Award Week!

The week of March 4 is going to be a busy one for The Story Prize. (Well, at least Monday-Wednesday will be busy.)

Monday, March 4

I will be a guest on WNYC 93.5 FM's "All of It," hosted by Alison Stewart, to discuss The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction, published by Catapult. If you don't live in the New York area, you can listen on WNYC's website, which streams live.

Tuesday, March 5

This is the official publication date of The Story Prize anthology from Catapult. The book collects a short story from each of the 14 past winners of The Story Prize, set up by excerpts from the onstage interviews with each writer or their TSP blog posts or judges' citations.

Wednesday, March 6

The Story Prize event at The New School begins at 7:30 p.m. Finalists Jamel Brinkley, Deborah Eisenberg, and Jamel Brinkley will read from and discuss their nominated books. At the end of the evening, we'll announce the 15th winner of The Story Prize, who will receive $25,000 and an engraved silver bowl. But no one goes home empty-handed. Each of the other two finalists will receive $5,000. (And we guarantee that Green Book will not win.)

General admission tickets are $14. You can buy them in advance online or the evening of the event at The New School (66 W. 12 St.).

The Story Prize Event on March 6 at The New School: Get with the Program

Come to The Story Prize event on March 6 at The New School, and you'll not only get to see and hear writers Jamel Brinkley, Deborah Eisenberg, and Lauren Groff read from and discuss their work on stage but you'll also get to take home an eight-page, full-color program (cover below) designed by artist Calli Ryan.

At the event, you'll have the opportunity to buy from bookseller McNally Jackson signed copies of each author's short story collection, as well as copies of The Story Prize 15th anniversary anthology.

General admission tickets, which cost $14, are available online or at The New School Box office the evening of the event.

The Story Prize Longlist for Short Story Collections Published in 2018

Beyond the three finalists and The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner, here's a list (alphabetical by the author's last name) of other books we read in 2018 that particularly stood out for us:

• Training School for Negro Girls by Camille Acker (Feminist Press)
• Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Awayland by Ramona Ausubel (Riverhead Books)
• The New Order by Karen E. Bender (Counterpoint)
• Days of Awe by A.M. Homes (Viking)
• Night Beast by Ruth Joffre (Black Cat)
• Certain American States by Catherine Lacey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Notes from the Fog by Ben Marcus (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Fight No More by Lydia Millet (W. W. Norton & Company)
• If You See Me, Don't Say Hi by Neel Patel (Flatiron Books)
• The Secret Habit of Sorrow by Victoria Patterson (Counterpoint)
• All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva (Spiegel & Grau)
• Pure Hollywood by Christine Schutt (Grove Press)
• You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)
• Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (37 Ink/Atria)
• The Water Diviner and Other Stories by Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer (University of Iowa Press)

In 2018, The Story Prize received as entries 108 books published by 79 publishers or imprints. We choose the shortlist of three finalists first, then release our longlist a few weeks later because it's difficult to narrow the field down—especially when so many of the books we read are worth a second look. 

Our longlist can only represent a limited number of books and of necessity leaves out dozens of good short story collections. To be sure, not every book we read rises to such a level. Nonetheless, every writer who published a short story collection last year accomplished something significant and deserves an enormous amount of credit.

We'll announce the winner of The Story Prize at an event co-sponsored with The New School's Creative Writing program at the auditorium at 66 W. 12 Street on March 6. At the event, finalists Jamel Brinkley, Deborah Eisenberg, and Lauren Groff will read from and discuss their work. You can buy tickets in advance online or that night at the box office.