Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

Lily Tuck, “Ice”

My husband and I did take a cruise to Antarctica, and since I am both a pessimist and a contrarian, I imagined the worst: the boat hitting an iceberg, sinking, my husband falling overboard, drowning. As it turned out we had a very happy time and, except for the books, the clock, the bottle of sleeping pills, everything that was neatly stacked on our nightstand falling pell-mell to the cabin floor and the obnoxious fellow passenger whose goal it was to drive a golf ball in every country of the world, nothing bad happened. Antarctica is stark and desolate, and despite the presence of birds, penguins, and seals as well as the unexpected beautiful blues of the icebergs, one cannot help but be struck by how insignificant and intrusive the appearance of human beings is in that predominantly white landscape, and I wanted to try to describe how this strange and vaguely hostile environment might affect a long-married couple.

Lily Tuck was born in France in 1939 and lived in South America as a child. She is the author of four novels- Interviewing Matisse or The Woman Who Died Standing Up, The Woman Who Walked on Water, Siam (a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), and The News from Paraguay (winner of the 2004 National Book Award)-a collection of stories, Limbo and Other Places I Have Lived , and a biography, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante . Her essay “Group Grief” was included in The Best American Essays 2006 . Her novel Probability or I Married You for Happiness will be published in fall 2011. She lives in New York City.

Brad Watson, “Alamo Plaza”

During my family’s leanest years, when I was growing up, we spent our summer vacations (if we got one; sometimes we didn’t, and sometimes they were as brief as three days) on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was always a boy’s disappointment, compared to the Alabama and north Florida coasts, with their natural white sand beaches and comparatively huge waves rolling in. And their much clearer water, very clear and green in north Florida. The real beaches in Mississippi are offshore, on the barrier islands, accessible by private boat or ferry, but we never went out there. We got the Mississippi Sound, which in those days was polluted by bad stuff from plants upriver, by waste from the fishing industry, and I don’t know what-all else. But it did have a charm about it. The whole place seemed calmer, more still, less corrupted by the glitzier and cheaper elements of upscale tourism. The smell-at first alarming and repulsive, then kind of wonderfully rich, a smell you realized was the rank richness of marine life and death-was one I experienced nowhere else, on no other coast, and not in New Orleans or any other coastal city. Except for a grand old hotel or two, most of the lodging was either run-down or modest. And the clientele was pretty much entirely local, Mississippi, with some Louisiana tourists mixed in. So I have fond memories of the place, even though I despised it at the time. These memories, mixed with memories of an imaginatively reclusive childhood, of often feeling like the odd boy out in my own family, were things I tried for a long time to combine in this story. It went into and back out of the desk drawer for many years, as I’d write a draft and fail, put it away, write it again a year or a few later, until it finally felt right. It feels highly personal, anyway, a story that comes from pretty deep inside. Putting it together, finally, felt like a great and pleasant relief. There was a kind of joyous sadness about it, which I guess is what I often experience when I recall that childhood, that family, mostly gone now.

Brad Watson was born in 1955 in Meridian, Mississippi. His stories have been published in Ecotone, The New Yorker, Granta, The Idaho Review, Oxford American, Narrative Magazine, The Greensboro Review , and The Yalobusha Review , as well as anthologies including The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories , and The Story and Its Writer . His story collection Last Days of the Dog-Men received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novel, The Heaven of Mercury , received the Southern Book Critics Circle Fiction Award (shared with Lee Smith), and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent collection is Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives . He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Wyoming and lives in Laramie, Wyoming.

The task of picking the twenty PEN/O. Henry Prize stories each year is at its most difficult at the end, when there are more than twenty admirable and interesting stories. Once the final choice is made, those remaining are our Recommended Stories, listed, along with the place of publication, in the hope that our readers will seek them out and enjoy them. Please go to our website, www.penohenryprizestories.com, for excerpts from each year’s recommended stories and information about the writers.

Adam Atlas, “New Year’s Weekend on the Hand Surgery Ward, Old Pilgrims’ Hospital, Naples, Italy,” Narrative Magazine .

Stories published in American and Canadian magazines are eligible for consideration for inclusion in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories . Only print editions are considered; that is, online-only publications are not eligible.

Stories must be written originally in the English language. No translations are considered.

Stories may not be submitted by agents or writers. Editors are asked to send the entire issue and not to nominate individual stories.

Because of production deadlines for the 2012 collection, it is essential that stories reach the series editor by May 1, 2011. If a finished magazine is unavailable before the deadline, magazine editors are welcome to submit scheduled stories in proof or manuscript. Publications received after May 1, 2011, will automatically be considered for The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 .

Please see our website, www.penohenryprizestories.com, for more information about submission to The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories .

The address for submission is:

Laura Furman, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories

The University of Texas at Austin

English Department, B5000

1 University Station

Austin, TX 78712

The information listed below was up-to-date when The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 went to press. Inclusion in this listing does not constitute endorsement or recommendation by The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories or Anchor Books.

African American Review

Saint Louis University

Humanities 317

3800 Lindell Boulevard

St. Louis, MO 63108

Nathan Grant, editor

aar.slu.edu

quarterly

Agni Magazine

Boston University

236 Bay State Road

Boston, MA 02215

Sven Birkerts

agni@bu.edu

agnimagazine.org

semiannual

Alaska Quarterly Review

University of Alaska Anchorage

3211 Providence Drive

Anchorage, AK 99508

Ronald Spatz, editor

uaa.alaska.edu/aqr

semiannual

Alimentum

PO Box 776

New York, NY 10163

Paulette Licitra and Peter Selgin, editors

editor@alimentumjournal.com

alimentumjournal.com

semiannual

American Letters & Commentary

Department of English

University of Texas at San Antonio

One UTSA Circle

San Antonio, TX 78249-0643

Catherine Kasper and David Ray Vance, editors

AmerLetters@satx.rr.com

amletters.org

annual