Read more
Informationen zum Autor Edited by Laura Furman Prize Jury: Mary Gaitskill, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Ron Rash Klappentext The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year! selected from thousands published in literary magazines. These remarkable stories explore the boundaries of the imagination in settings as various as an army training camp in China! the salt mines of Detroit! a divided Balkan town! and the eye of a hurricane. Also included are essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories! observations from the winners on what inspired them! and an extensive resource list of magazines. Leseprobe Introduction One of the most fascinating, and annoying, questions asked of writers is about the origin of a story. We hope that if we could pinpoint the real beginning of a story, it would reveal all that a story holds—certain aspects of the author’s personal history; the experience, fact, or image that caught the author’s imagination; the path through language from imagination to a coherent work of art. We wish to be able to extrapolate the mysterious process of writing fiction. Many stories draw upon either the experience of the writer or another’s experience as reported to the writer. This is not an assertion that every story is autobiographical (or biographical), only that something of the writer’s own life is of necessity part of every story. A number of writers find their stories through research, a method of educating oneself and also of procrastinating. For still other stories, and other writers, the inspiration may be as fleeting as a landscape glimpsed from a passing train. But the process of writing always remains mysterious. There can be no definitive answer to a question about a story’s origin because the best stories are manifold and open to multiple understandings. A single origin doesn’t seem enough for the stories we love and reread. Furthermore, a story presents changed meanings over time to a faithful reader, for the story we read in middle age is different from the one we first encountered in adolescence. A single glance from a train doesn’t account for a story’s beginning—it’s too monocular, too limited—and yet that may be the way the story’s creator remembers it. A story undergoes many changes as it’s written, making it a complicated journey from the starting point. We do want to know where a story came from, and by that we mean the whole story, not only the tiny flash that began the imaginative process. Implicit in the question is the respect we have for the story, and the answer we suspect: Not even the writer really knows where the story came from. If that were known, why bother to write? John Berger’s “A Brush” epitomizes a kind of silence I associate with the short-story form. In the story, the reader finds a slow, almost offhand perception that presents itself when one is looking the other way, or, as W. H. Auden said in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” We are all self-preoccupied; the narrator of “A Brush” is no exception. In Paris, he makes his way through his routine, giving no evidence that he is either lonely or happy in his solitude. We experience what he wants us to—chance meetings, a slow revelation of character and history by those he notices, and, finally, the shock of understanding, a moment of real attention. In the story’s ending, we understand how much the narrator has come to value and gain from his urban friendship. The narrator of “A Brush” is both the reader’s informant and a character involved in the story’s action. Berger’s masterly writing conveys with equal grace the recent history of Cambodia and the patient skill required in making art. At the story’s simple and exquisite ending, the narrator summons both fact and feeling. Salvatore Scibona’s ...
