated into sixteen languages; and Essays from the Nick of Time . He is a recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships and is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine . His short fiction has appeared there as well as in The Paris Review and Granta , among other publications, and his essays and stories have been anthologized in The Best American Essays and The Best American Short Stories . He has taught at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, and lives outside New York City.

Elizabeth Tallent, “Never Come Back”

The deep background of this story-which may not make itself felt very much in this final draft-are the changes confronting my hometown on the Mendocino coast: old ways of making a living have vanished, and with them the certainties they fostered, so there’s a sense in which people are free to start from scratch but also bewildered by the prevailing scriptlessness. In “Never Come Back” I wanted to write about a young mother who leaves her child and how the grandparents left to care for the child handle an absence they can’t understand but which they inevitably judge. My secret ambition in this story was to kindle empathy for characters whose actions are, on the face of it, indefensible, but which make the deepest kind of sense to them.

Elizabeth Tallent was born in Washington, D.C., in 1954. Her work includes the story collections Honey and Time with Children and the novel Museum Pieces . She teaches in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and lives in California.