The Story Prize Long List for Collections Published in 2016

In 2016, The Story Prize received as entries 106 books published by 72 publishers or imprints. We aim for a broad definition of what a "short story collection" is. Some books labeled as novels, for instance, sometimes also work as story collections, particularly when each chapter or section has a distinct title and introduces new characters or situations.

As difficult as it is to choose three finalists, it is in many ways just as difficult to come up with a long list of other notable story collections. I don't think we can repeat this often enough: Anyone who publishes a short story collection has accomplished something significant and nothing should diminish that achievement. More than a dozen other books we read this past year could have been on this list. But ultimately, even a long list can only be so long.

Here then is a list (alphabetical by author) of other books we read in 2016—beyond the three finalists and The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner—that particularly stood out for us:

• Bull by Kathy Anderson (Autumn House)
• We Show What We Have Learned by Claire Beams (Lookout Books)
• Swallowed by the Cold by Jensen Beach (Graywolf Press)
• The Rope Swing by Jonathan Corcoran (Vandalia Press)
• When Watched by Leopoldine Core (Penguin Books)
• The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies (Harcourt Houghton Mifflin)
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (Alfred A. Knopf)
• The Fat Artist by Benjamin Hale (Simon & Schuster)
• Prodigals by Greg Jackson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• In the Not Quite Dark by Dana Johnson (Counterpoint)
• What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi (Riverhead Books)
• The Dream Life of Astronauts by Patrick Ryan (The Dial Press)
• Insurrections by Rion Amilcar Scott (The University Press of Kentucky)
• Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein (Picador)
• Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams (Tin House)
• Dog Years by Melissa Yancy (University of Pittsburgh Press)

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 8. At the event, finalists Rick Bass, Anna Noyes, and Helen Maryles Shankman will read from and discuss their work. You can buy tickets in advance online, or that night at the box office.

Meet The Story Prize Judges: Harold Augenbraum, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Daniel Goldin

The Story Prize is pleased to announce its judges for 2016: Former National Book Foundation Executive Director Harold Augenbraum, Author Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and bookseller Daniel Goldin of Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company.

Here come the judges: Harold Augenbraum, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Daniel Goldin

These judges will decide the winner of the $20,000 top prize from among the three books that we (Director Larry Dark and Founder Julie Lindsey) choose as finalists in January. The other two finalists will receive $5,000.

We will announce the winner at the end of an evening of readings and onstage interviews on March 8, 2017, at The New School in New York City.

About the Judges

Harold Augenbraum is a Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University. From 2004 to early 2016, he was Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards. He has published seven books on Latino literature of the United States and has translated, among other works, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition and the Filipino novelist José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. He has taught U.S. Latino literature at Amherst College, founded the Proust Society of America, and co-chaired, with Susan Shillinglaw, the 2002 National Steinbeck Centennial celebration. He often speaks and writes on the future of literary reading and publishing and is currently carrying out a research project on the business of translation in the United States under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2015, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota awarded him the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Georgia Review, and The Best American Short Stories 2004, 2009, and 2016. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of “20 Under 40” fiction writers by The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Daniel Goldin has been the proprietor of Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company since 2009. Previous to Boswell, he spent 23 years with Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, primarily as a buyer, and before that, he was a publicist at a publishing house that is now part of Hachette Book Group. He has received the Christopher Latham Sholes Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers for encouraging and supporting Wisconsin writers and a James L. Patterson bookseller bonus. He was raised in Queens, New York, and graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in math and Russian.

John Jodzio Cracks Wise on Sunset

By Nick Fuller Googins

Los Angeles 

March 30, 2016

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual conference, which ran from March 30 to Apr. 2, represented a rare occurrence in Los Angeles: a gathering of writers who were not primarily focused on treatments, scripts, screenplays, or pilots. As the conference began, one such author, John Jodzio, read from his story collection, Knockout (Soft Skull Press), at Book Soup, on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, a mere ten-mile, hour-and-a-half freeway jaunt from the Convention Center hub of AWP action.

Author Jodzio: "a trusting soul"
(photo by Brian Vernor)

Those of us who made the trek crowded into Book Soup’s narrow reading space, where Jodzio provided more than a few laughs when he read his story “The Piss Test Place.” Any one of Knockout’s seventeen stories would probably have produced a similar reaction. Jodzio's fiction falls somewhere between short and flash—all of it markedly zany. “The Piss Test Place,” at just under five pages, features three-dollar strip teases, laser light shows, a dysfunctional heavy metal band, cocaine fudge, and a drug-sniffing dog with epilepsy. Jodzio created the protagonist—a mildly corrupt, usually-stoned employee—with the help of extensive field research. He filled us in before reading: 

“I used to do a lot of temp work. And they always made me take a piss test whenever I changed jobs. The guy who worked the desk of the piss test place was clearly high. So I wrote a story about him.”

While reading, Jodzio wears a mischievous perma-grin (think Norm Macdonald) that matches the sensibility of his fiction. He had difficulty keeping a straight face, especially when delivering lines like these:

“Since I’d started working here, I’d heard many tales of woe and roofied hard lemonades. It was difficult to tell who was telling the truth and who was lying. All I knew was I’d accidentally eaten some cocaine fudge at a party a few nights before, and I knew how easily something like this could happen to a trusting soul.”

Jodzio’s reading seemed to be over too quickly, but thankfully, he'd invited author and friend Kara Vernor to read with him. Vernor, a middle school teacher by day, writes stories that take their titles from her sex-ed students’ anonymously submitted questions. The one she shared with us was “How Much Tongue While Kissing?” It isn't hard to see why she and Jodzio are friends. All in all, it felt particularly delightful to laugh in a cozy bookstore while, outside, the traffic on Sunset Boulevard inched along.