The Story Prize Longlist for Story Collections Published in 2024

At The Story Prize we release a longlist of notable short story collections published in the previous year a few weeks after we announce our shortlist of three finalists. That list of 16 books, plus the three finalists and The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner (The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck), combine to highlight 20 short story collections. In 2024, The Story Prize received as entries 107 books published by 82 different publishers or imprints. Here are the books on our longlist: 

        •  Ghostroots by 'Pemi Aguda (W.W. Norton & Company) 
        •  How to Get Along Without Me by Kate Axelrod (Clash Books) 
        •  Ricky by Whitney Collins (Sarabande Books)
        •  Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press)
        •  Bugsy by Rafael Frumkin (Simon & Schuster)
        •  The Best That You Can You Do by Amina Gautier (Soft Skull)
        •  The Body Farm by Abby Geni (Counterpoint Press)
        •  Practice for Becoming a Ghost by Patrick Thomas Henry (Susquehanna
        Univ. Press)
        •  The Goodbye Process by Mary Jones (Zibby Books)
        •  How It Works Out by Myriam Lacroix (The Overlook Press)
        •  Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima (Tor)
        •  Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by Genarose Nethercott (Vintage Books)
        •  How to Make Your Mother Cry by Sejal Shah (West Virginia Univ. Press)
        •  Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (William Morrow)
        •  Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia (Tin House)
        •  Beautiful Days by Zach Williams (Doubleday)

Altogether, we received more worthwhile books than we could possibly mention without making our longlist a too-long-list, and it was difficult to narrow down the choices. It takes us a while to accomplish this because we do a fair amount of rereading. As always, we believe that anyone who writes and publishes a short story collection has overcome difficult obstacles, has accomplished something significant, and deserves enormous credit.  

We'll announce the 21st winner of The Story Prize on March 25 at a private event featuring readings by and interviews with the three finalists—Fiona McFarlane, Ruben ReyesJr., and Jessi Jezewska Stevens. Before then, we'll provide a link to watch the program live or online in the days that follow the announcement of the winner.

The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck Is The Story Prize Spotlight Award Winner

In addition to naming three finalists each year, we also present The Story Prize Spotlight Award to a collection of exceptional merit. Selected books can be promising works by first-time authors, collections in alternative formats, or works that demonstrate an unusual perspective on the writer's craft. The award includes a prize of $1,000. 

We're pleased to announce that the winner for books published in 2024 is The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck, published by Viking. These twelve inventive stories, perfectly executed, stood out from the pack. Shattuck takes an original approach to connecting the stories—all set in New England and ranging in time from 1796 to the present—ordering them according to a traditional eighteenth-century rhyme scheme, with the first and last stories framing five other matched pairs and the collection as a whole.

Ben Shattuck is the author of Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, which was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of Spring, a New York Times Best Book of Summer, a New England Indie Bestseller, and was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife and daughter on the coast of Massachusetts, where he owns and runs the oldest general store in America, built in 1793. He is also the director and founder of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency.

© Andreas Burgess

 This is the 13th time we've given out The Story Prize Spotlight Award. The 12 previous winners were: Drifting House by Krys Lee, Byzantium by Ben Stroud, Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor, Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar, Subcortical by Lee Conell, Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy, The Trojan War Museum by Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Inheritors by Asako Serizawaand, Born Into This by Adam Thompson, God's Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu and, most recently, The Goth House Experiment by SJ Sindu. 

You can find links to all thirteen books, including Shattuck's, on Bookshop, in the list Winners of The Story Prize Spotlight Award.

We'll announce the winner of The Story Prize on March 25 at a private event, which we'll live stream, featuring readings by and interviews with the three finalists: Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr., and Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. And soon we'll post a long list of short story collections published in 2024.

The 2024/25 Story Prize Finalists Are Fiona McFarlane, Ruben Reyes Jr., and Jessi Jezewska Stevens

The Story Prize, now in its 21st year, is pleased to honor as its finalists three outstanding short story collections chosen from 107 submissions representing 82 different publishers or imprints. Although it's no easy task to narrow the list down to three books, these collections particularly stood out for their originality in concept and execution.

The finalists are: 

• Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr. (Mariner Books)
• Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens (And Other Stories)

Highway Thirteen portrays moments in the lives of characters peripherally connected to an Australian serial killer—from a next door neighbor to an actor playing the killer in a limited TV series to a retired police officer. There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven offers formally inventive narratives contemplating and riffing on aspects of Central American migration to the U.S. Ghost Pains provides a series of precisely written and keenly observed stories about characters in Europe and America facing quotidian predicaments in a time of cultural dissonance.

We'll announce the winner of The Story Prize on the evening of Tuesday, March 25, at a private event featuring readings by and interviews with finalists McFarlane, Reyes, and Stevens. The top prize is $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The runners-up will each receive $5,000. We plan to live-stream the event starting at 7:30 p.m. and will post a link before then and the video in the days that follow. 

Story Prize Founder Julie Lindsey and Director Larry Dark selected the finalists. These three independent judges will determine the winner:

• Writer and editor Elliott Holt;
• Writer Maurice Carlos Ruffin; and
• Bookseller Lucy Yu

In the weeks ahead, we'll announce this year's winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award. We'll also publish a longlist of other exceptional collections we read last year. You can find a complete list of the story collections we received in 2024 on Bookshop.org. 

Video of The Story Prize Event: Yiyun Li, Bennett Sims, and Paul Yoon (winner)—plus 20th Anniversary Highlights

Here's the edited video of The Story Prize event held on March 26, 2024. It begins with highlights from the first 19 years of the award.

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About The Hive and the Honey by Story Prize Winner Paul Yoon

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they write citations for their top choices. This year's judges were critic and writer Merve Emre, librarian Allison Escoto, and writer Tania James. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge. Here's what the judges had to say about The Hive and the Honey by Yiyun Li: 

“The seven stories in The Hive and the Honey are uncanny tales of loss and longing. A mother loses a child. A child loses a father. One man loses his home. Another loses his sense of time. Each loss is experienced by the character as a private or secluded grief, but Paul Yoon excavates grief's historic dimensions, revealing the long-lived aftershocks of the Korean War. The genius of the collection lies in its steadiness of style—Yoon's prose is quiet and fine and, at times, painfully precise—and its variety of genre. Domestic realism sits alongside folk tales, ghost stories, and imperial histories. The present is haunted by the past, and the past is violently and beautifully summoned in the present.” 

“The Hive and The Honey is a collection of astonishing breadth, offering a panoramic portrait of Korean diaspora, of lives rescued from the margins of history. Here we encounter a samurai tasked with protecting an orphan boy; a haunted Korean settlement in Far East Russia; men and women fleeing brutal pasts, seeking connection or safety. And yet these characters are more elusive than can be summarized. They reveal themselves most acutely through intimate gestures: a girl inviting a bee to her teacup, a kid licking at the blood from his own broken nose, a man coming home from war with vegetable seeds tucked into his chest pocket. Such moments infuse the ordinary with lasting wonder and could only be achieved by a writer as patient, curious, and masterful as Paul Yoon.”

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they write citations for their top choices. This year's judges were critic and writer Merve Emre, librarian Allison Escoto, and writer Tania James. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge. Here's what the judges had to say about Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li: 

“Profound loss and its aftermath permeate this elegant collection of stories by a truly gifted writer. The people in these captivating stories are all moving through grief: a woman on a solo trip to Europe after the death of her child. A temporary nanny guides a new, dubious mother through the turbulence of the early days of motherhood, knowing she will have to leave the baby to an uncertain fate. An elderly dying professor reminisces about the small but meaningful moments of her life as her caretaker looks back on the events that guided her to this moment in her life. These characters are indelible, the quiet moments of their lives described through beautiful language. They lead lives that are both compelling and relatable; they stay with you long after you leave their story.”

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they write citations for their top choices. This year's judges were critic and writer Merve Emre, librarian Allison Escoto, and writer Tania James. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge. Here's what the judges had to say about Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims: 

“Bennett Sims is an original. There are no other stories like the stories in Other Minds and Other Stories (except perhaps those in his previous collection). The book amounts to an intense and artful exploration of the difficulty of truly understanding other minds, and as such also serves as a deep dive into the question of individual identity, of the mind that is seeking to understand. Some of the stories seem to be as much essays or philosophical explorations as they are fiction and unfurl via a single, long unbroken paragraph, a form that echoes the work of the great W.G. Sebald. Sims is extremely erudite with an expansive vocabulary, but his choice of words never seems strained. Other Minds is a collection that challenges the reader but also offers satisfactions comparable to cracking a code or solving a puzzle. When you get it, you get it. These stories invite you to engage, to join the enquiry—and they never condescend. It is an impressive high-wire act, a reading experience unlike any other.”