Video: The Story Prize Event on March 2 at The New School with Finalists Charles Baxter and Colum McCann and Winner Adam Johnson

Here's the video of The Story Prize event on March 2 at The New School. That night, the three finalists—Charles Baxter, Adam Johnson, and Colum McCann—read from and discussed their work on-stage. And at the culmination of the event, we announced the winner for books published in 2015: Adam Johnson's Fortune Smiles. 

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Charles Baxter's There's Something I Want You to Do

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Anthony Doerr, Rita Mead, and Kathryn Schulz. 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 Story Prize judges had to say about Charles Baxter's There's Something I Want You to Do:

“There’s a strange and very appealing unpredictability to Baxter’s imagination. He excels at menace, and he executes amazing leaps in time in these stories, like a DVD skipping forward through whole scenes. Best of all, he wrestles with huge stuff: faith, abortion, love, aging, kindness, the countervailing and intertwined forces of beauty and death. Elijah is a wonderful character: hungry, kind, and transcendent. I loved being in his company, and watching him reappear from time to time in the stories. The strong connections between and among stories amplify the significance of each profound and profane moment, all of which become part of a larger canvas of human experience.”

The Finalists for The Story Prize Are: Charles Baxter, Adam Johnson, and Colum McCann

Finalists: Baxter, Johnson, and McCann

We're pleased to honor as finalists for The Story Prize three outstanding books chosen from 100 entries representing 64 different publishers or imprints. They are:

• There's Something I Want You to Do by Charles Baxter (Pantheon)
• Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson (Random House)
• Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann (Random House)

There's Something I Want You to Do by Charles Baxter collects 10 stories, each with a one-word title representing a virtue or a vice. The title phrase resonates throughout, as several recurring characters find themselves speaking or hearing this request. The six stories in Adam Johnson's Fortune Smiles take place in territory as diverse as California, Louisiana, what was formerly East Germany, and North Korea, portraying difficult situations with sadness and humor. Colum McCann's collection, Thirteen Ways of Looking, consists of a powerful novella and three equally absorbing stories that explore how people process violence and loss.

This year's judges—Story Prize winning author Anthony Doerr, Brooklyn Librarian Rita Meade, and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz—will decide the outcome.

The annual award event will take place at the New School’s Auditorium at 66 West 12 Street in New York City at 7:30 p.m. on Wed., March 2. Tickets cost $14. That night, Baxter, Johnson, and McCann will read from and discuss their work on-stage. At the end of the event, Julie Lindsey will announce the winner and present that author with $20,000 (which remains the biggest top prize of any annual U.S. book award for fiction) along with an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000.

In the weeks ahead, we'll announce this year's winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award, and we'll publish an index of guest posts form 2015 authors, and a long list of other exceptional collections we read last year.

Charles Baxter and the Restored Sentence

In the third in a series of posts on 2015 books entered for The Story Prize, Charles Baxter, author of There's Something I Want You to Do (Pantheon Books) discusses what gets him going and what keeps him writing.

Describe a good writing day.
Time passes, but you don't notice the time because you're so deeply inside the story. You're so hyped up by what you're doing that your palms and underarms get sweaty. It's like a workout or lovemaking, but really there's nothing else like it.

What keeps you going?
The art and the difficulty and the grace of storytelling, and the effort to be a part of its great traditions.

What do you think is the source of your impulse to write stories?
A watchful childhood and what therapists call "hypervigilance" and a love of stories and of being taken away somewhere, anywhere by the power of the imagination.

Where does a story begin for you?
It can begin anywhere, sometimes with an opening line ("She thought he was a decent enough man until she tried to break up with him") or a situation (a paroled murderer moves in next door), or an image (a wheelchair on the beach, tipped over on the sand, and no one nearby).

Describe your revision process. 
I rewrite as I go, so I don't really count them up. Sometimes, rarely, I'm in the zone and don't have to rewrite at all. But that's very rare.

What’s the best phrase, line, or passage you’ve had to cut from a story?
"She has the complex dignity of many small town people who do not resort to alcohol until after night has fallen." The magazine that accepted the story in which that sentence appeared refused to print that sentence. They said that the narrator wouldn't know such a thing about that character. I countered by saying that such information is exactly what many small town inhabitants do know about each other. They weren't convinced. When the story was printed in the collection, I restored the sentence. It's still there. The poet Edwin Arlington Robinson attributed his survival to the fact that he didn't start drinking every day until it got dark. I remembered that, and I put it into that story, revised for my own purposes, where it remains.

Name or describe some hidden influences on your work.
Katherine Anne Porter's stories, and William Maxwell's prose style.

What surprises you most when you re-read your own writing?
That I was able to do it at all.

If you teach writing, how has it affected your work?
It has made me a Bad Cop whenever I read over what I've done. I'm very tough on myself.

Describe your collection in ten words or less.
It's a decalogue without moralism or didacticism.

Outstanding and Notable 2011 Collections

So many of the short story collections we read for The Story Prize in 2011 were skillful, engaging, and well-deserving of a wider readership. We could only choose three books as finalists. However, we read several other 2011 collections we considered to be worthy of attention. We found these seven books, in particular, to be outstanding:

• Steve Almond, God Bless America, Lookout Books*
• Charles Baxter, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, Pantheon
• Siobhan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone, Putnam/Amy Einhorn
• Caitlin Horrocks, This Is Not Your City, Sarabande Books 
• Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse, Small Beer Press
• Daniel Orozco, Orientation and Other Stories, Faber & Faber
• Jim Shepard, You Think That's Bad, Alfred A. Knopf

And we highly recommend these notable collections (though many others we read could also have been on this list):

• Alethea Black, I Knew You'd Be Lovely, Broadway Books
• Lou Beach, 420 Characters, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Shannon Cain, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press
• Seth Fried, The Great Frustration, Counterpoint/Soft Skull
• Laura Furman, The Mother Who Stayed, Free Press
• David Galef, My Date with Neanderthal Woman, Dzanc Books
• Dagoberto Gilb, Before the End, After the Beginning, Grove Press
• Diane Goodman, Party Girl, Autumn House Press
• Alan Heathcock, Volt, Graywolf Press
• Patricia Henley, Other Heartbreaks, Engine Books
• Michael Martone, Four for a Quarter, FC2
• Ana Menendez, Adios, Happy Homeland, Black Cat
• Sabina Murray, Tales of the New World, Black Cat 
• Edna O'Brien, Saints and Sinners, Little Brown
• Miroslav Penkov, East of the West, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Helen Phillips, And Yet They Were Happy, Leapfrog Press
• Shann Ray, American Masculine, Graywolf Press
• Adam Ross, Ladies and Gentlemen, Alfred A. Knopf
• Elissa Schappell, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, Simon & Schuster
• Andrew Scott, Naked Summer, Press 53
• Danzy Senna, You Are Free, Riverhead Books
• Emma Straub, Other People We Married, Five Chapters/Riverhead Books
• Melanie Rae Thon, In This Light, Graywolf Press
• Lynne Tillman, Someday This Will Be Funny, Cursor/Red Lemonade
• Colm Tóibín, The Empty Family, Scribner

* [Author links are to guest posts on The Story Prize blog. 

Book links are to IndieBound or other bookselling outlets.]

Erika Dreifus Opens Strong

In the 10th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Erika Dreifus, author of Quiet Americans (Last Light Studio), explains how she put together her collection.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in  your collection? 

I'd learned along the way that it is wise to open a collection with a particularly strong story, so I placed what I (and several trusted others) considered to be one of my "best" stories first. I was also guided by a roughly chronological thread. The first three stories are set before or during World War II (the first story extends to the immediate postwar era), and the last three stories take place in the first several years of 21st century. The middle story—the fourth of the seven—happens to be set pretty much at a midpoint, in 1972.

At what stage do you start seeking feedback on your work and from whom? 

I need a full draft, that's for sure. I have five or six writer friends I turn to most often for initial feedback, but I don't necessarily share all new work with everyone in that group. I try to be mindful of what's happening in everyone's lives—sometimes, it's just not the right time to ask one or another person for this immense favor—and some readers seem better suited to particular manuscripts than others.

Then, too, if I'm writing a story that is inspired not by something I've personally experienced or overheard or read about, but rather by an incident or situation I've gleaned from the life of a friend or family member, I typically send a draft to that friend or family member first. I'm working on a story right that falls into this category. It's much easier—less "scary"—to send something out to fellow writers for a critique. I can tell that I'm delaying the inevitable need to email this story to the person who should see it next.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver?

I love the response that one of your previous blog contributors. Charles Baxter, gave to this question: "Interesting characters, intriguing situations, beautiful sentences. Hauntings."

What book or books made you want to become a writer?

Two that I like to mention are Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I read first as a preteen, and La vie devant soi, by Romain Gary, which I was fortunately assigned during a college semester in France.  (The latter was published under the name Emile Ajar and translated by Ralph Manheim as The Life Before Us:  ("Madame Rosa"). It's probably signficant that as different as they are, both of these books feature young protagonists who aspire to be writers.

What kind of research, if any, do you do?

I earned a PhD in history, so it's not surprising that I'm quite fond of research, especially document-based research. The kinds of research that I've pursued have changed over time. As recently as the mid-1990s, when I was beginning to write fiction, the Internet wasn't the resource that it is today. Academic researchers simply had to spend great chunks of time in libraries and archives, and I'm so grateful for those research experiences. It was in an overseas archive, in fact, that I came across the documents that inspired by first (albeit still unpublished) novel. And one of the best things about living in Cambridge, Mass., as long as I did was my access to the Harvard University libraries. That said, I'm equally grateful for the online databases and other resources that help me locate everything from historical newspaper articles to full bibliographies on the subjects in which my fiction is grounded.

   

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later?

Never. What's that like?

What's the longest narrative time period you've ever contained in a short story?

The second story in Quiet Americans, "Matrilineal Descent," which appeared first in TriQuarterly, takes the reader from 1888 through World War One, with a final flash-forward to 1940. That's probably the longest span I've covered in a single story.

Charles Baxter A's Some Q's

In the ninth in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Charles Baxter, author of Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (Pantheon Books), answers questions about his writing process and identifies some ideal story collections.

Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems?
"Harmony of the World": I had to research the life of Paul Hindemith to write the story, and the process also required that I learn something about the life of Johannes Kepler; finally, I had to include musical notation in the story.

What is your writing process like?
It's haphazard. Usually I daydream my way through a story so that I have some sense of what the story will be once I sit down to write it. But sometimes I've tried to improvise an entire story from scratch, like a jazz improvisation. "Westland" was like that.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection?
This book is a New and Selected, so the order follows a chronological pattern, up to and including the new stories. There is, I hope, an inner logic as well.

At what stage do you start seeking feedback on your work and from whom? 
I used to ask my friends and fellow-writers for quite a bit of feedback, but now that I'm older, I don't need quite as much of that as I once did. You get to be your own harshest critic. However, I never asked anyone for criticism or suggestions unless I had put the story through at least several drafts.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver?

Interesting characters, intriguing situations, beautiful sentences. Hauntings.

Is there a story collection you consider your ideal of what a collection should be?  
John Cheever's Collected Stories and James Joyce's Dubliners and Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider.  No explanation from me about these great books should be necessary. More recently: Edward P. Jones's Lost in the City.

What book or books made you want to become a writer?
Books I read in high school by J. R. Salamanca and Davis Grubb.

What kind of research, if any, do you do?
 If the materials are arcane and esoteric, I try to read up on them.

If you dabble in any other non-literary forms of expression, what do you do and how does it inform your work?
I'm a published poet and critic. The poetry ideally creates a particular sensitivity to language, and (also, ideally) the criticism creates a sensitivity to form.

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later?
No. I can't imagine what that would be like, it's so distant from my own practice.

Have you had a mentor and who was it?
Alvin Greenberg, my teacher at Macalester College, and a fine short story writer in his own right. 

What's the longest narrative time period you've ever contained in a short story? 
About twenty years, in "Harmony of the World."