The Story Prize Finalists Are Racking up the Honors

When Story Prize winners or finalists achieve other honors, we're always happy for them. We're pleased on a personal level because we get to know and like these authors. Further honors also reaffirm our choices. And we hope that the books that are finalists for or win The Story Prize get into as many readers' hands as possible. Every honor helps in that regard.

So I was excited when Anthony Doerr, who just won The Story Prize, also won the the £30,000* Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for "The Deep." The story first appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story's Fall 2010 issue** and is in the April 10 edition of the Sunday Times Magazine.** Of course, I would have been equally excited if Yiyun Li, who was also a finalist for the Sunday Times Award, had won.

As it happens, this year's finalists have been racking up the honors since we held The Story Prize event on March 2. Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca were also up for the Northern California Book Awards on Apr. 10. Suzanne was a finalist for PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction, is a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award (even though she's more of a tiger person), and also won a Rome fellowship in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.***

If there's any downside to our finalists and winners achieving other honors it's that certain prizes can overshadow† The Story Prize—but not too many of them, in our view. The Pulitzer Prize is one, and will announce its winners and finalists on April 18. Nonetheless, if Tony, Yiyun, or Suzanne win, we'll be very happy for them. Plus, one real test of a book award is how well its winners and finalists hold up over time, and winning other awards increases the chances that this will happen.

* The equivalent of $49,155 at current exchange rates. Though this eclipses the $20,000 top prize for The Story Prize, we've been mentioned in all of the press coverage and at least have the advantage of a decidedly more succinct name than The Sunday Times EFG Bank Short Story Award.

** It is not one of the stories in Memory Wall, The Story Prize winning collection. For now, you have to buy one-day access to the Sunday Times site for $2 or purchase the back issue of Zoetrope for $8 to read "The Deep." Coincidentally, that same issue of Zoetrope included a story by Mary Swan, whose "The Deep" was the first-prize winner in Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards. In that volume, 2006 Story Prize winner Mary Gordon introduced Swan's story. 
*** Anthony Doerr is a past winner.
† By this, I mean that it could supplant mention of The Story Prize on book covers and in author biographies.

On Literary Awards and Subjectivity

Ron Rash, winner of the O'Connor Award

Congratulations to Ron Rash, winner of the £35,000 (around $55,000) Cork City – Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for his story collection Burning Bright  (Ecco). In the five (correction, six) years since the O'Connor prize was established (The Story Prize is in its seventh), the overlap of winners and finalists between the two book awards for short story collections has been small. So far, only two of our finalists--Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and Wells Towers' Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned--have been finalists (Towers) or winners (Lahiri) of the O'Connor award. We don't announce our finalists until early January, so that correspondence could increase. But what's clear is that literary prizes are (as everyone understands or should) largely subjective.

The first year I served as series editor for the O. Henry Awards, 1997, I got in touch with Katrina Kenison, then the series editor of Best American Short Stories, and we established a practice of comparing winners, once we'd both chosen. In those pre-social-networking days, there was no announcement. And until the galleys were sent out, few people knew the complete list of stories chosen for either collection. The first year, I think both Katrina and I were nervous as we read our lists of stories to each other over the phone. What if we had too many in common? She was nervous because our collection came out six weeks earlier. I was nervous because their collection routinely trounced ours in sales. Both our fears, however, were unfounded. We didn't overlap a single story in 1997. In 1998, we had three stories in common and two in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002.

One big procedural difference between the annual collections was that I chose the 20 stories myself, whereas Katrina picked 120 or so stories to send to the guest editor, who chose the final 20. We would often both admire some of the other collection's choices, and she sometimes took on a wistful tone. For instance, that very first year, she told me she would have liked Rick Moody's "Demonology" to have made the Best American cut. And I believe I made the better choice of Annie Proulx stories in 1998, when I chose "Brokeback Mountain" and Best American guest editor Garrison Keillor chose "The Half-Skinned Steer." Truth be told, I always thought the O. Henry Awards choices were better. But, then, I would. That's what subjectivity is all about.

Big Payoffs, Prize-Winning Collections, Self-Publishing Heavies, Celebrity Authors

While we wait for the 2010 entries to roll in, here (as we've done before) are some notable news briefs about short stories and short story collections.

A Kiwi Breaks the Bank
The winner of The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank short story award is New Zealand writer C.K. Stead for his story "Last Season's Man." At £25,000, this is probably the largest prize for a single story.

Alexie Wins the PEN/Faulkner Award
Sherman Alexie's story collection War Dances has won the prestigious annual $15,000 PEN/Faulkner Award. Another short story collection, Lorraine M. Lopez' Homicide Survivors Picnic was a finalist, adding to the list of 2009 short fiction titles honored as book award finalists. Alexie's collection, by the way, was not entered for The Story Prize.

A Big Time Literary Author Goes DIY
Author John Edgar Wideman has self-published his latest book, a story collection, Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind (inspired by Kawabata's classic Palm of the Hand Stories), on the Lulu site. Lulu has also brought back into print much of Wideman's back-list. Mark my words, this is one way disintermediation is going to play out, and more authors are likely to go the do-it-yourself route.

Two Actor/Writers (and One Writer/Actor)
Esquire magazine has published a story by MFA student and movie star James Franco, "Just Before the Black." Scribner will be publishing Franco's collection Palo Alto in September. Another actor, Gene Wilder, has a collection just out from St. Martin's Press, What Is This Thing Called Love. And let's not forget Sam Shepard, who earned his rep as a writer before gaining fame as an actor. His book, Day Out of Days, is on shelves now from the good folks at Alfred A. Knopf.

Soon to come: PEN/Malamud and the Pulitzer Prize, which I'm hoping a short story collection will once again win (though I'm not holding my breath).

The 2009 Whiting Writers' Award Winners Get Money And Advice

If you're a writer and you have a book or play or two under your belt, you might want to answer the phone if it rings some time toward the end of September. That's when the Whiting Writers' Awards calls to notify its ten winners, each of whom gets a generous $50,000 check.

Unlike The Story Prize, Whiting Award winners aren't required to attend the ceremony, but nearly all of them do. And, sure enough, ten authors sat perched on ten folding chairs stage right on Oct. 28 at the Morgan Library auditorium in New York for the 25th annual ceremony. They were: poets Jericho Brown, Jay Hopler, and Joan Kane; fiction writers Adam Johnson, Nami Mun, Salvatore Scibona, and Vu Tran; nonfiction writers Michael Meyer and Hugh Raffles; and playwright Rajiv Joseph.

And ceremonious it was. As the audience, which included authors, editors, publishers, and agents sat in rows of red velvet seats that quickly ascend to a height far above the stage, each Whiting Award winner had his or her moment in the spotlight. As is customary, one by one, they stood by the podium listening as Barbara Bristol, director of the Whiting's writing program, read out their diverse and illustrious biographies. Some honorees nodded their heads approvingly or gestured to affirm a quirky fact. For instance, Johnson did, in fact, earn a degree from McNeese State University; Mun covered her face when it was revealed that she had once been a street vendor and Avon Lady; Raffles actually is compiling a book of essays on human-insect interactions; and Scibona pumped a fist at the mention of his publisher, Graywolf Press. Most appealing of all may have been Kane, who was convincingly pregnant and tottered on high heels that must have been truly difficult to balance on as she listened to her own rather interesting story.

Until the writers walk onstage, you don't know who the winners will be. And since they are emerging writers, most are unrecognizable, so you have to wait until they're introduced to find out their names. The list of winners is a closely kept secret, but the authors are allowed to share the news with family, editors, and agents. So when I see agents or editors I recognize among the crowd, I generally assume they're in attendance because one of the winners is an author of theirs. For instance, agent Amy Williams of McCormack & Williams and Riverhead Press editor Megan Lynch, were there on behalf of Mun.

Each year, an illustrious guest writer gives a keynote speech, generally offering inspiration and/or advice. This year's speaker was Margaret Atwood, who reeled off a string of jokes as sharp and funny as any opening monologue you'll hear on late night television. One riff presented a list of unlikely mashups of literary classics and occult/horror subjects, which culminated in War and Peace and Heads That Grow Out of Your Armpits*. But Atwood had advice to offer, too, and pivoted to face the cluster of writers several times, pausing and peering over the top of her reading glasses to emphasize a point of particular importance.

A reception followed the event. On the way out of the auditorium, ushers handed out press releases with the list of winners and the biographies we heard. The Whiting Writers' Awards is a well-organized and idiosyncratic event, with a charm all its own, and this year was no exception. Some of the writers are likely to go on to great careers, but as speakers emphasized several times, that's not the point of the award. Rather it's to give a budding artist (not necessarily a young one) a chance to grow in his or her own way. And what better fertilizer is there for that than the support of peers and a nice fat check?

* Corrected 10/31. I mashed up two of Atwoods mashups (Jane Eyre and the Creature from the Black Lagoon and this one) to produce the incorrect Jane Eyre and Heads That Grow Out From Under Your Arms. However, in today's climate, these are all good ideas worthy of substantial advances.

The Twenty-Five Thousand Pound Story

They sure know how to fund a literary award across the pond. On Sept. 13, the London's Sunday Times announced a £25,000 prize for just a single short story of up to 7,000 words from an author previously published in the U.K. or Ireland. (I'm not sure whether you have to be a citizen or resident of either place.) The deadline is November 30.

The name -- The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award -- is long enough to be a short story itself, but the prize comes to more than $40,000 at current exchange rates (at the least, close to $6 a word), more than any U.S. prize specifically for short fiction. The closest U.S. contender is the Rea Award, at $30,000, and that's for an author, not an individual work. The prize for the Ireland-based Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award is £35,000 (we'll find out the winner in a few days).

For the most part, U.S. literary prize amounts are markedly lower than those in the U.K. and Ireland. Enlisting corporate sponsorship has allowed book awards like Man Booker to hand out some pretty nice checks (£50,000). It's hard to imagine a U.S. newspaper teaming up with a U.S. bank to create a short story prize (especially with both industries tottering). The Los Angeles Times Wells Fargo Short Story Prize? The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs, however, do team up for a business book award. So maybe that's something we should explore further.

After five years, at $20,000, The Story Prize still offers the highest amount of any annual U.S. book award for fiction. Among the major fiction prizes, PEN/Faulkner pays $15,000, and the National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize both hand out $10,000. Of course, U.S. book awards offer the promise of reaching a larger audience. The Pulitzer, in particular, can pay rich dividends. Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge remains on the paperback bestseller list after 15 weeks. The U.S. also offers other support to writers, such as the MacArthur genius grants. Still, wouldn't it be nice to see some larger literary prize sums in the offing?

Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief Makes off with the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize

Congratulations to Hannah Tinti for winning the Mercantile Library's John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize* for The Good Thief (a result I learned on GalleyCat). As previously noted, Hannah is one of the three judges for The Story Prize this year, the editor of One-Story, and the author of a story collection, Animal Crackers. It's an accomplished book, well deserving of the honor.

*Hopefully, the Mercantile Library's Web site will soon reflect this outcome. As of the time this was posted (10:30 on Dec. 2), it hadn't. Speaking of which, the Rea Award for the Short Story still hasn't posted its latest winner--Amy Hempel--(announced Oct. 8!) on its site. Get on the stick, literary awards! We do our best to post The Story Prize winner within an hour or two of the announcement, and that involves changes throughout our site. We operate on a shoe-string budget, so I know it can be done.

Charles D'Ambrosio: For He's A Jolly Good Lannan Fellow

Short story writer Charles D'Ambrosio has won a $100,000 Lannan Foundation fellowship. Past winners known for writing short stories include: Robert Coover, Edwidge Danticat, Lydia Davis, Stuart Dybek, Deborah Eisenberg, Mavis Gallant, Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Steven Millhauser, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, George Saunders, Joanna Scott, David Foster Wallace, and John Edgar Wideman. It's a pretty impressive bunch, and that's not even the full list.

D'Ambrosio well deserves the honor. His 2006 short story collection, The Dead Fish Museum, which The Story Prize designated as a notable collection, is an excellent book. I particularly liked "The High Divide," "Drummond & Sons," and "The Scheme of Things," all of which first appeared in The New Yorker.

Authors who write short stories seem to do very well garnering literary honors, including the Whiting Writers' Awards and the MacArthur Foundation fellowships, in addition to the Lannan. It's when it comes to book awards for fiction that novels tend to dominate, which is one reason we created The Story Prize. Clearly, practitioners of the short story form (too bad there's not a term equivalent to "novelist") engender a lot of respect, which nobody can deny.