Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005
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- Название:The O Henry Prize Stories 2005
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The O Henry Prize Stories 2005: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация
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I will abstain. If you're interested in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 at all, you're already an adherent of short prose, and know that it's alive and flourishing (as long as you can track it down on the smaller and smaller presses to which it's often relegated).
If the short story's cachet has evinced some decline over the course of the past century, it's a decline in public exposure and lucrative potential, not in quality. In terms of sales and public profile, the short story collection can't keep apace with the novel or pop nonfiction, but it's still absolutely kicking poetry's ass on all fronts, and, like poetry, remains in general more adventurous, fluid, and vitally modern than its novelistic big brother.
To review these stories in terms of their quality seems redundant – that they're terrific is a no-brainer. Entering its eighty-fifth year, The O. Henry Prize Stories consistently collects – I won't say the finest short fiction, but it collects inarguably exquisite short fiction published in the U.S. and Canada. We'll concede that there may be better stories out there, simmering under the radar or even (gasp!) unpublished, which does nothing to detract from the eminence of the ones collected here. This is a damn good read.
This year's edition was edited and introduced by Laura Furman, with a jury consisting of celebrated writers Cristina Garcia, Ann Patchett and Richard Russo. It's dedicated to Chekov upon the centenary of his death, which is forgivably predictable, given his pervasive influence on the short form. Besides illuminating notes from the writers on their work, the 2005 edition contains an essay by each of the judges on their favorite story, and a glossary of literary journals big and small that will be a valuable resource for writers and readers alike.
If quality is a given, it seems the best utility a review of the The O. Henry Prize Stories can have is to pick out the affinities between them and see (a) what writers were compelled to write about in the past year, (b) what editors were compelled to publish, and (c) which literary organs are currently in vogue. Word to the wise: If you'd like to win an O. Henry Prize, relentlessly submit to the New Yorker, which originally published no less than six of the twenty stories here, comfortably vanquishing silver-medallists The Kenyon Review and Zoetrope, who clock in with an admirable (if measly by comparison) two stories apiece.
No less than four stories in the volume revolve around music, all of which are deeply appreciative, none entirely trusting. Michael Palmer's atmospheric tale, "The Golden Era of Heartbreak", is haunted by a lovelorn trucker's song that carries everywhere in a town flattened by the departure of the narrator's wife. "My house filled to the eaves with this song," he states in his spare, lyrical tone, and the story is filled with it as well: The prose, like the town, is "flat as an envelope," and the trucker's song stretches spectrally across it.
A personal favorite of mine, Ben Fountain's "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers", is an elliptical, richly detailed character sketch in the vein of Millhauser or Hemon, about the intertwined destinies of two eleven-fingered pianists in nineteenth century Vienna, steeped in all the paranoia, political and ethnic tensions, and obsolete superstitions of the day.
In Timothy Crouse's "Sphinxes", a remarkably confident and unclassifiable tale, piano lessons, love affairs and subtle emotional maneuvering are braided together with increasing complexity until they become indistinguishable. In each of these stories, music is salvation and undoing, pure force and calculated metaphor: a paradox, a chimera, a sphinx.
And Gail Jones's "Desolation" is about a primal, alienating sexual encounter at a Death in Vegas concert, although it cross-references with the second type of story that heavily informs this year's volume, the community / exile story, which we're coming to just now.
Many stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 revolve around issues of community, but not the traditional, fixed community – these stories are about the provisional communities that arise in times of crisis, and the communities forged by travelers, strangers, souls in spiritual and physical exile.
Judge favorite "Mudlavia", a coming of age tale by Elizabeth Stuckey-French, finds a young boy and his mother in a health resort filled with questionable, exciting characters of colorful mien and shady provenance – slowly, away from their domineering father and husband, we watch them come alive to their own desires, desires that this alien context was necessary to draw out.
Another judge favorite, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's period piece "Exile in London", evokes the faded aura of postwar London by way of the young narrator's recollections of the ragged diaspora in her aunt's boarding house. And Nell Freudenberger's "The Tutor" details the tensions, both sexual and cultural, between a prototypically American teenager in Bombay and her native Indian tutor.
But the finest story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 has to be Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn I Will Redeem", which describes the plight of a homeless, admittedly "crazy" Spokane Native American as he embarks on a day-long quest to raise one-thousand dollars to buy back his Grandmother's tribal regalia from a pawn shop. That the story's themes are large and poignant is obvious; what's remarkable is that it manages funny, hopeful, angry, and redemptive at once. The narrator's refusal to lapse into self-pity or misanthropy at his pathetic plight is counterintuitive yet rings true, and by the time the story reaches its conclusion, not-at-all inevitable and uncommonly generous of spirit, one feels every inch of his joy.
In the end, this is the short-story function that trumps all the others: The ability to vault the reader into realms of unanticipated joy. While not all the stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 achieve this as viscerally as Alexie's fable, each one loudly debunks any nonsense about the short story's obsolescence.
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431 Sheridan Road Kenilworth, IL 60043 M. M. M. Hayes, Editor storyquarterly@hotmail.com www.storyquarterly.com Annual
StringTown
93011 Ivy Station Road
Astoria, OR 97103
Polly Buckingham, Editor
Stringtown@aol.com
Annual
The Sun
107 North Roberson Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
Sy Safransky, Editor
TheSunMagazine@pcspublink.com
www.thesunmagazine.org
Monthly
Sundog
English Department Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32311 www.sundog@english.fsu.edu www.english.fsu.edu/sundog Biannual
Sycamore Review
English Department
1356 Heavilon Hall
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907
sycamore@expert.cc.purdue.edu
www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/sycamore/Biannual
Talking River Review
Division of Literature and Languages
Lewis-Clark State College
500 8th Avenue
Lewiston, ID 83501
Biannual
Tameme
199 First Street
Los Altos, CA 94022
C. M. Mayo, Editor
editor@tameme.org
www.tameme.org
Annual
Tampa Review
The University of Tampa 401 West Kennedy Boulevard Tampa, Florida 33606-1490 Richard Matthews, Editor http://tampareview.ut.edu Biannual
The Texas Review
English Department
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, TX 77341
Paul Ruffin, Editor
eng.pdr@shsu.edu
Biannual
Third Coast
English Department
Publications Submitted/ 393
Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5092 Shanda Hansma Blue, Editor Shanda_Blue@hotmail.com www.wmich.edu/thirdcoast Biannual
The Threepenny Review
P.O. Box 9131 Berkeley, CA 94709 Wendy Lesser, Editor www.threepennyreview.com Quarterly
Tikkun
60 West 87th Street
New York, NY 10024
Thane Rosenbaum, Literary Editor
magazine@tikkun.org
www.tikkun.org
Bimonthly
Timber Creek Review
8969 UNCG Station Greensboro, NC 27413 John M. Freiermuth, Editor Quarterly
Tin House Magazine
P.O. Box 10500 Portland, OR 97296-0500 Rob Spillman, Editor, and Win
McCormack, Editor-in-Chief tinhouse@pcspublink.com www.tinhouse.com Quarterly
Toronto Life
59 Front Street E.
Toronto, Ontario M5E 1B3 Canada
John Macfarlane, Editor www.torontolife.com Monthly
Transition Magazine
W. E. B. DuBois Institute
Harvard University
69 Dunster Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame
Anthony Appiah, Editors transition@fas.harvard.edu www.transitionmagazine.com Quarterly
Triquarterly
Northwestern University
2020 Ridge Avenue
Evanston, IL 60208
Susan Firestone Hahn, Editor
www.triquarterly.org
Triannual
Two Rivers Review
P.O. Box 158 Clinton, NY 13323 Phil Memmer, Editor tworiversreview@juno.com Biannual
The Virginia Quarterly Review
One West Range
P.O. Box 400223
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4223
Staige D. Blackford, Editor
vqreview@virginia.edu
www.virginia.edu/vqr
Quarterly
War, Literature & the Arts
English and Fine Arts Department United States Air Force Academy
Colorado Springs, CO 80840-6242
Donald Anderson, Editor
donald.anderson@usafa.af.mil
www.wlajournal.com
Biannual
Wascana Review
English Department University of Regina Regina, Saskatchewan S4S 0A2
Canada Michael Tussler, Editor Michael.tussler@uregina.ca www.uregina.ca/arts/english/wascana/wrhome.htm Biannual
Washington Review
P.O. Box 50132 Washington, DC 20091-0132 Clarissa K. Wittenberg, Editor www.washingtonreview.org Bimonthly
Washington Square
Creative Writing Program
New York University
19 University Place, Room 219
New York, NY 10003-4556
Sarah Kain, Editor-in-Chief
www.nyu.edu/gsas/program/cwp/wsr.htm Biannual
Watchword
3288 21st Street #248 San Francisco, CA 94110 Amanda L. Green, Danielle Jatlow, Liz Lisle, Editors danielle@watchwordpress.org
www.watchwordpress.org
Biannual
Weber Studies
Weber State University 1214 University Circle Ogden, UT 84408-1214 Brad Roghaar, Editor weberstudies@weber.edu http://weberstudies.weber.edu Triquarterly
West Branch
Bucknell Hall Bucknell University Lewisburg, PA 17837 Paula Closson Buck, Editor www.bucknell.edu/westbranch Biannual
West Coast Line
2027 East Academic Annex
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6
Canada Roy Miki, Editor wcl@sfu.ca
www.sfu.ca/west-coast-line Triannual
Western Humanities Review
University of Utah
English Department
255 South Central Campus Drive,
Room 3500 Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0494 Barry Weller, Editor whr@mail.hum.utah.edu http://vegeta.hum.utah.edu/whr Biannual
Publications Submitted/ 395
Whetstone
Barrington Area Arts Council P.O. Box 1266 Barrington, IL 60011-1266 Sandra Berris, Marsha Portnoy, Jean
Tolle, Editors Annual
Whistling Shade, the Twin Cities Literary Journal
P.O. Box 7084
Saint Paul, MN 55107
Anthony Telschow, Rhoda Niola,
Editors editor@whistlingshade.com www.whistlingshade.com Quarterly
Wind
P.O. Box 24548
Lexington, KY 40524
Charlie Hughes, Leatha Kendrick,
Editors books@windpub.org Biannual
Windsor Review
English Department University of Windsor Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4
Canada Katherine Quinsey, General Editor uwrevu@uwindsor.ca Biannual
Witness
Oakland Community College Orchard Ridge Campus 27055 Orchard Lake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48334 Peter Stine, Editor witness@webdelsol.com
www.occ.cc.mi.us/witness
Biannual
Worcester Review
6 Chatham Street
Worcester, MA 01609
Rodger Martin, Managing Editor
www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/6433 Annual
Wordplay
P.O. Box 2248
South Portland, ME 04116-2248
Helen Peppe, Editor-in-Chief
wordplay@maine.rr.edu
Quarterly
Writers’ Forum
University of Colorado
P.O. Box 7150
Colorado Springs, CO 80933
C. Kenneth Pellow, Editor-in-Chief
kpellow@mail.uccs.edu
Annual
Xavier Review
Xavier University
Box 110C
New Orleans, LA 70125
Thomas Bonner, Jr., and Richard
Collins, Editors rcollins@xula.edu Biannual
Xconnect: Writers of the Information Age
P.O. Box 2317 Philadelphia, PA 19103
D. Edward Deifer, Editor-in-Chief xconnect@ccat.sas.upenn.edu http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect Annual
The Yale Review
Yale University
P.O. Box 208243
New Haven, CT 06250-8243
J. D. McClatchy, Editor
yalerev@yale.edu
Quarterly
The Yalobusha Review
P.O. Box 186
University, MS 38677-0186
yalobush@sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/pubs/yalobusha_review.html Annual
Zoetrope: All-Story
916 Kearny Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
Tamara Straus, Editor-in-Chief
www.zoetrope-stories.com
Quarterly
ZYZZYVA
P.O. Box 590069
San Francisco, CA 94159-0069
Howard Junker, Editor
editor@zyzzyva.org
www.zyzzyva.org
Triannual
Permissions
The series editor wishes to thank the editors of the participating periodicals, the agents of the authors, and the authors themselves for cooperation in assembling The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
“What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie from Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie. Copyright (c) 2003 by Sherman Alexie. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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