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| © Beowulf Sheehan |
When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were writer and librarian Dev Aujla, critic, writer, and librarian David Kipen, and writer Kirstin Valdez Quade. 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 judges had to say about Let Me Think by J. Robert Lennon:
“In 1970, when Mr. and Mrs. Lennon brought their infant son home from a Pennsylvania hospital, it was already child abuse to name him John. Perhaps not surprisingly, John Robert Lennon grew up to become American fiction's premier measurer of the distance by which reality falls shy of perfection. He is our very own poet of the not-quite. In ‘The Museum of Near Misses,’ the umpteenth excruciatingly funny short story in Let Me Think, a narrator named J. Robert Lennon happens into a museum where the presidential election of 2016 has apparently gone a different way. There is simply no justice if this story doesn't win the 2021 Sidewise Award for Alternate History. (A real thing, by the way—but one for which, alas, recent reality is sadly ineligible.)
“Some of the stories in Let Me Think are so brief that including them almost makes the book shorter. Nano-vignettes like the title story, which first appeared in Barrelhouse, know more about family and parenthood than any pallet-load of humorless pop-psychology sludge. Some readers will follow the recurring couple at the heart of Lennon's ‘Marriage’ stories—who bicker over, for instance, the husband's suddenly suspicious lack of exclamation points in texts to his wife—and fight the urge to sweep their house for listening devices.
“As a critic once wrote of Lennon's hysterical, strikingly well-plotted novel The Funnies, the author is ‘fresh without reaching, funny without stooping.’ Once in a while in Let Me Think, ‘fresh’ comes perilously close to ‘experimental’—but no, wait, come back! As Lennon's namesake once wrote of a more radical sort of experiment, ‘If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow.’ It's hard to say whom Lennon might be carrying pictures of. Barthelme? Nabokov? Roseanne Barr? Someday, aspiring writers may yet carry pictures of Lennon—and not the Liverpudlian one, either.
“In other words, please read Let Me Think.”