{"product_id":"o-henry-prize-stories-2007-isbn-9780307276889","title":"O. Henry Prize Stories 2007","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn arresting collection of contemporary fiction at its best, these stories explore  a vast range of subjects, from love and deception to war and the insidious power  of class distinctions.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e However clearly spoken, in voices sophisticated, cunning,  or naive, here is fiction that consistently defies our expectations. Selected from  thousands of stories in hundreds of literary magazines, the twenty prize-winning  stories are accompanied by essays from each of the three eminent jurors on which  stories they judged the best, and observations from all twenty prizewinners on what  inspired them.\u003cbr\u003e“The Room”\u003cbr\u003eWilliam Trevor\u003cbr\u003e“The Scent of Cinnamon”\u003cbr\u003eCharles Lambert\u003cbr\u003e“Cherubs”\u003cbr\u003eJustine Dymond\u003cbr\u003e“Galveston Bay, 1826”\u003cbr\u003eEddie Chuculate\u003cbr\u003e“The Gift of Years”\u003cbr\u003eVu Tran\u003cbr\u003e“The Diarist”\u003cbr\u003eRichard McCann\u003cbr\u003e“War Buddies”\u003cbr\u003eJoan Silber\u003cbr\u003e“Djamilla”\u003cbr\u003eTony  D’Souza\u003cbr\u003e“In a Bear’s Eye”\u003cbr\u003eYannick Murphy\u003cbr\u003e“Summer, with Twins”\u003cbr\u003eRebecca Curtis\u003cbr\u003e“Mudder  Tongue”\u003cbr\u003eBrian Evenson\u003cbr\u003e“Companion”\u003cbr\u003eSana Krasikov\u003cbr\u003e“A Stone House”\u003cbr\u003eBay Anapol\u003cbr\u003e“The  Company of Men”\u003cbr\u003eJan Ellison\u003cbr\u003e“City Visit”\u003cbr\u003eAdam Haslett\u003cbr\u003e“The Duchess of Albany”\u003cbr\u003eChristine  Schutt\u003cbr\u003e“A New Kind of Gravity”\u003cbr\u003eAndrew Foster Altschul\u003cbr\u003e“Gringos”\u003cbr\u003eAriel Dorfman\u003cbr\u003e“El Ojo de Agua”\u003cbr\u003eSusan Straight\u003ci\u003eIntroduction\u003c\/i\u003e  Laura Furman, Series Editor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Room\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWilliam Trevor, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Scent of Cinnamon\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharles Lambert, \u003ci\u003eOne Story\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCherubs\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJustine Dymond, \u003ci\u003eThe Massachusetts Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eGalveston Bay, 1826\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEddie Chuculate, \u003ci\u003eManoa\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Gift of Years\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVu Tran, \u003ci\u003eFence\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Diarist\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRichard McCann, \u003ci\u003eBloom\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWar Buddies\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJoan Silber, \u003ci\u003eLand-Grant College Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDjamilla\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTony D'Souza, \u003ci\u003eTin House\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eIn a Bear’s Eye\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYannick Murphy, \u003ci\u003eMcSweeney's Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSummer, with Twins\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRebecca Curtis, \u003ci\u003eHarper's Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMudder Tongue\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBrian Everson, \u003ci\u003eMcSweeney's Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCompanion\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSana Krasikov, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Stone House\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBay Anapol, \u003ci\u003eManoa\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Company of Men\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJan Ellison, \u003ci\u003eNew England Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCity Visit\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAdam Haslett, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Duchess of Albany\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChristine Schutt, \u003ci\u003eNoon\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA New Kind of Gravity\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAndrew Foster Altschul,\u003ci\u003e StoryQuarterly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eGringos\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAriel Dorfman, \u003ci\u003eSubtropics\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eEl Ojo de Agua\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSusan Straight, \u003ci\u003eZoetrope\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe View from Castle Rock\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlice Munro\u003ci\u003e, The New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReading THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2007\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharles D’Ambrosio on “The Room” by William Trevor\u003cbr\u003eUrsula K. Le Guin on “Galveston Bay, 1826” by Eddie Chuculate\u003cbr\u003eLily Tuck on “The Room” by William Trevor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWriting\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eTHE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2007\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Writers on Their Work\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRecommended Stories\u003cbr\u003ePublications Submitted\u003cbr\u003ePermissions“Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction.” —\u003ci\u003eThe  Atlantic Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eLaura Furman's\u003c\/b\u003e work has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eVanity Fair\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePloughshares\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Yale Review\u003c\/i\u003e, and other magazines. She is the founding editor of the highly regarded \u003ci\u003eAmerican Short Fiction\u003c\/i\u003e (threetime 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. Ursula LeGuin is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Left Hand of Darkness\u003c\/i\u003e. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Charles D'Ambrosio is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Dead Fish Museum\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Lily Tuck's most recent work is \u003ci\u003eThe News from Paraguay\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the National Book Award . She lives in New York City and Maine.\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eIntroduction\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReading the many short stories submitted to The O. Henry Prize Stories  by periodicals each year would seem to provide a special perch from which to generalize  and categorize, to proclaim the year’s prevailing style or subject matter. At a recent  dinner party I attended, the host declared that he didn’t read contemporary fiction  and didn’t know much about it, but he wondered if people still wrote old-fashioned  sentences like “ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Constance said coldly.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was easy  to reassure him that such sentences still enjoy life, along with many other kinds,  and that writers today are publishing a healthy variety of stories. But nothing would  induce me to stand on an O. Henry soapbox and preach about trends in contemporary  prose.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy choice, my reading experience focuses on one story at a time, not on what  kind of story it is. If it’s a great story, it doesn’t matter if it is a Western,  an epic, historical fiction, a spiritual journey, a domestic drama, or a postmodern  fable. What matters most is how effectively the story moves the reader from one world  (her own) to another (the story’s).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the statements of this year’s O. Henry writers  reveal, the writers themselves come to their stories in many different ways. You’ll  find one writer who wrote a story to express deep grief, and another to enter a contest  that required a certain genre. Another of our writers wrangled his subject from anecdote  to part of a novel to a short story. Yet another writer found her story within the  fiction of two centuries ago, when, we would like to think, women’s lives were so  different. Each story in the collection represents an individual writer’s search  for the story and the right way to tell it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere’s a distant intimacy in William  Trevor’s fiction. He observes his characters from the heights of a chilly god, not  without sympathy but without sentimentality–a god with low expectations, perhaps.  The reader of a Trevor story, whether she likes the characters or not, can’t help  but be drawn to their dilemmas. In “The Room” the much-wronged Katherine uses infidelity  as a catharsis. Varieties of betrayal and a homicide shadow the story, yet its focus  is not on violence or even conflict but on an intricate emotional balancing act.  Katherine lives as though in a chambered nautilus, with each aspect of her life sealed  off in a separate compartment. It’s up to the reader to make the connections between  them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThree of our stories have war in the background: Justine Dymond’s “Cherubs,”  Joan Silber’s “War Buddies,” and “The Gift of Years” by Vu Tran. In “Cherubs” the  war is long past, and, at first, there are no signs of trouble at the charming wedding  in France the story portrays. But as it unfolds, narrated in first-person plural  by American guests with the breathy enthusiasm associated with nuptials, the past  intervenes. The excitement and promise of the occasion is tempered by another time  when other Americans, the liberating army, were terrible guests.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJoan Silber, whose  story “The High Road” was in the O. Henry 2003 collection, sets her story “War Buddies”  years after the war has ended, when the narrator takes stock of his life and, most  of all, of his long-lost doppelgänger. They were a civilian pair of engineers sent  to South Vietnam to solve a technical problem that was costing lives and money. The  war, though terrifying, was almost the least of their troubles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe third war story,  by Vu Tran, is about a South Vietnamese soldier separated from his family while his  children grow up. The narrative contains a stunning reminiscence of battle, but Vu  Tran’s tale explores the consequences of war in domestic terms. It’s a story about  the universal human reluctance to believe in events that take place in our absence,  especially when it comes to our children.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The Duchess of Albany” by Christine Schutt  and “Mudder Tongue” by Brian Evenson are strikingly different stories about aging  parents and children. In Schutt’s story, a mother faces up to her widowhood by playing  with language and image. Evenson’s portrait of a deteriorating father’s linguistic  pathology evokes the reader’s sympathetic frustration even as we wait for another  fascinating mistake. Schutt’s widow uses language as a way to avoid being meddled  with as she mourns, and Evenson’s misspeaking professor succeeds too well in concealing  his loss of control over the spoken word. For both aging characters, language is  a weapon against an increasingly alien world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A Stone House” by Bay Anapol and  “In a Bear’s Eye” by Yannick Murphy are testimony to the often-observed kinship between  the short story and the poem. In “A Stone House” the narrator circles around her  lover, who is chimerical even when he’s within reach, and her memories of her dying  mother. “In a Bear’s Eye” observes the difference between adult grief and a child’s  literal understanding of loss. On the first reading, both of these lovely stories  offer the pleasure of the language; a second reading reveals the force of their emotion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt would be easy to categorize “City Visit” by Adam Haslett and “The Diarist” by  Richard McCann as coming-out stories, but this sells both stories short. One of Richard  McCann’s gifts as a writer is the way he uses memory to wrestle experience into art.  “The Diarist” begins with the narrator announcing, “Here’s one thing I remember,  from all the things I never wrote down in my diary the summer I was eleven, the summer  before my father died.” The narrator is impossibly different from his father and  brother in ways he didn’t then understand. At the triumphant end of the story it  becomes clear that the narrator will find his way not only by recognizing his sexuality  but also through writing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe protagonist of Adam Haslett’s “City Visit” believes  that New York, where he arrives with his mother for a visit, holds the key to his  secret identity and his freedom. What he doesn’t notice, and the reader does, is  that his mother knows his secret and is willing to step aside while he takes his  risks away from her care.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAriel Dorfman’s “Gringos” and Sana Krasikov’s “Companion”  are stories of uneasy exile. In Dorfman’s skillfully layered tale, an exiled Latin  American couple who live in the United States pretend not to know Spanish, putting  themselves in danger when they’re abroad. “Gringos” is also the story of a long marriage;  perhaps the marriage offers the couple their only secure citizenship. Ilona, the  protagonist of “Companion,” is a warm, sexy, cranky, lonely woman who’s living in  the United States, yet she thinks constantly of other places and other possibilities.  Her struggle to improve her lot undercuts her existence. The story poses the question  of whether Ilona’s helpless, predatory stance is part of every immigrant’s condition  or simply Ilona’s character.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEddie Chuculate’s “Galveston Bay, 1826” takes  the reader on an adventure over land and out of time as a group of Cheyennes cross  the Red River and travel as far south as they can. Chuculate’s characters are deftly  portrayed, and the reader feels, along with them, their joy and terror about what  they discover.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The Scent of Cinnamon” by Charles Lambert is set in the nineteenthcentury  American West and begins with an exchange of letters between an American farmer and  an English widow. As the two strangers move closer to becoming man and wife, the  story takes another turn altogether, leaving the reader to decide what happened and  what didn’t, what was real and what wasn’t. The Western pioneer setting, with its  keen details of clothing, furniture, and horseflesh, makes an appropriate backdrop  for a story about longing and loneliness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThough “El Ojo de Agua” by Susan Straight  takes place in contemporary Rio Seco, California, its heart is in another time and  place altogether, the flood of 1927 in segregated Bayou Becasse, Louisiana. That  nightmare time had a profound effect on the intertwined families in Susan Straight’s  story, so much so that the story’s present-day tragedies echo the depredations of  the past.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Rebecca Curtis’s narrator describes the sisters in her “Summer, with  Twins,” she is measuring them: “They weren’t strikingly beautiful, and they weren’t  especially kind. But everything they did they did with enthusiasm . . . Their enthusiasm  made me angry, because it seemed false, but then I became included in it and realized  it was genuine.” The narrator’s desire to be included is her downfall. She’s too  dense to understand the selfishness and meanness of the twins, but the ambiguous  reward of her summer–and the story–is an understanding of the power of money. Rebecca  Curtis insists on confronting the confused morality of the twins.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAppropriate social  behavior has gone missing in “Djamilla,” Tony D’Souza’s story of a young American  in love with Africa. Disillusioned with the tribe he’s living with, he flirts with  a beautiful unmarried woman from another tribe. However much he sees himself as part  of a community, because he’s an outsider, he doesn’t suffer the consequences of his  actions. The interplay of desire, role playing, and carelessness makes “Djamilla”  an intense exploration of how different people living in close proximity can be.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Jan Ellison’s “The Company of Men,” Catherine, the young narrator, is deliciously  naïve. In New Zealand she meets two young men, Jimmy and Ray, and the three settle  temporarily in Sydney, Australia. They’re all young and uncommitted: “There was the  promise of some new knowledge–the shape of an ear, the smell of musk–or a shift in  one’s view of oneself in the world.” They never become sexually entangled but she’s  seduced nonetheless, and in a way that shifts her view of her own sensuality.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A  New Kind of Gravity” by Andrew Foster Altschul takes place in a shelter populated  by women and children who’ve suffered from violence, but its male narrator is the  story’s true subject. He works at the shelter, guarding the women from their abusive  husbands and boyfriends. As his involvement with them becomes more complicated, the  story grows more tense. He’s trying hard to understand the women. We believe he’s  the good guy. Yet his secret flaw makes the story–and its subject–far more complicated  than a tale of right and wrong, good and bad.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnce again, the stories in \u003ci\u003eThe O.  Henry Prize Stories \u003c\/i\u003ecome from the three most important commercial publications for  fiction–\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eHarper’s\u003c\/i\u003e–and from a variety of  small magazines. The role of the commercial magazines in supporting and publishing  new and established writers has never been so important. \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e’s decision  to stop publishing a story per issue and to offer all its fiction in one annual issue  raised distress signals among the community of writers, editors, and readers who  care about literature.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet if the commercial magazines reach more readers than any  of the others, the little magazines are the greatest evidence of our vibrant literary  world. It’s true that some of them fold when they lose university or private support,  but heartening new magazines always arise in their place. For the second year in  a row, an O. Henry Prize story comes from \u003ci\u003eOne Story\u003c\/i\u003e, the innovative and successful  dream of two young women. Another story is from \u003ci\u003eNoon\u003c\/i\u003e, an annual whose imaginative  writing isn’t widely known to the reading public. Two stories in our collection come  from \u003ci\u003eManoa\u003c\/i\u003e, an especially handsome quarterly, which for two decades has engaged in  cross-cultural publication of writers from Asia and North America.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLiterary magazines  and writers need an active readership. If you admire the writers in this year’s \u003ci\u003eO.  Henry\u003c\/i\u003e, please keep an eye out for their future work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLaura Furman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAustin, Texas\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305346683109,"sku":"NP9780307276889","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307276889.jpg?v=1767733974","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/o-henry-prize-stories-2007-isbn-9780307276889","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}