Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

2003- Laura Furman

1997-2002 Larry Dark

1967-1996 William Abrahams

1961-1966 Richard Poirier

1960 Mary Stegner

1954-1959 Paul Engle

1941-1951 Herschel Brickell

1933-1940 Harry Hansen

1919-1932 Blanche Colton Williams

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 David Guterson, Diane Johnson, Jennifer Egan

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, MAY 2011

The series editor wishes to thank the staff of Anchor Books for making each new collection a pleasure to work on and to read, and to the staff of PEN American Center for the work they do for writers all over the world and for our collection .

Jessica Becht and Benjamin Healy read, wrote, thought, talked, and made this collection one deserving of their intelligence and talent. The series editor thanks them more than they can imagine .

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PEN/O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES

Many readers have come to love the short story through the simple characters, easy narrative voice and humor, and compelling plotting in the work of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), best known as O. Henry. His surprise endings entertain readers, even 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 in 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.” The 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.”

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 Letters) 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 formed a Committee of Award to read the short stories published in a year and 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 collection 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, retitled The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories in 2009.

All stories originally written in the English language and published in an American or Canadian periodical are eligible for consideration. Individual stories may not be nominated; magazines must submit the year’s issues in their entirety by May 1. Only stories appearing in a printed periodical are considered. No online-only publications are eligible for inclusion.

As of 2003, the series editor chooses the twenty PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and each year three writers distinguished for their fiction are asked to evaluate the entire collection and to write an appreciation of the story they most admire. These three writers read the twenty prize stories in manuscript form with no identification of author or publication. They make their choices independent of each other and the series editor.

The goal of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.

In the past seven PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories , work by William Trevor has appeared five times; this dedication comes in a year when we are Trevor-less.

Trevor was born in Ireland and his work is identified with the literature of that country. Trevor’s greatest gift sometimes seems to be distance. He can write as heartbreakingly about young love as he can about the weight of political troubles on obscure individual lives. He is capable of creating a character both unattractive and despicable, such as Mr. Hilditch in Felicia’s Journey , side by side with Felicia herself, an incorrigibly gullible young woman who becomes, by the end of that excellent novel, nearly saintly in her martyrdom and humility. Painful and involving as the novel is to read, the most disturbing moment comes when the reader begins to feel for the horrible Mr. Hilditch. Often Trevor’s deep intelligence and unobtrusively beautiful prose works coercively. In his many novels and short stories, Trevor pulls his reader out of the comfortable complacency of not being someone like Mr. Hilditch. In exchange for our discomfort, we gain insight into the criminal and unlikable, and we feel compassion, whether we want to or not. In a collection of essays, Excursions in the Real World , Trevor wrote that a writer “needs space and cool; sentiment is suspect. Awkward questions, posed to himself, are his stock-in-trade…. he has to stand back-so far that he finds himself beyond the pale, outside the society he comments upon in order to get a better view of it. Time, simply by passing, does not supply that distance….”