The O. Henry Prize Collection

“Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction”—The Atlantic Monthly
 
The O. Henry Prize Stories 1990 gathers 20 of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines.

Stories include:
Leo E. Litwak “The Eleventh Edition” (first prize)
Peter Matthiessen “Lumumba Lives” (second prize)
Lore Segal “The Reverse Bug” (third prize)
Joyce Carol Oates “Heat”
Carolyn Osborn “The Grands”
James P. Blaylock “Unidentified Objects”
Jane Brown Gillette “Sins Against Animals”
Julie Schumacher “The Private Life of Robert Schumann”
Joanne Greenberg “Elizabeth Baird”
Alice Adams “1940: Fall”
T. Coraghessan Boyle “The Ape Lady in Retirement”
Marilyn Sides “The Island of the Mapmaker’s Wife”
David Michael Kaplan “Stand”
Meredith Steinbach “In Recent History”
Claudia Smith Brinson “Einstein’s Daughter”
Felicia  Ackerman “The Forecasting Game”
Reginald McKnight “The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas”
Bruce Fleming “The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein”
Devon Jersild “In Which John Imagines His Mind as a Pond”
Janice Eidus “Vito Loves Geraldine”
 
“One of the most welcome signs of the literary spring is the appearance of the annual O. Henry Awards collection.”—Los Angeles TimesBorn in 1919, William Abrahams published four successful novels and a number of poems before finding his true calling as an editor. He presided over the O. Henry Awards for more than 30 years starting in 1965. Abrahams also worked as the west coast editor of Atlantic Monthly Press and collaborated on nonfiction books with his partner, Peter Stansky. He passed away in 1998.