The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

by Laura Furman (Editor)

Overview

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The winning stories come from a mix of established writers and emerging voices, and are uniformly breathtaking. They are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired their stories, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction.

"The Tomb of Wrestling," Jo Ann Beard, Tin House
"Counterblast," Marjorie Celona, The Southern Review
"Nayla," Youmna Chlala, Prairie Schooner
"Lucky Dragon," Viet Dinh, Ploughshares
"Stop ’n’ Go," Michael Parker, New England Review
"Past Perfect Continuous," Dounia Choukri, Chicago Quarterly Review
"Inversion of Marcia," Thomas Bolt, n+1
"Nights in Logar," Jamil Jan Kochai, A Public Space
"How We Eat," Mark Jude Poirier, Epoch
"Deaf and Blind," Lara Vapnyar, The New Yorker
"Why Were They Throwing Bricks?," Jenny Zhang, n+1
"An Amount of Discretion," Lauren Alwan, The Southern Review
"Queen Elizabeth," Brad Felver, One Story
"The Stamp Collector," Dave King, Fence
"More or Less Like a Man," Michael Powers, The Threepenny Review
"The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies," Jo Lloyd, Zoetrope
"Up Here," Tristan Hughes, Ploughshares
"The Houses That Are Left Behind," Brenda Walker, The Kenyon Review
"We Keep Them Anyway," Stephanie A. Vega, The Threepenny Review
"Solstice," Anne Enright, The New Yorker

Prize Jury for 2018:  Fiona McFarlane, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elizabeth Tallent

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525436584
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/04/2018
Series:	The O. Henry Prize Collection
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	639,333
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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.

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Introduction
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Excerpted from "The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Laura Furman.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

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

"This year’s twenty O. Henry Prize Stories place the poetic qualities of the short story on full display." —The New Criterion

"The latest installment of the storied short fiction prize volume . . . [is] a strong collection of first-rate work without a false note. Essential for students of the form." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2018-06-18
Latest installment of the storied short fiction prize volume, a going concern for a century.There was a time, not so long ago, when short story writers were concentrating, tediously, on the lives of short story writers and their on-campus foibles. Horizons have expanded, and perhaps because it's such a horrible time, the writers in Furman's latest collection often tend to the horrible and its repercussions. In Viet Dinh's memorable, ironically titled "Lucky Dragon," Japanese sailors who ventured too close to the American H-bomb tests off Bikini Atoll return home to transmogrify; now monsters because of radiation poisoning, they are also the victims of superstition: "Already some of the villagers think that if they eat our flesh, they will live forever," says one bitterly, while another so terrifies his wife that "She handled his bowls and utensils as if they were made from lightning." In Jo Ann Beard's "The Tomb of Wrestling," a young girl, squeamish about animals anyway, spends time on her grandparents' farm, where butchering animals, "food in its sentient state," is the norm; as an adult, attacked in her own kitchen, she is forced to respond violently to the violence being visited on her. It's a scary and all too real tale of terror. In Pakistan, the protagonist of Jamil Jan Kochai's "Nights in Logar" happens upon a scene of carnage when a shepherd, distracted by a passing American helicopter, takes his eyes from his flock for a moment. A dog attacks so viciously that "he thought his poor little lamb had exploded from the inside out." In a land of unending war, people wind up the same way. And as for Tristan Hughes' "Up Here," whose first paragraph ends, "We were going to shoot the dog. Or rather, I was going to shoot the dog," you just know things aren't going to turn out well.A strong collection of first-rate work without a false note. Essential for students of the form.

Kirkus Reviews