The PEN / O.Henry Prize Stories 2010 - The Best Stories of the Year

Zusatztext “Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction.” — The Atlantic Monthly Informationen zum Autor Laura Furman's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Ploughshares, The Yale Review , and other magazines. She is the founding editor of the highly regarded American Short Fiction (three-time finalist for the American Magazine Award). A professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, she teaches in the graduate James A. Michener Center for writers. She lives in Austin. Klappentext A collection of the twenty best contemporary short stories selected by series editor Laura Furman from hundreds of literary magazines! The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010 brings to life a dazzling array of subjects: a street orphan in Malaysia! a cowboy and his teenage bride! a Russian nanny in Manhattan! a nineteenth-century Nigerian widow! and political prisoners on a Greek island. 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. Them Old Cowboy Songs Annie Proulx Clothed! Female Figure Kirstin Allio The Headstrong Historian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Stand By Me Wendell Berry Sheep May Safely Graze Jess Row Birch Memorial Preeta Samarasan Visitation Brad Watson The Woman of the House William Trevor The Bridge Daniel Alarcón A Spoiled Man Daniyal Mueenuddin Oh! Death James Lasdun Fresco! Byzantine Natalie Bakopoulos The End of My Life in New York Peter Cameron Obit Ted Sanders The Lover Damon Galgut An East Egg Update George Bradley Into the Gorge Ron Rash Microstories John Edgar Wideman Some Women Alice Munro Making Good Lore Segal For author interviews! photos! and more! go to www.ohenryprizestories.com A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to support the PEN Readers & Writers Literary Outreach Program. Leseprobe Introduction    For the reader, the short story is nothing less than a brief and intense residence in another world. This other place offers escape from yourself and your own world, as well as the rarest of gifts—the possibility of becoming someone else. Each crucial element of fiction—character, place, time, event—offers the opportunity for intimacy and compassion. These two words, so quiet and loaded, contain difficult and threatening emotions, but they are also the emotions that in the end make us feeling beings. The short story, while you’re reading, includes you as a witness and imaginary participant, and allows you to suffer and rejoice.   The reader’s entrance into the new world depends, mysteriously, on the language used to tell the tale. Unless the teller’s voice is true, the reader won’t have the courage to go to Pakistan, to a hollow or gorge or prairie, to a village in Malaysia, certainly not into the mind and heart of a character quite unlike the reader. Read the statements of the authors in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010. Some of the writers have impressive bodies of work, others are beginning, but none claims to be in complete control of a story or to say that it came out as planned. The impulse to write is not an impulse to control. It’s more like an experienced sailor going to sea once more. Writing a short story is akin to being on a voyage to India and ending up in Indiana. There are discoveries to be made along the way, and the new land has its points of fascination, but it isn’t where you thought you were going.   Ron Rash, one of our best living storytellers, lives and writes close to his Appalachian roots. “Into the Gorge,” he tells us, came from a story h...

List of contents

Introduction      Laura Furman, Series Editor

Annie Proulx, Them Old Cowboy Songs, The New Yorker
Kirstin Allio, Clothed, Female Figure, Iowa Review
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Headstrong Historian, The New Yorker
Wendell Berry, Stand By Me, Atlantic Monthly
Jess Row, Sheep May Safely Graze, Threepenny Review
Preeta Samarasan, Birch Memorial, A Public Space
Brad Watson, Visitation, The New Yorker
William Trevor, The Woman of the House, The New Yorker
Daniel Alarcón, The Bridge, Granta
Daniyal Mueenuddin, A Spoiled Man," The New Yorker
James Lasdun, Oh, Death, Paris Review
Natalie Bakopoulos, Fresco, Byzantine, Tin House
Peter Cameron, The End of My Life in New York, Subtropics
Ted Sanders, Obit, Indiana Review
Damon Galgut, The Lover, Paris Review
George Bradley, An East Egg Update, Yale Review
Ron Rash, Into the Gorge, Southern Review
John Edgar Wideman, Microstories, Harper s Magazine
Alice Munro, Some Women, The New Yorker
Lore Segal, Making Good," The American Scholar
 
Reading The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010
The Jurors on Their Favorites:
Junot Díaz on A Simple Man by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Paula Fox on Oh, Death by James Lasdun
Yiyun Li on The Woman of the House by William Trevor
 
Writing The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010
The Writers on Their Work
 
Recommended Stories 2010

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Widely regarded as the nation s most prestigious awards for short fiction. The Atlantic Monthly

Product details

• Authors: Laura Furman
• Assisted by: Laura Furman (Editor)
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 20.04.2010
• EAN: 9780307472366
• ISBN: 978-0-307-47236-6
• No. of pages: 479
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 203 mm x 26 mm
• Series: Anchor Books; Pen / O. Henry Prize Stories; The O. Henry Prize Collection; The O. Henry Prize Collection; Pen / O. Henry Prize Stories
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature