Video: The Story Prize Event on March 8 at The New School with Finalists Anna Noyes and Helen Maryles Shankman and Winner Rick Bass

Here's the video of The Story Prize event on March 8 at The New School. That night, the three finalists—Rick Bass, Anna Noyes, and Helen Maryles Shankman—read from and discussed their work on-stage. And at the culmination of the event, we announced the winner for books published in 2016: Rick Bass's For a Little While.

(Real) News About The Story Prize Event

Finalists Rick Bass, Helen Maryles Shankman, and Anna Noyes
(photo @ Beowulf Sheehan)

Here are links to some of the news coverage that The Story Prize event on March 8 at The New School has garnered—none of it fake.

The San Francisco Chronicle
Library Journal
Poets & Writers

Shelf Awareness

Publishers Weekly
Associated Press

That night, we announced Rick Bass's For a Little While as the winner for books published in 2016. He received $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The other two finalists, Anna Noyes for Goodnight, Beautiful Women and Helen Maryles Shankman for They Were Like Family to Me, each received $5,000.

What the Judges Had to Say About Helen Maryles Shankman's They Were Like Family to Me

© Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Harold Augenbraum, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Daniel Goldin. 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.

“The stories in They Were Like Family to Me are connected around the Polish town of Włodawa, which the Nazis occupied during World War II. The stories dance around Reich Regional Commissioner Reinhart, the bureaucrat who has a taste for the finer things and is willing to protect his most talented Jews. The author weaves in Jewish folktales, making them seem like family legends. Several of the incidents, like the merchants forced to do jumping jacks for the amusement of Nazi guards, appear in several of the stories. And minor characters in one story take center stage in the other. There’s no question that Helen Maryles Shankman had my attention in the first story, when the brutal Nazi officer Max Haas hires a Jewish man to paint his apartment, only to realize the man is the illustrator of his child’s favorite children’s book. At one point, I gasped and had to talk about the story to just about anyone I came in contact with for the rest of the day. I couldn’t help it. And I loved the classic way that the Reinhart character plays at the periphery of so many stories before we finally get his perspective.”

What the Judges Had to Say About Anna Noyes's Goodnight Beautiful Women

© Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Harold Augenbraum, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Daniel Goldin. 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.

"All the women in this book are beautiful, even when they aren’t. In their femaleness, they so overwhelm the men that you can almost smell and touch and hear their yearning, their disappointment, their recognition that “it will be all right” (in most cases) even when it probably won’t. As with the great mistresses of the short story—Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro—each story is structured to invisibilize the structure itself, so that as a reader you end up drinking in a series of raw feelings hung terribly on the balloon structure of the Goodnight, Beautiful Women’s home."

What the Judges Had to Say About Rick Bass's For a Little While, Winner of The Story Prize

© Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Harold Augenbraum, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Daniel Goldin. 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.

“Rick Bass’s gift at conveying the vastness of the American wilderness through a form as compact as the short story is a cause for wonder. Again and again in this collection his stories demonstrate the form’s elasticity and expansiveness, its ability to evoke greatness of scale and time using little more than the seemingly modest tools of close observation, clear language, and rich sensory detail. His characters are forged in the fire of extremes: loggers, boxers, dog trainers, competitive runners, and horse breakers, they experience extreme weather and terrain, extreme solitude and loss, as well as moments of intense, transformative connection. Sentence by sentence, story by story, he does the patient, passionate work of awakening his readers to the innate wildness, mystery, and beauty of the world, and of the people who inhabit it.”

Rick Bass's For a Little While Is the 13th Winner of The Story Prize

We're pleased to announce that Rick Bass's For a Little While (Little, Brown) is the winner of The Story Prize for books published in 2016. Bass's The Lives of Rocks was previously a finalist for books published in 2006. He is only the second author to be a finalist twice, along with George Saunders, who was also a finalist that year, when the winner was The Stories of Mary Gordon.

The other finalists this year were authors Anna Noyes for Goodnight, Beautiful Women (Grove Press) and Helen Maryles Shankman for They Were Like Family to Us (Scribner). At the event at The New School, all three finalists read from and discussed their work on-stage. As runners-up, Noyes and Shankman each received $5,000.

In the days and weeks to come, we'll post the judges' citations for the three books, photos from the event and after party, and a link to the video.