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."