Video of The Story Prize Event: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Danielle Evans, and Deesha Philyaw (winner)

Because of the pandemic, this year's Story Prize event was prerecorded and posted on YouTube on March 10, 2021. We hope and expect to hold a live event in 2022. Here's the video featuring the three finalists—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Danielle Evans, and winner Deesha Philyaw—reading from and discussing their work:

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Likes by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were critic and writer Ismail Muhammad, Margot Sage-EL of Watchung Booksellers, and writer and Williams College professor Karen Shepard. 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 what the judges had to say about Likes by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum:

“These stories take on the biggest issues of utterly realistic worlds—parents and children, race and class in America, marriage, the paralyzing nature of anxiety, victims and perpetrators—without ever forgetting that they are fiction, meant to prioritize the possibilities of language and story. Bynum envelops us in story-worlds where the ordinary is rendered unfamiliar, disorienting us in the most useful ways. The banal becomes remarkable, the fantastic an ordinary part of our daily lives. It’s as if a tiny hole has been ripped in the fabric of our world, and through it, we spy not just our doomed and flawed selves, but also how extraordinary and heartbreaking and worth saving we are.”  

Watch a video that includes a reading by and conversation with Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and the other two finalists for The Story Prize, including winner Deesha Philyaw.

The 2020/21 Finalists for The Story Prize Are: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Danielle Evans, and Deesha Philyaw

The Story Prize, now in its 17th year, is pleased to honor as its finalists three outstanding short story collections chosen from 121 submissions representing 89 different publishers or imprints. They are*:

• Likes by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans (Riverhead Books)
• The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw (West Virginia University Press)

We will announce the winner on the evening of Wednesday, March 10, at which time The Story Prize will post a video including readings by and interviews with finalists Bynum, Evans, and Philyaw, 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. 

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

• Writer and Critic Ismail Muhammad,
• Independent Bookseller Margot Sage-EL, and
• Author Karen Shepard

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 more information about the video we'll be posting in lieu of a live event.

* Links for book titles are to Bookshop.org. Links for author names are to guest Instagram posts.

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.

Updates: More Honors for '08 Collections; Franco-phile or Franco-phobe?

All right, we're (almost) ready to (maybe) put last week's Story Prize event behind us (kind of). Here are a few short-fiction related items that have come up in recent days or that we were too obsessed to point out in the last few weeks. Of particular note: 2008's bumper crop of short story collections is still making news, as is an upcoming collection from a scruffy young talent. And the Pulitzers are yet to come (Apr. 20).

• Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth is the Europe and South Asia Regional winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. The overall winner will be announced on May 16. (Go, Jhumpa!) And Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them is in the running for the Best First Book.
• Tomorrow night the National Book Critics Circle will announce their award winners. Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, as previously noted, is among the fiction finalists.
• Joan Silber's The Size of the World is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction.
• Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Ms. Hempel Chronicles was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, which Joseph O'Neill's Netherland won.
• Actor James Franco sold a short story collection to Nan Graham at Scribner. He's currently a student in the MFA program at Columbia University. The stories are set in Palo Alto, Calif., whose high school he paid a visit to in November, 2007, in search of material (see photo). No doubt name (and face) recognition didn't hurt, but let's not be too hasty to pre-judge. Franco will be bringing some extra attention to short fiction, and that's generally a good thing.

Listen As Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Discusses Ms. Hempel Chronicles

Author Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, appeared on KRCW radio on Jan. 15 to talk about her brilliant collection of connected stories, Ms. Hempel Chronicles (A 2008 Story Prize Notable Book) with Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt, who obviously gave the book a close reading (not all interviewers do). It's probably best to listen to this if you've read the collection, because while not presenting any real spoilers, the discussion points out some subtleties that would be more satisfying to discover on your own.



During the course of the interview, Bynum talks about her use of the "free indirect style," which James Wood advocates in How Fiction Works. Wood (a judge for The Story Prize in 2005) didn't invent this concept, and Bynum doesn't mention Wood, but I get the sense she's read his book and adopted the term to explain her technique. Of course, I could be wrong about this, but if not, it's interesting to see the influence of criticism on a writer's discourse.

Even more interesting, from the perspective of The Story Prize, is that in one of the stories in the collection, "Accomplice," the title character, a middle school teacher, has her class read finalist Tobias Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life, a subject that comes up in the KCRW interview. If we'd ended up choosing Ms. Hempel Chronicles as a finalist, it would have been really interesting to touch on this with Bynum and Wolff.