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PRIZE STORIES 2001

Name: PRIZE STORIES 2001
Author: Larry Dark
ISBN: 0-385-49878-0

THE O. HENRY AWARDS

edited by Larry Dark ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2001

A strong year for the series.

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For this year’s collection—short fiction’s version of the All-Star Team—editor Dark has reduced the number of stories from twenty to seventeen in order to include three lengthier pieces.

Refreshingly, each of the three longer stories departs from current fiction’s overly familiar “middle-class quotidian” terrain. Mary Swan’s “The Deep”—given First Prize by judges Mary Gordon, Michael Chabon, and Mona Simpson—takes place during WWI and centers on a pair of peculiarly co-dependent female twins who go overseas as civilian volunteers. In Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map,” a nervous British surveyor traverses the Himalayas of the 1860s, while George Saunders’s brilliant “Pastoralia” (printed, fortunately, from the full text in Saunders’s book of the same name, and not from The New Yorker’s truncated version) is about a hapless fellow playing a caveman in a “historical” theme park. The judges give Second Prize to Dan Chaon’s “Big Me,” an extraordinary piece about a boy in Nebraska who becomes convinced that a stranger on his block is his future self. Meanwhile, ever-reliable Alice Munro takes both Third Prize, with “Floating Bridge,” and a Special Award for Continuing Achievement. This award was last given in 1986, to Joyce Carol Oates, who also appears in this year’s collection, her 29th O. Henry selection. There are a few weird recurrences—in two separate stories, people come across children’s hands—and, as usual, a preoccupation with illness and violence. The inclusion of historical fiction—as well as wonderfully strange fare like Pinckney Benedict’s “Zog-19: A Scientific Romance,” about an alien made of iron and sentient gases who takes over the life and loves of a Seneca Valley farmer—keeps the volume various and interesting, despite a small handful of desultory pieces. Taking this year’s magazine award is The New Yorker, which published five of the seventeen stories.

A strong year for the series.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2001

ISBN: 0-385-49878-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001

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 2000
edited by Larry Dark

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

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 ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.