We received 129 short story collections in 2014, the most ever entered for The Story Prize in a single year. Beyond the three finalists and the winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award, here's a long list of some other collections that particularly stood out for us:
- The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol (W.W. Norton)
- The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Pitiful Criminals by Greg Bottoms (Counterpoint)
- Man V. Nature by Diane Cook (Harper Torch)
- Can't and Won't by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lanterns by Stuart Dybek (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- The Wilds by Julia Elliott (Tin House Books)
- Let Me Be Frank with You by Richard Ford (Ecco)
- American Innovations by Rivka Galchen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Problems with People by David Guterson (Alfred A. Knopf)
- All the Rage by A.L. Kennedy (Little A/New Harvest)
- Redeployment by Phil Klay (Penguin Press)
- See You in Paradise by J. Robert Lennon (Graywolf Press)
- Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus (Alfred A. Knopf)
- Funny Once by Antonya Nelson (Bloomsbury)
- The Gurkha's Daughter by Prajwal Parajuly (Quercas)
- Flings by Justin Taylor (HarperCollins)
We publish our long list after our short list of finalists because in some ways it's even more difficult to make these choices. We read many other worthwhile collections, but to keep the list at a somewhat reasonable length, we had to draw a line somewhere. Every author who published a short story collection in 2014 deserves a great deal of credit, and at least a dozen other books we read could easily have made this list.
