Beyond the three finalists and The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner, here's a list (alphabetical by the author's last name) of other books we read in 2018 that particularly stood out for us:
- Training School for Negro Girls by Camille Acker (Feminist Press)
- Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
- Awayland by Ramona Ausubel (Riverhead Books)
- The New Order by Karen E. Bender (Counterpoint)
- Days of Awe by A.M. Homes (Viking)
- Night Beast by Ruth Joffre (Black Cat)
- Certain American States by Catherine Lacey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Notes from the Fog by Ben Marcus (Alfred A. Knopf)
- Fight No More by Lydia Millet (W. W. Norton & Company)
- If You See Me, Don't Say Hi by Neel Patel (Flatiron Books)
- The Secret Habit of Sorrow by Victoria Patterson (Counterpoint)
- All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva (Spiegel & Grau)
- Pure Hollywood by Christine Schutt (Grove Press)
- You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)
- Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (37 Ink/Atria)
- The Water Diviner and Other Stories by Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer (University of Iowa Press)
In 2018, The Story Prize received as entries 108 books published by 79 publishers or imprints. We choose the shortlist of three finalists first, then release our longlist a few weeks later because it's difficult to narrow the field down—especially when so many of the books we read are worth a second look.
Our longlist can only represent a limited number of books and of necessity leaves out dozens of good short story collections. To be sure, not every book we read rises to such a level. Nonetheless, every writer who published a short story collection last year accomplished something significant and deserves an enormous amount of credit.
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 6. At the event, finalists Jamel Brinkley, Deborah Eisenberg, and Lauren Groff will read from and discuss their work. You can buy tickets in advance online or that night at the box office.
