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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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BOYS OF ALABAMA

A NOVEL

by Genevieve Hudson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 2020

A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.

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A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.

Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.

A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.

Pub Date: May 19, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION | LITERARY FICTION

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FAMILY TREE

by Susan Wiggs ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016

A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.

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After a year in a coma, Annie Rush wakes up to a world without her husband, the TV she developed, and a wealth of memories that put her life into context, but as her body and mind heal, she puts her faith in second chances.

As a successful cooking-show producer who’s married to the gorgeous star, Annie knows she’s lucky, so she overlooks the occasional arguments and her husband’s penchant for eclipsing her. She’s especially excited the day she finds out she’s pregnant and, ignoring her typical steadfast schedule, rushes to the set to tell him. And discovers him making love to his onscreen assistant. Stunned, Annie leaves, trying to figure out her next move, and is struck on the head by falling on-set machinery. She wakes a year later in her Vermont hometown, as weak as a kitten and suffering from amnesia. As the days pass, however, she finds clues and markers regarding her life, and many of her memories begin to fill in. She remembers Fletcher, the first boy she loved, and how their timing was always off. She wanted to leave her family’s maple farm behind and explore the world—especially once her cooking-themed film school project was discovered and she was enfolded into the LA world of a successful food show. Fletcher intended to follow her, until life created big roadblocks for their relationship that they could never manage to overcome. Now, however, Annie’s husband has divorced her while Fletcher has settled in Switchback, and just as things look like they may finally click for Fletcher and Annie, her pre-accident life comes calling again. Wiggs (Starlight on Willow Lake, 2015, etc.) examines one woman’s journey into losing everything and then winning it all back through rediscovering her passions and being true to herself, tackling a complicated dual storyline with her typical blend of authenticity and sensitivity.

A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.