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PRIZE STORIES 1998

Name: PRIZE STORIES 1998
Author: Larry Dark
ISBN: 0-385-48958-7

THE O. HENRY AWARDS

edited by Larry Dark ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1998

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This latest installment of the venerable O. Henry winners, edited by old-hand critic Dark (Prize Stories 1997, etc.), provides some pleasures amid few surprises. “You are what some would call a serious reader,” Dark assures us at the start. —The very fact that . . . you are interested in these twenty stories is proof enough.” But it’s not all work and no play, for many of the entries here manage to entertain as well as mean. The obsessive introspection that has nearly killed the short story as a popular art form is largely absent, and traditional narrative seems to be enjoying a comeback, if the pieces offered this time around serve as any guide. Lorrie Moore takes First Prize with “People Like that Are the Only People Here,” a mother’s account of her baby’s illness in which self- conscious irony (“The Tiny Tim Lounge is a little sitting area at the end of the Peed-Onk corridor”) verges on black humor while staying just within the boundary of good taste. Second Prize—winner Steven Millhauser’s “The Knife Thrower” describes in almost gothic prose the Svengali-like effect of a carnival actor upon an audience of small-town folk (“We had heard that among his followers there were many, young women especially, who longed to be wounded by the master and to bear his scar proudly”). Alice Munro’s Third-Prize—winner, “The Children Stay,” is more in the contemporary mode: an almost disembodied recollection of a woman’s adultery and then abandonment of her family that becomes finally more ponderous than meditative. Several backwoods pieces—Rick Bass’s “The Myth of Bears” (Yukon trappers) and Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (Wyoming ranchers)—manage to resuscitate old-fashioned realism with local color, but the best is Louise Erdrich’s “Satan: Hijacker of a Planet,” a taut, extraordinarily eerie description of a country girl seduced by a charismatic revival preacher. Definitely worth picking through, even for readers who aren’t all that serious.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-385-48958-7

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STORY PRIZE
edited by Larry Dark

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2002
edited by Larry Dark

- BOOK REVIEW
PRIZE STORIES 2001
edited by Larry Dark

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.