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THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2016

Name: THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2016
Author: Laura Furman
ISBN: 978-1-101-97111-6

edited by Laura Furman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2016

An unfailingly well-chosen collection, though one looks forward to more new voices in volumes to come.

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Latest installment of the state-of-the–art form annual prize volume, closing in on its first century.

A writer without chops couldn’t get away with time travel that nets the narrator a fetal point of view. Elizabeth Genovise, whose story “Irises” opens this year’s prize collection, dares to take that stance in writing of a woman who “is a few hours away from leaving her marriage and a few days away from ending my life,” planning to terminate a pregnancy in favor of life with a lover. In scarcely a dozen pages, Genovise compresses the entirety of the now-grown woman’s relationship with her mother, and it’s a marvel to behold. The succeeding story, by a young Indian immigrant named Geetha Iyer, is just as marvelous, playing with the conventions of magical realism to imagine a Borges-ian archive that includes islands, polar bears, and a substantial portion of the Arctic Ocean, all neatly filed away in matching envelopes. Asako Serizawa’s story “Train to Harbin” wrestles matter-of-factly with the enormity of war, an old survivor resignedly confessing that “At my age it is time, not space, that is palpable, its physicality reminding me of the finality of all our choices, made and lived.” There is, naturally enough, a meta piece, Frederic Tuten’s “Winter, 1965,” about a writer’s tribulations; Furman is right to say that Tuten “gets everything right,” and he surely does, but it’s a slippery slope. Warhorses Robert Coover and Wendell Berry turn in work that is unsurprisingly excellent—it would be a surprise, that is, if it were anything less, but neither contribution is much of a revelation. The anthology tends to the well tried and already well published, some of whom acquit themselves with better than usual work—Ron Carlson, for instance, a fixture but seldom a standout in such story anthologies, turns in an eye-opening story with the obliquely titled “Happiness.”

An unfailingly well-chosen collection, though one looks forward to more new voices in volumes to come.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-101-97111-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2019
edited by Laura Furman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2018
edited by Laura Furman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2017
edited by Laura Furman

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.