The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 by Laura Furman

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 Reviews

• 
  Joseph Lerner

  Interesting how the quality of this annual anthology varies from year to year. Somehow I think it shouldn't. Of the thousands of short stories published annually, the best 20 or so, whoever are the judges, should meet a pretty damn high standard of excellence. This year (2013) the O. Henry Prize Stories are especially good. For one thing, two of the three judges (Edith Pearlman and Jim Shepard) are among my favorite contemporary short story writers (top five?). For another, it's great fun to discover recent stories by authors (Deborah Eisenberg, Kelly Link, Andrea Barrett) I've so admired in the past and whose newer stuff I find hard to come by (because the writers haven't anthologized them yet in their own one-author collections). Also stories I've read the past year and get to reread (Munro's "Leaving Maverley," Joan Silber's "Two Opinions"). And finally (and most gratifyingly), the discovery of new writers, or writers I've never heard of (Polly Rosenwaike, Tash Aw, Derek Palacio) who make me want to rush out and read their other work.
  
  I'm especially grateful that Kelly Link, primarily an sf/fantasy author, is included (again) in a mainstream literary collection. I wish the judges (and series editor Laura Furman) would be more bold in their choices, and include more authors similar in sensibility to Link's. That's my one caveat, and why I've awarded four stars and not five to this anthology.
• 
  Pat Pujolas

  Another fine collection here. Standouts include: Kelly Link's "The Summer People" (a masterful blend of magic and realism), Jamie Quatro's "Sinkhole" (a brilliant introduction to the term sexorcism), and Ayse Papatya Bucak's "The History of Girls" (a short story about girls who are dead or dying in the aftermath of an explosion). Otherwise, Munro writes a Munro story, and everybody else seems to be stuck 30 years in the past.
• 
  Christopher Mattick

  A necessarily diverse collection of short (and not-so-short) stories, all exquisitely crafted. Some resonate; a few do not - early-on there is a preponderance of tales of well-off Manhattanites drowning in ennui. It is, of course, hard to give a damn about them, but the anthology does even-out as it progresses, and includes several stories with genuinely sympathetic characters.
• 
  Iva

  Absolutely great selection of short (and some like Andrea Barrett's novella length) stories. Many of the writers were quite familiar,like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Alice Munro; others were new and unknown to me. I particularly liked the judges observations as well as the author's comments on inspiration and background of their stories.
• 
  Cathy

  A varied collection that took me forever to read because I skipped around, liking some and not others, then setting it down again. By far my favorite in this collection is "The Summer People" by Kelly Link, which is a story at the intersection of two genres, young adult and steampunk. It's about a girl charged with taking care of fairy tenants, who is conflicted by duty and a desire to escape.
• 
  Paul Cockeram

  This is my first time finishing an O. Henry collection, and I noticed some significant differences between the stories in here and those regularly published in another prize anthology, The Best American Fiction. The biggest difference is length. The first four stories in this collection total 105 pages. Add the length of the final story and you have 152 pages. (By contrast, the five stories in the same positions in the 2013 Best American collection total 88 pages.) So O. Henry’s Laura Furman has built a much bigger house here. What has been done with all that extra room?
  
  The pacing in general is much slower. An O. Henry prize story tends to begin a little earlier than a Best American story, and it indulges a few more digressions. These additions might service the setting, allowing some stories to build truly fascinating worlds with lush details. Kelly Link’s “The Summer People” stands out in this regard, bringing to a New England country town the mysticism of faeries. Deborah Eisenberg’s “Your Duck is My Duck” travels from lower class New York City to a playground for the wealthy on a third world island, presenting a simmering native uprising that somehow seems less threatening than the emotional dysfunction of the moneyed husband and wife at the center of the story. Derek Palacio’s “Sugarcane” dramatizes third world corruption in starkly human terms, playing out a conflict between desire, status, and comfort. Alice Munro, on the other hand, continues her project of writing short stories with the scope of novels, somehow covering characters’ entire lives with depth and pathos in a condensed space. But I found one of the collection’s longest pieces, Andrea Barrett’s “The Particles,” to be a page-turning read with a surprisingly quick pace, perhaps because of its parallel narrative covering two different times in its characters’ lives.
  
  Other stories feel very close to the fast-paced, compact style of the Best American Fiction. Jamie Quatro’s “Sinkhole” in particular spares nothing while building a coming-of-age narrative around young love, god, and death. Ann Beattie’s “Anecdotes” is another example of the contemporary trend toward efficiency, evincing her customary minimalist restraint, packing three lives and a host of subtle conflicts within mother/daughter relationships into a few pages. Polly Rosenwaike's "White Carnations" covers similar ground, this time examining the maternal bonds between unrelated women. Another good mother/daughter story, which reverses the usual roles due to a grave illness, was L. Annette Binder's sorrowful "Lay My Head."
  
  But the longer stories that don't devote themselves to setting tend to spend their leisure time on character, focusing particularly upon our struggle to love each other despite the jagged pieces of our brokenness that keep getting in the way. Donald Antrim’s “He Knew” shows two flawed, beautiful people making a marriage out of their anxieties, paranoia, and mounting despair. Another tale of love's hazards is Samar Farah Fitzgerald's "Where Do You Go?", in which the challenges come from an apparent mismatch of personalities in the husband and wife, along with a conspicuous absence of good roll models. Asako Serizawa’s “The Visitor” blends love, lust, and grief in a visit between two strangers connected by shared loss and humiliation. Joan Silber's "Two Opinions" delivers a liberated woman's tale of marriage and love, and the love to be found beyond the boundaries of marriage. Another story, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala'a "Aphrodisiac," also examines infidelity in a morally strict country, while incorporating hints of alchemy at work in illicit seduction. Less emotionally charged is George McCormick's "The Mexican," a modernist story devoted to psychological realism and spare prose, whose feelings lurk in the background, behind the eerie imagery. Tash Aw's "Sail" practices a similar emotional restraint to achieve a much more chilling insight into the psyche of its apparently sympathetic narrator.
  
  A few stories depart from convention, folding magical elements into the mix or experimenting with form. The collection's most experimental venture is Melinda Moustakis' "They Find the Drowned," a catalogue of life in Alaska covering the range of personalities attracted to it and a full account of the hazards that typically greet them. I enjoyed that story and was charmed by how well its vignettes came together into a coherent narrative. On the other hand, Ayse Papatya Bucak’s “The History of Girls” examines the aftermath of a fatal gas explosion in a girls’ boarding school, letting the narrator speak with the ghosts of her classmates as she lies buried in rubble, waiting for rescue.
  
  Ultimately, I'm satisfied with this collection and have already purchased the 2012 edition. But I have also learned a lesson: the O. Henry prize doesn't strictly keep to Poe's dictum that a short story be readable in a single sitting--frequently, a sitting-and-a-half is required. To the credit of the editor and the prize jury, the extra investment of time is almost always handsomely rewarded.
• 
  Ci

  I did not read all of the stories, excluding some due to subject matters or other personal reasons. For the rest, I found this year's collection of excellent quality and quite a few surprises. It gives me more exposure to authors I did not know before. Here are some of my story notes:
  
  Your duck is my duck. Eisenberg.
  
  A taut and unsentimental view of the ruins of rich meaningless, either in the lives of Ray and Christa, the rich hosts, their attendants, or the natural world corrupted by such heartless exploitation for pleasure only. The puppet show by Amos is a story along the biblical vein. The superficial twang of “your duck is my duck” indicates the mockery of any true sharing of lives or empathy. An excellent tale.
  
  Sugarcane. Palacio.
  
  A Cuban doctor and his apprentice negotiated the tough life in rural Cuban. Sugar serves the metaphor for the sweetness of transitory bodily pleasure. An excellent story about empathy and what accounts as a good men in an inhospitable and unchanging world.
  
  Summer people.
  
  A strange tale started mundanely but quickly became a tale of enchantment and various forms imprisonments. Father and daughter, mother and daughter, school friends, caretaker and summer people, reality and magic, escape and longing for home.
  
  Leaving Maverly. Munro
  
  A main thread through the steady and enriched marriage of Ray and Isabella, stitched in the in and out of Leah who has sought many changes. One is steady love and care through difficult times, another a hopping through moods and opportunities. A monochromatic tale on the shaded gray side.
  
  White Carnations. Rosenwaike
  
  A story about mother/daughter relationships. Rather conventional.
  
  Lay my head. Binder.
  
  A quietly brave and dignified story meditating on untimely death, the returning to non-being. No religious tone, but a somber and stoic one.
  
  He Knew. Antrim.
  
  A New York tale of a well-to-do couple tethering to each other in desperations. Manifested as dependency, manic, neurosis, tenderness and creatural comforts, the barren yet squalid love life of the urban rich. Not exceptionally insightful. Saul Bellow has done it in much higher level in his novels about New York, particularly the “Samler’s Planet”.
  
  
  Where Do you Go. Fitzgerald.
  
  A young couple live among the older ones after shedding off their passing youth. The young woman confronted the approaching death among the elder while the young man does not. In the end, they converged their despair and comforts in a fantasy of fertility. Well-written.
  
  Aphrodisiac. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
  
  What a tale! The fetid fecundity, the urine-and-milk femininity corrupted in retro-graded possession and histrionics. The rational and western-educated mind did not prevent our protagonist to break the magic of such revolting aphrodisiac, the primal call from the depth of carnal control and possession, against all reason, taste and logic. One must be aware the lurking darkness echoing such primative magic. One laughs at the “ball and chain” as pale analogy. An excellent story; sadly the author passed away in April 2013. (I should read some of work; I did not know her fame before).
  
  Sinkhole, Quatro
  
  A skillfully weaved tale about a teenage boy and a girl coping with their individual fear and physical damages. In the atmosphere of individual’s sinkhole, the author writes about the impersonated God characters in the Camp. I don’t know if it is a surrealistic touch or it is actually happening in summer camps, yet such touches give embodiment of the kind of God that one lives in real life. In reaching out to each other, they both tumbled free from their fears. It is a wonderful tale.
  
  
  
• 
  Elijah

  This book and I did not get along. I'd really like to give it a 2-2.5, but in order to keep myself honest I gave each story a rating as I finished it, and the average was closer to 3.
  
  I am coming to realize that I just don't enjoy mainstream fiction 95% of the time, particularly contemporary mainstream fiction with no hints of the fantastic whatsoever.
  
  Most of the stories in this collection were not, in my opinion, worthy of a prize, much less one names after O. Henry. A few stood out as better, or at least more enjoyable, than the rest, and one I would even read again multiple times. The best stories in this collection, in my estimation, were Kelly Link's "The Summer People," Annette Binder's "Lay My Head," and Ayse Papatya Bucak's "The History of Girls" (this last being the one I would read multiple times).
  
  Other than those, the stories in here are very pedestrian "my life sucks" or, in the case of the third person narrations, "their lives suck" kind of stories that bore me to no end. Alice Munro, an author I've never been able to enjoy, almost turned me around with her story "Leaving Maverley," which left her usual boring subjects alone for the first half to two thirds of the story before turning around and giving me exactly what I've come to expect from her stories.
  
  I think I'll stick to speculative fiction now, thanks.
• 
  Ms. Reader

  I received this book from Goodread Givaways. It contains a very fine collection of short stories selected by judges that have a very talented eye for talented writing. Several of them I found interesting, amusing, and/or entertaining to read. Other's were boring, bland, and easily forgotten. I was actually a little disappointed by the handful of short stories that didn't catch my attention or liking, considering the amount of talent that should be on these pages. I'm not necessarily a picky reader, but many of these were not well-suited for me.
• 
  Tracy

  It's always really difficult to rate a collection. There are stories that I really love and others that are not quite my cup of tea. This collection has a number of really good pieces that I enjoyed reading. By far, my favorite is Ayse Papatya Bucak's "The History of Girls." Every line is powerful. The images...wow!! The subject matter is painful but she handles it with such fierce imagery and care. The entire time reading the piece, I knew I was in expert hands. I look forward to reading more from Bucak.
• 
  Benjamin Obler

  Got this for Christmas. More eclectic than the typical Best American annual. Not all of the stories manage to hold my interest. A nice mix of a few familiar names--Eisenberg, Beattie, Antrim--and fresh ones. Halfway through, and Eisenberg's is my favorite. One of the best features of an anthology like this, for a writer, is the index of Publications Submitted at the back, which provides an up-to-date snapshot of journals publishing top stories. To my surprise, several are not listed in Duotrope.com.
• 
  Paul Secor

  About what I expected from an anthology like this one: several stories that I enjoyed - Asako Serizawa, Ann Beattie, Alice Munro, Andrea Barrett - a few that were ok, and a bunch that were forgettable.
  Reading an essay by one of the O. Henry jurors, I came across the word/expression, "Eisenberg-y". My first thought was that I had no idea the this expression existed. My next thought was, is there any reason for this expression to exist?, and was at a complete loss to come up with any reason.
• 
  John Ollerton

  I really enjoyed this compilation. This was my first venture into the O Henry prize short stories. The winning short stories are picked from literary magazines in Canada and the U.S. By picked judges blind reading. I think my favourite was the Summer People being one of the first "magic realism" stories I've really enjoyed.
  If you like short stories I really recommend dipping into one of the annual O Henry books.
• 
  Kara

  As with any anthology, I liked some authors and stories better than others, but overall this collection is an enjoyable compilation of contemporary short story writers. There's a pretty good mix of authors of different genders and ethnicities, which is always appreciated. I also liked the balance of early career vs. more well-known writers — there's a piece by Alice Munro (!!) as well as the very first published short story from another author, Derek Palacio.
• 
  Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance

  There is something refreshing about reading a good book of short stories. It is different than reading a book of fiction and different from reading a book of nonfiction. Like eating a tray of delicious and varied horderves. You may not like every single story but with this many to choose from and with this great variety and quality, you will enjoy a lot.
  
• 
  Jennifer

  I don't love anthologies and this was one of the only ones I've ever finished. Three stories particularly stood out to me: "The Summer People" by Kelly Link; "Sinkhole" by Jamie Quatro; and "The History of Girls" by Ayse Papatya Bucak. I also enjoyed the notes from the authors on the writing of their stories, something I always wonder about.
• 
  Alex Toney

  Though this year's collection seems to get off to a slow start, the quality of the selected stories is still mind-boggling. Difficult to overstate the quality of writing. Exciting new voices and wonderful pieces from cherished old hats. If you love reading short stories, have ever thought about reading short stories, or even hate short stories, this is the book for you. Recommend.
• 
  Libby

  I wanted to like this collection more than I did, especially as it was a gift from an old and dear friend, but I frankly found most of the stories tedious and boring. My favorite stories were by Donald Antrim, Alice Munro, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (all previously published in The New Yorker).
• 
  Shanna

  I always enjoy reflecting on the best short stories of the year. In this collection, White Carnations and He Knew shined, while They Find the Drowned, Aphrodisiac and The Visitor left a bit to be desired.
• 
  AJ Nolan

  As with all anthologies, even those of prize winners, some are fantastic and some are kind of eh. But most are fantastic. Munro's Leaving Maverly is gorgeous, which is why I used this O.Henry rather than the new one for my Craft of Fiction students.
• 
  Alexanne Levengood

  I loved this collection SO so much, even more than I thought I might. Full of powerful and delightful stories. (Also wonderful that Alice Munro won the Nobel right before I got to her story.)
• 
  Megan

  Not one of my favorite O. Henry Collections-there were several stories I didn't finish. My favorites were "The Summer People", "Sinkhole" and "Sugarcane".
• 
  Jan

  Solid, unsurprisingly. Some were a bit pretentious but there were some gems, as well.
• 
  Teresa

  the summer people was brilliant !
• 
  Meghan

  There are some gems in this collection, but also several that I just didn't like. A matter of taste, of course. I love this series regardless.
• 
  Erin

  Great collection of short fiction. I can't recommend "The Summer People" by Kelly Link enough.
• 
  Dan Vinson

  Loved the Donald Antrim, Ann Beattie, and Deborah Eisenberg stories. I can't wait for Antrim's first story collection this fall!