THE STORY PRIZE

Name: THE STORY PRIZE
Author: Larry Dark
ISBN: 978-1-936787-63-0

edited by Larry Dark ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2019

A touch less diverse than the Best American Short Story and Pushcart Prize annuals but still a pleasure for students of the...

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An anthology marking the 15th anniversary of the annual prize celebrating collections of short stories.

There is not much unity to be found in these pages; as volume editor Dark writes of the stories in this volume: “Each is distinctive, sometimes jarringly different in tone, scope, and language from the story that precedes or follows it.” All, however, are skillful distillations, sometimes of whole lives—Patrick O’Keeffe’s evocation, for instance, of gloomy rural Ireland and its generations of secrets kept (“You know the way them older people are, can’t say a word or ask them anything ever, excuse me now for saying so, Missus“)—and sometimes of smaller moments, such as Steven Millhauser’s lyrical description of a rainstorm that melts away the snowmen the narrator and a clutch of fellow children have made (“Already, it seemed to me, our snowmen were showing evidence of a skill so excessive, an elaboration so painfully and exquisitely minute, that it could scarcely conceal a desperate restlessness”). Most of the writers are well-published and relatively well-known, though not always for short stories: Rick Bass, for instance, though his stories are often anthologized, is thought of first as a novelist, as are Edwige Danticat, George Saunders, and Tobias Wolff. Dark finds room for a few writers who are earlier on in their careers, such as Daniyal Mueenuddin, a Pakistani-American writer who writes of a love affair that takes on complicated dimensions when the young woman finds that she is pregnant: “The old midwife from the village,” Mueenuddin writes ominously, “with filthy hands and a greedy heart, brought the baby into the world, a tiny little boy.” The baby will be fighting against the odds, it appears, but then happiness is not a commodity that flows in abundance in many of these stories, with the possible exception of Mary Gordon’s literal shaggy dog story, a delight to read.

A touch less diverse than the Best American Short Story and Pushcart Prize annuals but still a pleasure for students of the genre.

Pub Date: March 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-936787-63-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Catapult

Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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

- BOOK REVIEW
PRIZE STORIES 2001
edited by Larry Dark

- BOOK REVIEW
PRIZE STORIES 2000
edited by Larry Dark

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

21

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

21

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BOOK OF LIVES
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.