The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Read online

  SERIES EDITORS

  2003– Laura Furman

  1997–2002 Larry Dark

  1967–1996 William Abrahams

  1961–1966 Richard Poirier

  1960 Mary Stegner

  1954–1959 Paul Engle

  1941–1951 Herschel Bricknell

  1933–1940 Harry Hansen

  1919–1932 Blanche Colton Williams

  PAST JURORS

  2017 David Bradley, Elizabeth McCracken, Brad Watson

  2016 Molly Antopol, Peter Cameron, Lionel Shriver

  2015 Tessa Hadley, Kristen Iskandrian, Michael Parke

  2014 Tash Aw, James Lasdun, Joan Silber

  2013 Lauren Groff, Edith Pearlman, Jim Shepard

  2012 Mary Gaitskill, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Ron Rash

  2011 A. M. Homes, Manuel Muñoz, Christine Schutt

  2010 Junot Díaz, Paula Fox, Yiyun Li

  2009 A. S. Byatt, Anthony Doerr, Tim O’Brien

  2008 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Leavitt, David Means

  2007 Charles D’Ambrosio, Ursula K. Le Guin, Lily Tuck

  2006 Kevin Brockmeier, Francine Prose, Colm Toíbín

  2005 Cristina García, Ann Patchett, Richard Russo

  2003 Jennifer Egan, David Guterson, Diane Johnson

  2002 Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates, Colson Whitehead

  2001 Michael Chabon, Mary Gordon, Mona Simpson

  2000 Michael Cunningham, Pam Houston, George Saunders

  1999 Sherman Alexie, Stephen King, Lorrie Moore

  1998 Andrea Barrett, Mary Gaitskill, Rick Moody

  1997 Louise Erdrich, Thom Jones, David Foster Wallace

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House LLC

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by Laura Furman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Permissions appear on this page.

  Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525436584

  Ebook ISBN 9780525436591

  Cover design by Mark Abrams

  www.anchorbooks.com

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  For Margaret Perry

  As you set out for Ithaka

  The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 reflects the integrity, patience, and editorial skill of Diana Secker Tesdell as well as Anchor’s art, production, digital, and publicity departments. The series editor thanks each and every person involved in making this book.

  The editorial assistants for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 were Fatima Kola and Darri Farr. We worked together in harmony and with respect for our differences in taste. Our conversations were a great pleasure.

  The Department of English of the University of Texas at Austin gives The O. Henry Prize Stories a home and research libraries beyond compare and, with the Michener Center and the New Writers Project, provides support for the editorial assistants. The series editor thanks the university and especially Professor Elizabeth Cullingford.

  —Laura Furman

  Publisher’s Note

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES

  Many readers have come to love the short story through the simple characters, easy narrative voice and humor, and compelling plotting in the work of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), best known as O. Henry. His surprise endings entertain readers, including those back for a second, third, or fourth look. Even now one can say “Gift of the Magi” in a conversation about a love affair or marriage, and almost any literate person will know what is meant. It’s hard to think of many other American writers whose work has been so incorporated into our national shorthand.

  O. Henry was a newspaperman, skilled at hiding from his editors at deadline. A prolific writer, he wrote to make a living and to make sense of his life. He spent his childhood in Greensboro, North Carolina, his adolescence and young manhood in Texas, and his mature years in New York City. In between Texas and New York, he served out a prison sentence for bank fraud in Columbus, Ohio. Accounts of the origin of his pen name vary: one story dates from his days in Austin, where he was said to call the wandering family cat “Oh! Henry!”; another states that the name was inspired by the captain of the guard at the Ohio State Penitentiary, Orrin Henry.

  Porter had devoted friends, and it’s not hard to see why. He was charming and had an attractively gallant attitude. He drank too much and neglected his health, which caused his friends concern. He was often short of money; in a letter to a friend asking for a loan of $15 (his banker was out of town, he wrote), Porter added a postscript: “If it isn’t convenient, I’ll love you just the same.” His banker was unavailable most of Porter’s life. His sense of humor was always with him.

  Reportedly, Porter’s last words were from a popular song: “Turn up the light, for I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

  * * *

  —

  Eight years after O. Henry’s death, in April 1918, the Twilight Club (founded in 1883 and later known as the Society of Arts and Sciences) held a dinner in his honor at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. His friends remembered him so enthusiastically that a group of them met at the Biltmore Hotel in December of that year to establish some kind of memorial to him. They decided to award annual prizes in his name for short-story writers, and they formed a committee of award to read the short stories published in a year and to pick the winners. In the words of Blanche Colton Williams (1879–1944), the first of the nine series editors, the memorial was intended to “strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.”

  Doubleday, Page & Company was chosen to publish the first volume, O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories 1919. In 1927, the society sold all rights to the annual collection to Doubleday, Doran & Company. Doubleday published The O. Henry Prize Stories, as it came to be known, in hardcover, and from 1984 to 1996 its subsidiary, Anchor Books, published it simultaneously in paperback. Since 1997, The O. Henry Prize Stories has been published as an original Anchor Books paperback.

  HOW THE STORIES ARE CHOSEN

  All stories originally written in the English language and published in an American or Canadian periodical are eligible for consideration. Individual stories may not be nominated; magazines must submit the year’s issues in their entirety by June 1. Editors are invited to submit online fiction for consideration. Such submissions must be sent to the series editor in hard copy. (Please see this page, and www.ohenryprizestories.com, for details.)

  As of 2003, the series editor chooses the twenty O. Henry Prize Stories, and each year three writers distinguished for their fiction are as
ked to be jurors and to evaluate the entire collection and write an appreciation of the story they most admire. These three writers receive the twenty prize stories in manuscript form with no identification of author or publication. The jurors make their choices independent of each other and the series editor.

  The goal of The O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.

  To Gina Berriault (1926–1999)

  Gina Berriault is often called a “writer’s writer,” and one critic called her sentences “jewel-box perfect.” Such praise is heartfelt and true, yet it makes Berriault’s work sound dull and virtuous. In truth, virtue is the last thing Berriault’s stories care about, and they are anything but dull.

  In the short story, the writing is everything. Too much style, too many leaps in language for the fun of it, and the story deflates. Berriault’s prose immediately awakens you, but if you look back to find out how she pulled you into her story, there’s nothing obvious to tell you how she did it.

  The opening of “Bastille Day,” from her collection The Infinite Passion of Expectation, lures you in but waits to stop your heart until the very end. It begins at one in the morning in San Francisco when Teresa reaches San Gotardo, “the last bar on her round of bars this night of her fortieth birthday, July 14, 1970.” Teresa is on an odyssey, a quest to find what it means to be forty. Others insist that the number has meaning, but “all her life, she’d refused to conform to popular delusions. With her, the sense of mortality hadn’t waited to take her by surprise at forty. It had been with her always, a seventh sense, along with the absolute preciousness of life, hers and everybody’s.”

  Teresa’s odyssey differs from the Homeric original. For one thing, she’s not trying to get home. (If anything she’s running away from home, and her mate, Ralph, if only for a night.) The war in the background of the story is the Vietnam War, not the Trojan one. And in her description of herself, Teresa is neither noble nor heroic, nor does she encounter on her journey lotus-eaters, Sirens, or an angry goddess who turns men into swine.

  Instead, the bar she enters is full of regulars, just as Teresa expected, and some strangers. All the characters—even the unnamed, the drunk, the foolish—are distinct and important, especially to themselves, evoking in their particularity Teresa’s sense of how precious life is. There is a trio of women who especially intrigue her. A beautiful girl, whom Teresa names the fairy-tale woman, reminds her of being young and foolish, in a glad way. “A girl out of a fairy tale after she had come alive and become a woman and lost some teeth but not yet all her beauty.” An old woman dances to Hawaiian music. A woman “neatly dressed in a gray suit and hat, her pumps dangling from her toes,” sits at the bar spewing know-it-all reminiscences of her journalism career, laced with casual racist slurs.

  A fight breaks out and is ended by a man with a quiet authority, whom Teresa recognizes. She knew this man, Mayer, from left-wing meetings, from a time when she, like the woman at the bar, thought she knew everything. He reminds her of her warm-fleshed youth. “She wondered if she had looked at him with desire, in the past. She had felt desire toward a number of men in that time when they had all conferred over how to right the world. Once in that time she might have made love with him in a dream.”

  The half-remembered possibility of desire stands in contrast to her feelings about Ralph, who, she explains later to Mayer, followed his own lengthy odyssey to becoming a professor. “ ‘Well, first it was going to be Philosophy. He switched over to Economics and then he switched over to Modern European History. We felt it was all right for him to take so long. I had jobs. Anyway, I always felt he was like the favorite child of Time.’ ” She tells Mayer about their radical friends who became prosperous, who were blessed by Time: “ ‘They just had to wait to get over their bleeding heart phase, if you know what I mean.’ ” Teresa does not see herself as a favorite child of Time. Time has gotten the best of her.

  The fairy-tale woman, as it turns out, hasn’t quite escaped either. She asks Teresa to walk home with her to show her guardian, a wealthy older man, that she wasn’t out with a man. In the glimpse Berriault gives us, he is cold and frightening, and almost imperial. After the fairy-tale woman goes to him, Teresa and Mayer keep walking, until she realizes that it is now too late to leave the city.

  “ ‘I can’t make it home,’ she said. ‘Over the bridge to Berkeley and another bus stop in the heart of darkness. Nothing’s running this time of night. Or far between. I think I’m scared.’ ” She is scared, tired, far from home, and wanting someone else to take over. Her fortieth birthday is ending with her acting like a child.

  Mayer takes her to his apartment. Teresa knows he wishes she weren’t there. He’s living in neat but reduced circumstances, just separated from his wife. They end up in bed, Teresa under the covers, Mayer on top.

  “She listened to his breath change as he fell asleep. She heard his breath take over for him and, in that secretive way the sleeper knows nothing about, carry on his life.” The word secretive is stunning here. Berriault emphasizes that the sleeper doesn’t know the secret and neither will Teresa.

  Often, short stories end on a rising note, with a new and abstract image that illuminates the story. Gina Berriault’s endings are more often than not devastating, without a rising note to be heard. “Bastille Day” ends with Teresa once more alone, really alone, though inches from another person. Forty has brought her different intimations of her own mortality than she’s had before.

  —Laura Furman

  Austin, Texas

  Contents

  Cover

  Series Editors and Past Jurors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Editor’s Note

  Publisher’s Note

  To Gina Berriault (1926–1999)

  Introduction

  Laura Furman, Series Editor

  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, Kenyon Review

  We Keep Them Anyway

  Stephanie A. Vega, The Threepenny Review

  Solstice

  Anne Enright, The New Yorker

  Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

  The Jurors on Their Favorites

  Fiona McFarlane on “The Tomb of Wrestling” by Jo Ann Beard

  Ottessa Moshfegh on “Counterblast” by Marjorie Celona

  Elizabeth Tallent on “The Tomb of Wrestling” by Jo Ann Beard

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bsp; Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

  The Writers on Their Work

  Publications Submitted

  Permissions

  Introduction

  The subject matter of the twenty stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 is so varied that even naming it feels reductive: a violent home invasion, an illiterate writer of letters from the dead, a retrospective homage to a failed marriage, an inconspicuous man in a very small town who bears witness to the great world’s horrors.

  It becomes second nature for passionate readers to identify and consider the elements of fiction: plot, language, characters, setting. Subject matter seems like the most obvious one yet is perhaps the least important in the long run. While an interesting subject might initially attract readers, it won’t keep them there unless the formal elements are in balance.

  For the author, subject matter is more complicated. Each element of a story can seem to have its own notion of its importance, so that the writer often feels in control of nothing. Add to this the fact that a writer can start with one idea of what the story is about and end by realizing that it’s about something else entirely. Many authors say that they write to understand their own lives, so that even when a writer thinks she’s creating a unique, completely invented character, she isn’t surprised to recognize someone she knows lurking in the portrait—or even herself.

  Nothing matters in the end except the story itself.

  After you have completed a story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018, you might find you have two different answers to the questions “What is the subject matter?” and “What is the heart of the story?” And if you turn to “Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018,” you can see what answers the authors themselves have to offer.