Bookverdict.com

Share On

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Google Plus

Add to My List

Prize Stories 1998 (Prize Stories (O Henry Awards))

By Dark, Larry & Barrett, Andrea

Publishers Summary:
Every year since 1918, the editors of the O. Henry Awards have selected the best of the previous year's short fiction. The 1998 anthology contains 20 prizewinning stories, three of which have been specially honored by jurors Andrea Barrett, Mary Gaitskill, and Rick Moody. It's a fascinating and diverse collection, more adventurous than its rival, Best American Short Stories , but like that series it provides an edifying look at the state of American short fiction. As it turns out, rumors of the form's death have been greatly exaggerated. For starters, we have first prize winner Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are the Only People Here"--the harrowing but profoundly unsentimental story of a mother whose baby is diagnosed with cancer. Second prize goes to Stephen Millhauser's creepy little fable "The Knife Thrower," about a traveling showman whose performance mixes violence, eroticism, and art, and third to Canadian master Alice Munro's dry-eyed account of a young woman leaving her marriage, "The Children Stay." These stories have little in common but their reluctance to take either fiction or experience secondhand. They hold the world up to us, strange and new; they transgress. By turns magical and troubling, the best short stories leave readers in a state much like that of the knife thrower's appalled but fascinated audience: "Long and loud we applauded, as she bowed and held aloft the glittering knife, assuring us, in that way, that she was wounded but well, or well-wounded; and we didn't know whether we were applauding her wellness or her wound, or the touch of the master, who had crossed the line, who had carried us, safely, it appeared, into the realm of forbidden things."

 Not Rated. Be the first to rate this product!

ISBN

978-0-38548-958-4

Publisher

Anchor