Video of The Story Prize event: Andrea Barrett, Ling Ma (winner), and Morgan Talty

 Here's the edited video of The Story Prize event held on March 15. 

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Natural History by Andrea Barrett

Photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were critic, writer, and editor Adam Dalva, writer Danielle Evans, and bookseller and podcaster Miwa Messer. 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 Natural History by Andrea Barrett:

“Andrea Barrett’s Natural History moves brilliantly through time and memory, building a complicated and compelling family tree. The stories in this collection are mesmerizing in their ability to balance illumination of the unknown or forgotten—lingering in lost histories, small moments of scientific wonder, and the private secrets of relationships—with a reverence for the unknowable, and a willingness to let stories or characters hold on to their mystery when it serves them.”

Live-Stream The Story Prize Award Event on March 15 at 7:30 p.m.

The Story Prize event is just a week away. Although we're having a private award night this year, we're going to live-stream it on YouTube. Here's the link.

What you'll see and hear is the three finalists for The Story Prize for books published in 2022—Andrea Barrett for Natural History (W.W. Norton), Ling Ma for Bliss Montage (FSG), and Morgan Talty for Night of the Living Rez (Tin House)—read from and discuss their short story collections before we announce the 19th winner of The Story Prize and present that writer with an engraved silver bowl and the top prize of $20,000. The other two finalists will each take home $5,000.

Finalists Andrea Barrett, Ling Ma, and MorganTalty

If you miss the live-stream, you'll still be able to watch the video on our website and on YouTube in the days that follow. You can find videos of past events under the WINNERS menu on our home page or on YouTube.

The 2022/3 Finalists for The Story Prize Are Andrea Barrett, Ling Ma, and Morgan Talty

The Story Prize, now in its 19th year, is pleased to honor as its finalists three outstanding short story collections chosen from 119 submissions representing 79 different publishers or imprints. The range and quality of story collections published in 2022 were high, and, as always, it was difficult to narrow the list down to three books. This year's finalists are: 

• Natural History by Andrea Barrett (W.W. Norton)

• Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

• Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty (Tin House)

We will announce the winner of The Story Prize on the evening of Wednesday, March 15, at a private event featuring readings by and interviews with finalists Barrett, Ma, and Talty, as well as the announcement of the winner and acceptance of the $20,000 top prize and the engraved silver bowl that goes with it. The runners-up will each receive $5,000. We plan to live stream the event starting at 7:30 p.m. and will post a link before then and a video the next day. 

Story Prize Founder Julie Lindsey and Director Larry Dark selected the finalists. Three independent judges will determine the winner:

• Critic, writer, and editor Adam Dalva;
• Writer Danielle Evans; and
• Bookseller and podcaster Miwa Messer

In the weeks ahead, we'll announce this year's winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award. We'll also publish a long list of other exceptional collections we read last year and information on how to watch the event.

Video: The Story Prize Event on March 5, Andrea Barrett, Rebecca Lee, and George Saunders

In case you missed The Story Prize event on March 5 at The New School, here's the video. That night, the three finalists—Andrea Barrett, Rebecca Lee, and George Saunders—read from and discussed their work on-stage. And at the culmination of the event, we announced the winner for books published in 2013: George Saunders' Tenth of December. 

What the Judges Had to Say About Andrea Barrett's Archangel

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Stephen Enniss, Antonya Nelson, and Rob Spillman. 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 said about Andrea Barrett's Archangel:

“When a void seems to separate the humanities and the sciences, Andrea Barrett offers us stories of discovery that bridge this chasm and reunite these estranged dimensions of experience. These stories probe our innate curiosity about our world. The men and women of her stories pose questions, and in that boldness affirm the power of the creative mind in community with others. Even as scientific principles come into clearer view, fictive patterns emerge in Archangel, reminding us of the larger narrative of human advance and discovery that is both personal and communal. Andrea Barrett writes stories that bind.”

News Flash: What They're Saying About The Story Prize Event

Andrea Barrett, George Saunders, and Rebecca Lee
(photo: Beowulf Sheehan)

Here are some press accounts of The Story Prize event on March 5, at which eventual winner George Saunders and fellow finalists Andrea Barrett and Rebecca Lee read from and discussed their work onstage at The New School:

The Outlet (Electric Literature)

Like Fire (Open Letters Monthly)

Last Night's Reading: George Saunders, Andrea Barrett

AP

Reuters

PublishersWeekly

GalleyCat

NPR

Shelf Awareness

Poets & Writers

Entertainment Weekly

The Post Standard and here

Star News

Book People

Fiction Writers Review

And the Finalists for The Story Prize Are...Andrea Barrett, Rebecca Lee, and George Saunders

2013 finalists for The Story Prize: Barrett, Lee, and Saunders

The Story Prize, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, is pleased to honor three outstanding short story collections chosen from 96 submissions representing 64 different publishers or imprints. The three finalists are:

• Archangel by Andrea Barrett (W.W. Norton)
• Bobcat by Rebecca Lee (Algonquin Books)
• Tenth of December by George Saunders (Random House)

On March 5, these three authors will read from and discuss their work on-stage at The New School's Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street at an event that starts at 7:30 p.m. After the final author interview, Julie LIndsey, Founder of The Story Prize, will announce the winner, who will get $20,000—still the most of any annual U.S. book award for fiction—along with an engraved silver bowl. The other two finalists will each take home $5,000.

You can buy tickets to the March 5 event from The New School box office online or by calling 212-229-5488.

It's always difficult to choose just three books as finalists (and one as The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner), and several other books we read would have made excellent choices. In the weeks ahead, I'll post a list of some of these other collections. Also look for more posts leading up to the event and to commemorate ten years of The Story Prize.

Julie and I have chosen the finalists, now, it's up to our three judges—Stephen Ennis, Antonya Nelson, and Rob Spillman—to determine which book will get the top prize. We will announce the outcome at our March 5 event and via social media: Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and Facebook.

Andrea Barrett's Science Fiction

In the 42nd in a series of posts on 2013 books entered for The Story Prize, Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel (W.W. Norton), discusses the similarities and differences between writing fiction about science and writing science fiction.

A few weeks ago I went to a series of readings and classes where eight excellent science fiction writers read their work and responded to questions. I was intrigued by what they were writing; also by how they described their working process. How differently, I thought, we found our way into stories! A few days after that—pure coincidence, as far as I know—a thoughtful reader emailed me about Archangel. Frederick Pohl, he said, one of science fiction’s grand masters, had defined science fiction as “a way of thinking about things”—and in his opinion I was a science fiction writer. That same week, a journalist asked me if I’d ever considered writing a science fiction novel.

“Um,” I said. “Maybe?” 

Since then I’ve been wondering how this genre, about which I don’t know enough, might be related to what I do. The fictional characters who take center stage in the five long stories of Archangel are influenced by real characters from the worlds of science, medicine, and technology, and they wrestle with real scientific problems. A woman trained in astronomy, struggling in 1920 to explain Einstein’s new theory to everyday readers, encounters a famous physicist who passionately resists that same theory. A genetics student, experimenting with fruit flies in the 1920s and 1930s, falls sequentially under the sway of scientists promoting competing views of inheritance. A high-school teacher first encounters Darwin’s ideas through biologist Louis Agassiz’s fierce opposition to them at a summer school for natural history that took place in 1873—and so on. Lots of scientific ideas, for sure—yet somehow I don’t think of these stories as being about science. They’re more about the feeling of being engaged in that work. Not about ideas and theories themselves but about people in the act of formulating, contemplating, rejecting, and reacting to them, during a half-century when such theories were overturning our view of the world.

Albert Einstein,
vampire hunter?

While I was searching online for the source of that first Frederick Pohl quote, I found something else he said: “The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and you take it apart into all its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens.” With science fiction, that can mean extrapolating into the future, or into an alternate universe; setting invented characters along paths that can’t, or don’t yet, exist in the world we know. Although I’ve so far worked only within the context of this world, I recognize that method. Sometimes my fictional characters brush against actual characters, doing what they are known to have done: and what are those conjunctions, so clearly invented, but extrapolations? Take some of those components, throw them away, plug in different ones—insert the words ‘from the historical record’ after the word ‘components’ and that’s not far from what I do. 

Reading about Einstein’s theories, for instance, I also read about Scientific American magazine’s 1920 “Einstein Essay Contest,” which offered a prize of $5,000 for the best popular essay on the topic. The editor in charge of the contest—delightfully referred to as “The Einstein Editor”—after reviewing the submissions, wrote a cranky essay about what he called the “Divergent Viewpoints as to what Constitutes a ‘Popular’ Essay.” I thought I might write a story about him and what it felt like to sift through those papers. Then I thought I might write a story about a woman who wrote one of those papers. Then I thought—well, I ended up very far from there, as I did from the early ideas of all these stories: because as soon as I begin to sketch a character, her feelings come with her onto the page. 

From her feelings her life begins to come into focus; from the shape of her life more feelings arise, which result in actions and images and lines of dialogue that create still more actions, and bring to life other characters. For me, that path of emotion is the real trigger for a piece of fiction. Not an idea, which is necessary but not sufficient. Good science fiction transmits ideas, sometimes fabulously exciting ideas, but the best of it also evokes our passionate feelings. Somehow, for reasons I don’t quite understand, thinking and reading about science puts me in touch with a different ‘alternate world’—the one we inhabit in times of hope, despair, conflict, passion, envy, and all the varieties of love. 

Carol Houck Smith, We'll Miss You

One of the nicest people in publishing and a truly great editor, Carol Houck Smith, died on Nov. 29 in her Manhattan apartment at the age of 85. She worked at W.W. Norton, where her authors included Andrea Barrett, Ron Carlson, Joan Silber, and many others.

The picture to the right is from the reception following The Story Prize event in February 2007.
Carol had particularly wanted to be there that year because one of the finalists was Rick Bass, whose first short story collection, The Watch, she had edited.

Carol was a supporter of The Story Prize from the start, responding with warm encouragement to the announcement of the launch in January 2004, attending a small cocktail party for editors and publishers that spring, and coming to the first event in 2005, in support of her author, Joan Silber, who was a finalist for Ideas of Heaven--a great book made better through Carol's taste and wisdom, as everything she edited was.

I had first spoken with Carol several times in early 2001, when I was putting together Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards. I had decided to include three novellas* in that volume, one of which was Andrea Barrett's "Servants of the Map," the title story of a collection set for publication in 2002--several months after the O. Henry Awards volume would be out. To my surprise, Andrea Barrett informed me, a few days after I called to tell her that I'd chosen her story for the O. Henry Awards, that her publisher, W.W. Norton, did not want to give permission to publish "Servants of the Map" because they were concerned that it would cannibalize sales of Barrett's collection. In four previous years, I had never had an author or publisher turn down a chance to be in the anthology.

Andrea suggested I speak with her editor. So I called Carol Houck Smith and had a long conversation in which I did my best to persuade her that inclusion in the O. Henry Awards would likely help Servants of the Map reach an even larger audience (a somewhat shaky argument because after winning the National Book Award for her story collection Ship Fever in 1996, Barrett's books no doubt outsold the O. Henry Awards by a wide margin). Carol explained Norton's position, but she also listened with an open mind--something rare in my experience. In the end, Carol convinced Norton to allow us to include the story. I think what may have persuaded her wasn't my arguments but my passion for that particular story, which matched her own.

What I didn't know until later, was that Carol had "retired" several years before this. That didn't stop her from going to work every day and continuing to edit and nurture writers' careers. She was, throughout her career, a tireless advocate for poetry and fiction, a frequent presence at writing conferences, someone who constantly sought out and nurtured new talent, and a trusted editor and friend to many writers. Carol, we're going to miss you--the literary world is going to miss you.

* The other two novellas/long stories that year were Mary Swan's "The Deep" and the full version of George Saunders' "Pastoralia," both of which also ended up being the title stories of collections.

Addendum: Here's more.