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Zusatztext “Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction.” -- The Atlantic Monthly Informationen zum Autor LAURA FURMAN, series editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories since 2003, is the winner of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for her fiction. The author of several books, including the story collection The Mother Who Stayed , she taught writing for many years at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Central Texas. Klappentext Mudlavia Elizabeth Stuckey-French The Brief History of the Dead Kevin Brockmeier The Golden Era of Heartbreak Michael Parker The Hurt Man Wendell Berry The Tutor Nell Freudenberger Fantasy for Eleven Fingers Ben Fountain The High Divide Charles D'Ambrosio Desolation Gail Jones A Rich Man Edward P. Jones Dues Dale Peck Speckle Trout Ron Rash Sphinxes Timothy Crouse Grace Paula Fox Snowbound Liza Ward Tea Nancy Reisman Christie Caitlin Macy Refuge in London Ruth Prawer Jhabvala The Drowned Woman Frances De Pontes Peebles The Card Trick Tessa Hadley What You Pawn I Will Redeem Sherman Alexie Introduction In the work of Anton Chekhov, to whom The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 is dedicated, one feels a force as powerful as a hurricane moving toward his characters. His knowledge from a young age that he had a terminal illness may account for some of this, but he was also sensitive to the gathering political storm in Russia. The 1905 revolution broke out within six months of his death. Writers and other artists respond to the same political and societal pressures as everybody else. Some explicitly use a political figure or an overwhelming event such as the Vietnam War in their art. Others are engaged by the public tensions of their time without any direct reference to current events. The twenty writers of The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 live all over our planet—a family farm in Kentucky, the city of Perth in Western Australia, urban Florida. Their stories are set in India, Paris, London, Brazil, and New York, also possibly in heaven. Whatever their origin, whatever their private or public inspiration, our Prize Stories are all preoccupied with notions of community. The relationship between individual and society is usually portrayed as a struggle—think of the destruction of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. In these O. Henry stories, community and individual appear most often not in opposition but in some kind of disintegrating relation. . . . Among the New York City characters of “Dues,” nothing is forgiven, neither a minor crime of property nor a love affair that won’t quite die. Dale Peck sprinkles his story with doubles and dualities from the deuce of the title on, but all the odd couples are joined when an ironic community arises from disaster. Another New Yorker, in Paula Fox’s “Grace,” is opaque to his fellow office-workers and too obdurate for love. It’s not because he’s in New York that John Hillman is isolated but because he’s himself. In the New York of Caitlin Macy’s tale of real estate and social distinction, “Christie,” well-being is defined by living at the right address, even having the right doorman. The fun of the story is that we root for the narrator’s happiness though we know, and hope she knows, that it’s unattainable. Happiness, almost an ecstasy, radiates from Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn I Will Re...
