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.]

A Long List (That Could Be Even Longer)

Since the second year of The Story Prize, we've posted a list of other notable books beyond the three we choose as our finalists each year. Here are fifteen other highly recommended short story collections published in 2009:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck (Alfred A. Knopf)

Robert Boswell, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (Graywolf Press)

Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press and, later, W.W. Norton)

Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible (HarperCollins)

Brian Evenson, Fugue State (Coffee House Press)

Petina Gappah, An Elegy for Easterly (Faber and Faber)

Aleksander Hemon, Love And Obstacles (Riverhead Books)

Barb Johnson, More of This World or Maybe Another (Harper Perennial)

James Lasdun, It's Beginning to Hurt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

J. Robert Lennon, Pieces for the Left Hand (Graywolf Prress)

Caitlin Macy, Spoiled (Random House)

Lydia Millet, Love in Infant Monkeys (Soft Skull Press)

Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World (University of Georgia Press)

Jean Thompson, Do Not Deny Me (Simon & Schuster)

Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books)

These selections are, as always subjective, and not being on the list should in no way detract from the achievements of the other collections we read. Every writer who published a book of short stories in 2009 beat the odds and achieved something significant, and there are, of course, quite a few other collections well worth reading.

It's hard to narrow down the choices to a reasonable number of notable books from the 75 or so we read each year (78 in 2009), and it seems like every year it gets harder, with even more good collections to choose from. Short fiction gained some serious momentum in 2009, and I believe that will only continue.

Audio, Video, and Other Notable 2008 Collections @ TheStoryPrize.org

We've revamped The Story Prize Web site, adding audio and video, as well as pull-down menus that enhance the navigation, thanks to Web master John Parsons, who created the precociously classic look of the site.

The audio is of an appearance on WNYC's Lopate Show with the 2006/07 finalists for The Story Prize--Rick Bass, Mary Gordon, and George Saunders. The video consist of two Web casts: one from the 2006 event with finalists Jim Harrison, Maureen McHugh, and Patrick O'Keeffe; and a slicker production from last year's event with Tessa Hadley, Vincent Lam, and Jim Shepard.

Missing in action is audio from our first event at Symphony Space in 2005, some of which we hope to add soon. We'll also link to this year's Web cast once it's up, which should be a couple of weeks after the event. Our goal is to create an audio and video archive of all of our annual award events. As before, you can also see photos from each year.

In addition, we've finally posted a page on the fourteen other notable story collections from 2008. I provided the list itself here a couple of weeks ago. The page on the Web site adds text to that, with a paragraph on each book focusing on one particular story. We can't recommend these books highly enough. We also have lists from 2007, 2006, and 2005.

And while we're at it, we might as well mention that The Story Prize event is just a month away, with finalists Jhumpa Lahiri, Joe Meno, and Tobas Wolff reading from and discussing their work at the New School on March 4. Why wait for the Web cast when you can see it live?

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.

The Short List, Long List, Other Notable Books--Whatever

It looks like it's going to take me a little while to post a page of Other Notable Books published in 2008 (which is what we call our shortlist/longlist) on The Story Prize Web site. That's because I write a paragraph on each book, and that involves flipping through the collections again to refresh my memory and sometimes rereading a story or two. So I guess I might as well just go ahead and put out the list. Here it is:

A Better Angel by Chris Adrian (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan (Little Brown)
The Development by John Barth (Houghton Mifflin)
The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier (Pantheon)
Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Harcourt)
The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford (HarperCollins)
I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass (Pantheon)
The Boat by Nam Le (Knopf)
Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser (Knopf)
Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx (Scribner)*
Glass Grapes and Other Stories by Martha Ronk (BOA Editions)
The Size of the World by Joan Silber (W.W. Norton)
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
Legend of a Suicide by David Vann (University of Massachusetts Press)

Compare this list to the tally I made in December of short story collections named to yearend best books list (or don't because I'm about to), and you'll see a lot of overlap. Ten of the 14 books on this list, plus two of our finalists (Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins)--for a total of 12--overlapped with the 22 books listed on that post. I'd add, that six of those books weren't entered for The Story Prize, so it's really 12 out of 16.

On the other hand, there are five books on our list that I didn't see mentioned in any yearend lists (though in all fairness I stopped counting on Dec. 15). What explains this? For one, there's the old (but true) saw that there's no accounting for taste. Secondly, we probably read more story collections than anyone picking books for those lists, so our field was bigger.

Still, I can't help but feel that some very good books were overlooked. To begin with, I didn't see finalist Joe Meno's Demons in the Spring on any yearend list and, obviously, if we think it's good enough to be a finalist, we feel like that's a major ommission. Demons was well-reviewed when it was reviewed, which wasn't enough. I also find it surprising that I didn't see John Barth's The Development--which gave me as much pleasure as any book I read--on any lists.

In any event, I'll give some of my thoughts on particular books on this list in upcoming posts and say more about our finalists soon.

* Note: We got Annie Proulx's collection in galley form, hence the white spine on the book fifth from the right.