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Zusatztext "You won't go away hungry . . . you'll make new friends. In the 2003 'O. Henry' . . . new series editor! Laura Furman! picked all sorts of treats." -- The Seattle Times "Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction." -- The Atlantic Monthly Informationen zum Autor Edited by Laura Furman Prize Jury: Jennifer Egan, David Guterson, and Diane Johnson Klappentext Since its establishment in 1919! the O. Henry Prize stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. Such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway's The Killers (1927); William Faulkner's Barn Burning (1939); Carson McCuller's A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud (1943); Shirley Jackson's The Lottery (1949); J.D. Salinger's For Esme with Love and Squalor (1963); John Cheever's The Country Husband (1956) ; and Flannery O'Conner's Everything that Rises Must Converge (1963) all were O. Henry Prize stories. An accomplished new series editor--novelist and short story writer Laura Furman--has read more than a thousand stories to identify the 20 winners! each one a pleasure to read today! each one a potential classic. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 also contains brief essays from each of the three distinguished judges on their favorite story! and comments from the prize-winning writers on what inspired their stories. There is nothing like the ever rich! surprising! and original O. Henry collection for enjoying the contemporary short story. The Thing in the Forest A. S. Byatt The Shell Collector Anthony Doerr Burn Your Maps Robyn Jay Leff Lush Bradford Morrow God's Goodness Marjorie Kemper Bleed Blue in Indonesia Adam Desnoyers The Story Edith Pearlman Swept Away T. Coraghessan Boyle Meanwhile Ann Harleman Three Days. A Month. More. Douglas Light The High Road Joan Silber Election Eve Evan S. Connell Irish Girl Tim Johnston What Went Wrong Tim O'Brien The American Embassy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Kissing William Kittredge Sacred Statues William Trevor Two Words Molly Giles Fathers Alice Munro Train Dreams Denis Johnson Leseprobe Introduction A reader, given a moment with a writer, will often pose the question: “Do you have a reader in mind when you write?” The question is as interesting as the many answers it inspires, for the thrust of the reader’s question is, “How did you know me?” Sometimes a story matches an incident in the reader’s life; at other times the congruence is to an emotional, spiritual, or intellectual experience. The short story, even more than the novel, creates an instant and lasting relationship between writer and reader, perhaps because we experience the story and its characters as we do life. Our understanding of the lives of others, even those we think we know well and whom we love, comes over time yet in intense glimpses, revealed most often by stress or loss, the twin capitals of the short story’s dominion. The peace of daily life, even the dullness of it, is what is decimated in the short story and replaced by the nightmare or sometimes the consolation of understanding another’s existence or our own. The realization, often called compassion, that everybody else lives in their own unique and solitary universe, can feel shattering, liberating, even amusing, depending on how the reader comes to it. Through our experience of the short story, we are better than we are in life, more ready to be empathic, more ready to see why another made the choices he did. The writer, who...
