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| Photo by Beowulf Sheehan |
When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Anthony Doerr, Rita Mead, and Kathryn Schulz. 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 Story Prize judges had to say about Charles Baxter's
There's Something I Want You to Do:
“There’s a strange and very appealing unpredictability to Baxter’s imagination. He excels at menace, and he executes amazing leaps in time in these stories, like a DVD skipping forward through whole scenes. Best of all, he wrestles with huge stuff: faith, abortion, love, aging, kindness, the countervailing and intertwined forces of beauty and death. Elijah is a wonderful character: hungry, kind, and transcendent. I loved being in his company, and watching him reappear from time to time in the stories. The strong connections between and among stories amplify the significance of each profound and profane moment, all of which become part of a larger canvas of human experience.”
