The Story Prize Longlist for Collections Published in 2025

In 2025, The Story Prize received as entries 114 books published by 72 different publishers or imprints. Unlike most other books awards, we release our longlist after we announce our shortlist of three finalists. These sixteen books, plus the three finalists and The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner (Trying to Be by John Haskell), combine to highlight 20 short story collections. Here are the books on our longlist: 

• The Words of Dr. L. by Karen E. Bender (Counterpoint)
• Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino (FSG Originals)
• Whites By Mark Doten (Graywolf Press)
• A Love Story From the End of the World by Juhea Kim (Ecco)
• Save Me Stranger by Erika Krouse (Flatiron Books)
• Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus (Ecco)
• Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin (Soft Skull)
• Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore (Tin House)
• Open Up by Thomas Morris (The Unnamed Press)
• Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund (Astra House)
• Waiting for the Long Night Moon by Amanda Peters (Catapult)
• Stag Dance by Torrey Peters  (Random House)
• Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)
• Small Scale Sinners by Mahreen Sohail (A Public Space)
• Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski (Simon & Schuster)
• The Pelican Child by Joy Williams (Alfred A. Knopf)

As we always say (and truly believe), anyone who writes and publishes a short story collection has overcome significant obstacles, has accomplished something noteworthy, and deserves enormous credit. As always, we received more worthwhile short story collections than we could possibly mention without making our longlist too long to be meaningful. We encourage readers to explore the full list of 2025 collections entered for The Story Prize on Bookshop.org.

We'll announce the 22nd winner of The Story Prize on March 31 at a private event featuring readings by and interviews with the three finalists—André Alexis, Lydia Millet, and Ayşegül Savaş. Before then, we'll provide a link to watch the program live or online in the days that follow the announcement of the winner.

The Story Prize Longlist for Story Collections Published in 2024

At The Story Prize we release a longlist of notable short story collections published in the previous year a few weeks after we announce our shortlist of three finalists. That list of 16 books, plus the three finalists and The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner (The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck), combine to highlight 20 short story collections. In 2024, The Story Prize received as entries 107 books published by 82 different publishers or imprints. Here are the books on our longlist: 

        •  Ghostroots by 'Pemi Aguda (W.W. Norton & Company) 
        •  How to Get Along Without Me by Kate Axelrod (Clash Books) 
        •  Ricky by Whitney Collins (Sarabande Books)
        •  Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press)
        •  Bugsy by Rafael Frumkin (Simon & Schuster)
        •  The Best That You Can You Do by Amina Gautier (Soft Skull)
        •  The Body Farm by Abby Geni (Counterpoint Press)
        •  Practice for Becoming a Ghost by Patrick Thomas Henry (Susquehanna
        Univ. Press)
        •  The Goodbye Process by Mary Jones (Zibby Books)
        •  How It Works Out by Myriam Lacroix (The Overlook Press)
        •  Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima (Tor)
        •  Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by Genarose Nethercott (Vintage Books)
        •  How to Make Your Mother Cry by Sejal Shah (West Virginia Univ. Press)
        •  Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (William Morrow)
        •  Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia (Tin House)
        •  Beautiful Days by Zach Williams (Doubleday)

Altogether, we received more worthwhile books than we could possibly mention without making our longlist a too-long-list, and it was difficult to narrow down the choices. It takes us a while to accomplish this because we do a fair amount of rereading. As always, we believe that anyone who writes and publishes a short story collection has overcome difficult obstacles, has accomplished something significant, and deserves enormous credit.  

We'll announce the 21st winner of The Story Prize on March 25 at a private event featuring readings by and interviews with the three finalists—Fiona McFarlane, Ruben ReyesJr., and Jessi Jezewska Stevens. Before then, we'll provide a link to watch the program live or online in the days that follow the announcement of the winner.

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they write citations for their top choices. This year's judges were critic and writer Merve Emre, librarian Allison Escoto, and writer Tania James. 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 judges had to say about Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li: 

“Profound loss and its aftermath permeate this elegant collection of stories by a truly gifted writer. The people in these captivating stories are all moving through grief: a woman on a solo trip to Europe after the death of her child. A temporary nanny guides a new, dubious mother through the turbulence of the early days of motherhood, knowing she will have to leave the baby to an uncertain fate. An elderly dying professor reminisces about the small but meaningful moments of her life as her caretaker looks back on the events that guided her to this moment in her life. These characters are indelible, the quiet moments of their lives described through beautiful language. They lead lives that are both compelling and relatable; they stay with you long after you leave their story.”

The Story Prize Longlist for Story Collections Published in 2023

At The Story Prize, we announce our shortlist of three finalists first—as we did a few weeks ago—then release our longlist later. The three finalists, The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner (which we recently announced), and the longlist combine to highlight 20 books. Here are the books published in 2023 that we've chosen:

        •  Temple Folk by Aaliyah Bilal (Simon & Schuster)
        •  Witness by Jamel Brinkley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
        •  I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle (Algonquin Books)
        •  The Faraway World by Patricia Engle (Avid Reader Press)
        •  Elsewhere by Yan Ge (Scribner)
        •  After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley (Alfred A. Knopf)
        •  Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny (Alfred A. Knopf)
        •  The Best Possible Experience by Nishanth Injam (Pantheon)
        •  So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (Grove Press)
        •  Disruptions by Steven Millhauser (Alfred A. Knopf)
        •  I Am My Country by Kenan Orhan (Random House)
        •  The Disappeared by Andrew Porter (Alfred A. Knopf)
        •  This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton)
        •  The People Who Report More Stress by Alejandro Varela (Astra House)
        •  Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine (Tin House)
        •  The Sorrows of Others by Ada Zhang (A Public Space)

Last year, The Story Prize received 113 books published by 84 different publishers or imprints. We read more worthwhile short story collections than is practical to include on our longlist, and it was very difficult to narrow down the choices. (That's why we take extra time to do some rereading before releasing our list.) As always, we believe that every writer who writes and publishes a short story collection has accomplished something significant and deserves a ton of credit. 

We've put together a Bookshop list of all the story collections that we received in 2023, many more worth reading than can fit on our longlist. We'll announce the 20th winner of The Story Prize on March 26 at a private event featuring readings by and interviews with the three finalists—Yiyun Li, Bennett Sims, and Paul Yoon. Before then, we'll provide links to watch the program live or online in the days that follow the announcement of the winner.

Announcing the 2023 Story Prize Judges: Merve Emre, Alllison Escoto, and Tania James!

(L to R) Merve Emre, Allison Escoto, and Tania James

Each year The Story Prize enlists three judges to choose the winner from among the three short story collections we select as finalists and annunce in January. In alternating years one of the judges is bookseller and one is a librarian. One judge is always a short story writer, and the third can be a critic, editor, or academic.

The judges who will choose the 20th winner of The Story Prize in March 2024 are critic and writer Merve Emre, head librarian at The Center for Fiction Allison Escoto, and novelist and short story writer Tania James. We didn't aim to have all three judges be women. It just turned out that this was the best group of judges we felt we could assemble this year—a pretty impressive bunch.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

Allison Escoto is the head librarian and director of education at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. She has worked as a librarian for more than twenty years in various libraries in and around New York City. She also reviews books for Booklist and serves on the ALA RUSA Notables committee. From 2017-2020, she was the Associate Editor for Newtown Literary Journal, a publication dedicated to featuring writers from her beloved Queens.

Tania James is the author of four works of fiction, most recently Loot (Knopf), which was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award in fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Freeman’s; Granta; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; and One Story, among other places, and featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. An associate professor of English in the MFA program at George Mason University, she lives in Washington, D.C.

Video of The Story Prize event: Lily King, J. Robert Lennon, and Brandon Taylor (winner)

Here's the edited video of The Story Prize event held on April 13:

 

The Story Prize Longlist for Short Story Collections Published in 2019

In 2019, The Story Prize received as entries 94 books published by 72 publishers or imprints. We choose the shortlist of three finalists first, then release our longlist a few weeks later. Between the three finalists, The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner, and the longlist, we acknowledge a total of 20 books. Here then is the longlist of 16 outstanding short story collections:

• Sing to It by Amy Hempel (Scribner)
• False Bingo by Jac Jemc (MCD x FSG Originals)
• Joy by Erin McGraw (Counterpoint)
• Instructions for a Funeral by David Means (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Minutes of Glory by Ngũgĩ  wa Thiong'o (The New Press)
• Honey in the Carcase by Josip Novakovich (Dzanc Books)
• Maggie Brown & Others by Peter Orner (Little, Brown and Company)
• Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons (Vintage Books)
• The Rapture Index by Molly Reid (BOA Editions)
• You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian (Scout Press)
• Orange World by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf)
• The World Doesn't Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott (Liveright)
• Guestbook by Leanne Shapton (Riverhead Books)
• She Was Like That by Kate Walbert (Scribner)
• Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang (Hogarth)
• Lot by Bryan Washington (Riverhead Books)

Every writer who published a short story collection in 2019 accomplished something of great significance and deserves an enormous amount of credit. It's always difficult to narrow the field down, and this time was no exception.

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 Edwidge Danticat, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Zadie Smith will read from and discuss their work. You can buy tickets in advance online or that night at the box office.

Goodbye Guest Blog Posts, Hello Author Instagram Posts

After nine years of featuring guest posts from writers whose books have been submitted for The Story Prize (538 of them, to be exact), we've jumped to another social media platform: Instagram. So far this year, we've featured 23 guest posts. We ask every writer whose book we receive to share an image (or a few images) that inspired, informed, are essential to, or represent her or his book or a particular story in it, along with a brief explanation of the image or images. Contributors so far include Michael Carroll, Amy Hempel, Cary Holladay, Carrianne Leung, Mark Mayer, Josip Novakovich, Chris Power, and Aurelie Sheehan. To see these posts, follow @TheStoryPrize on Instagram.

George Saunders (and The Story Prize) on CBS Sunday Morning

If you watch this profile George Saunders that ran earlier today on CBS Sunday Morning, at the 3:05 mark, you'll see Story Prize Founder Julie Lindsey announcing Saunders as the winner of The Story Prize. A producer asked for permission to film at last year's event. We, of course, said yes, and we've been waiting for our 15 seconds ever since then.

Up on My Soapbox for Publishers Weekly

I've written a Soapbox column for Publishers Weekly to share some of the perspective on short story collections I've gained from reading for The Story Prize for 10 years. It will appear on the back page of the next issue of PW. Here's the opening:

"At the end of every year of reading collections for The Story Prize, four copies each of approximately 100 books end up stacked in my small home office, a space already crammed with volumes from previous years. My wife has pointed out that I could create more room for myself by asking for only two books per entry and requesting additional copies of the three finalists when I needed to send them to the judges in January. However, I want to have books ready to send out the instant Julie Lindsay, the founder of The Story Prize, and I make our final choices. And I like to think that any collection that comes our way could make the cut."

To continue reading...

And the Finalists for The Story Prize Are...Andrea Barrett, Rebecca Lee, and George Saunders

2013 finalists for The Story Prize: Barrett, Lee, and Saunders

The Story Prize, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, is pleased to honor three outstanding short story collections chosen from 96 submissions representing 64 different publishers or imprints. The three finalists are:

• Archangel by Andrea Barrett (W.W. Norton)
• Bobcat by Rebecca Lee (Algonquin Books)
• Tenth of December by George Saunders (Random House)

On March 5, these three authors will read from and discuss their work on-stage at The New School's Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street at an event that starts at 7:30 p.m. After the final author interview, Julie LIndsey, Founder of The Story Prize, will announce the winner, who will get $20,000—still the most of any annual U.S. book award for fiction—along with an engraved silver bowl. The other two finalists will each take home $5,000.

You can buy tickets to the March 5 event from The New School box office online or by calling 212-229-5488.

It's always difficult to choose just three books as finalists (and one as The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner), and several other books we read would have made excellent choices. In the weeks ahead, I'll post a list of some of these other collections. Also look for more posts leading up to the event and to commemorate ten years of The Story Prize.

Julie and I have chosen the finalists, now, it's up to our three judges—Stephen Ennis, Antonya Nelson, and Rob Spillman—to determine which book will get the top prize. We will announce the outcome at our March 5 event and via social media: Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and Facebook.

Happy 100th Birthday, Mr. Cheever

Yesterday—May 27—would have been John Cheever's 100th birthday, and I like to think that I have the day off form work for that reason. In fact, maybe Memorial Day should be an annual occasion to remember writers whose work is, well, memorable. After all, May is Short Story Month.

I would be remiss if I didn't also reiterate that this Thursday night, May 31, at the Center for Fiction, The Story Prize will be co-presenting a tribute to The Stories of John Cheever. Susan Minot will read from and discuss JC's "The Sorrows of Gin." Rick Moody will focus on "The Jewels of the Cabots." And Elizabeth Strout will read from "The Worm in the Apple." If you're going to be there (and I hope you are), I would highly recommend reading/re-reading these three stories.

The 92nd Street Y offered it's centennial tribute to John Cheever, with a focus on the man himself. With the exception of Michael Chabon's spirited reading of "The Enormous Radio," the program was almost entirely dedicated to the writer and not his work. Biographer Blake Bailey read excerpts that focused on Cheever grappling with his fame. Susan Cheever read from her father's diaries, admiring the gorgeous prose that permeated even work that wasn't written for publication. And Allan Gurganus, Cheever's former student and more, read the last few sentences of "Goodbye, My Brother," and spoke at length about personal encounters with his mentor.

I'm glad the 92nd Street Y did this. Now we can focus on the reason we even remember this man 100 years after his birth—his fiction and, in particular, his stories. Call me romantic, but I would be taking note of this occasion even if I'd never seen the photos of John Cheever's handsome, craggy face or heard recordings of his exaggerated patrician accent, or learned about his troubled family relationships and his personal demons. For most of us, the stories transcend the life.

The Story Prize Judges: Sherman Alexie, Breon Mitchell, and Louise Steinman

The Story Prize is fortunate this year to have Hollywood types Jorge Cloony* and Sofia Lorren* announce this year's judges (Sherman Alexie, Breon Mitchell, and Louise Steinman) live** from the White House:†

 (The transcript)

Jorge Klooney: Do you know who the judges for The Story Prize are?
Sofia Lorren: Yes. I hear the brilliant novelist/short story writer/poet/screenwriter/director Sherman Alexie is one of the judges.
Jorge: Whoa! Those are a lot of slashes. You know, I am an actor/writer/director.
Sofia: I will ignore that. Another judge is Professor Breon Mitchell of Indiana University.
Jorge: Say isn't he a well known translator of books such as The Tin Drum and The Trial by Franz Kafka, not to mention the Director of the Lilly Library at Indiana University?
Sofia: Indeed
Jorge: And who is the third judge,? Not that creep Simon Whatever, I hope.
Sofia: The Story Prize has better taste than that. The third judge this year is Louise Steinman.
Jorge: Say, isn't she the curator of the ALOUD reading/conversation series for the L.A. Public Library and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC?
Sofia: Yes. She is also an author and a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Jorge: Wow! That is quite a lineup. I can't wait to find out which three books they choose as finalists for The Story Prize.
Sofia: The judges do NOT choose the finalists. Julie Lindsey and Larry Dark do that.
Jorge: Oh, I guess that is just a popular misconception. The judges choose the winner from among the three finalists.
Sofia: Now you have it! The Story Prize will announce its finalists in January. And the winner -- as chosen by Alexie, Mitchell, and Steinman -- will be announced on March 21, 2012.
Jorge: That's at the end of an evening of readings by and interviews with the authors.
Sofia: Yes. It will be at The New School in New York City. So mark it on your calendar. And, remember...
Jorge: Keep it short!

For more on The Story Prize judges, see our Web site. In the weeks ahead, we hope to feature each judge in a separate blog post. 

*    celebrity lookalike avatars
**  okay, not live, pre-recorded
†   location lookalike avatar

New Assistants Phedra and Patrick Extend the Reach of The Story Prize

We're pleased to introduce two writing students from the Rutgers-Newark MFA program, Phedra Deonarine and Patrick Thomas Henry, have just joined The Story Prize as assistants:

Phedra Deonarine lived in Trinidad for eighteen years. She then moved to Vancouver where she earned a B.A. in English from the University of British Columbia. Her short story "Pelau" was long-listed for the 2010 CBC Literary Awards. She is currently the Truman Capote Fellow in the Creative Writing M.F.A. Program at Rutgers University-Newark.

Patrick Thomas Henry is a graduate of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University and has also earned an MA in English literature at Bucknell University. Currently, he attends the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark.  His fiction is forthcoming in Revolution House and The Writing Disorder; he has published review essays in the journal Modern Language Studies, and he is the author of the critical head notes in On Writing Short Stories, edited by Tom Bailey. He blogs about literature and related topics at The Penguin in the Machine.



Sarah Bridgins, who is now a literary agent with the Francis Goldin Agency, served as an assistant for several years, and Brett Duquette, now working as an editor for Sterling Publishing, helped out more recently.

One of the main jobs of our assistants is to contact publishers about short story collections we're interested in reading to make them aware of our deadlines. They also provide another perspective on some of the collections we receive.

This time around, however, we're doing something different: Phedra and Patrick will also be attending literary events in New York City and elsewhere and reporting on them for this blog. Other sites, such as Electric Literature's The Outlet have been doing this for some time. It seems like a good way to broaden our focus on short fiction and to support bookstores, institutions, reading series, and literary magazines that are essential to the short story.

If you'd like TSP to cover your event, please feel free to contact us at info@thestoryprize.org (a week before the event, if possible). 

Yiyun Li: What the Judges Had to Say About Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were bookseller Marie du Vaure, Granta editor John Freeman, and author Jayne Anne Phillips. 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 judges had to say about finalist Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl:

In deceptively simple prose, Li plumbs the depths of the human soul, managing through her lonely characters to put us in touch with our own yearnings. China is the setting for most of the stories in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, but they could be happening anywhere, so strong is Li’s empathy for her characters and the universal sense of humanity she conveys. "Kindness," the long story that begins the collection, sets the tone for the entire book presenting a seemingly uneventful life that hones in on the utterly gripping interior drama of its narrator. Each story that follows opens gently like a flower and ends—to our astonishment—in full bloom. Li’s fine and careful work shows that simple can be profound and depth of feeling trumps elaborate machinations. To be so wonderfully in control and yet so keenly attuned to emotion is a rare gift indeed.

photo © Eric Richards 

Suzanne Rivecca: What the Judges Had to Say About Death Is Not an Option

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were bookseller Marie du Vaure, Granta editor John Freeman, and author Jayne Anne Phillips. 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 judges had to say about finalist Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not an Option:

Suzanne Rivecca's stories are truly “illuminated lamentations . . .  testimonies of harm” that continually startle and surprise. These stories of female sensibility speak to our times with ironic, brilliant strength, their voices linked by a young writer's empathetic genius. Rivecca's unhappy, discerning, always inquiring protagonists journey to various hearts of darkness, crossing cultural, religious, sexual, and generational boundaries with wit and angelic rage. Each seems a soul pulsing with linguistic energy and exhilarating intelligence. Rivecca reminds us that we are all connected, similar to our very molecules and erratic genes, inextricably bound by desire, shame, guilt, and ecstatic possibility. Death Is Not an Option becomes an impassioned directive about how to read, how to write, and how to live.

photo © Eric Richards

Anthony Doerr: What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Memory Wall

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were bookseller Marie du Vaure, Granta editor John Freeman, and author Jayne Anne Phillips. 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 one judge had to say about Anthony Doerr's Story Prize winning collection Memory Wall:

Anthony Doerr’s incandescent collection of stories is a poignant elaboration on the idea of how memory affects the course of our lives, and how it acts as the true portal to our own selves. Each story is a tribute to the irrepressible need of humans to draw on remembrance in order to shape their future. When confronted with the alienating pain of loss or disappointment, the protagonists compensate for that void in projecting their recollections of that experience onto the canvas of their new daily reality. As such, and through the solicitous and careful artistry of the writer, these characters are able to recreate a stronger self, and they move on through a last reshaping process, even if that means facing their very own end and erasure. It is the shimmering space between the two planes of reality and memory that Doerr captures with immense sensitivity.
  Doerr is adept at evoking a variety of places and different times in history, conjuring sharp settings in which the fragility of his characters is played out. The diversity of backgrounds underscores his poetic skill at illustrating his themes of emotional distancing and the resilience of hope. While he displays a rare imagination in the handling of his subjects, he maintains a beautiful and quiet grace in his precise, spare style, providing a harmonious resonance to all of the stories. Memory Wall is an astonishing work that bears the signature of a writer of remarkable talent and impressive maturity.  It leaves the reader deeply moved and carrying the indelible impression of having witnessed compassion in the making.

And another judge observed that:

Anthony Doerr has long been fascinated with the natural world. He has a botanist’s broad vocabulary, a trail guide’s solo instincts. But there has always been a division – especially in his fine and very funny book on trying (and failing) to write in Italy, Four Seasons in Rome, between our lives, and the lives of, say, crustaceans. As if the natural world were out there, fleetingly glimpsed, constantly being pushed aside by the so-called everyday world. Doerr has finally broken down that boundary with this extraordinary collection of stories, Memory Wall. It is the work of a writer who has absorbed the natural world so deeply he can write with its metaphors. Or to put it another way: this book creates its own ecology. Instead of water, there is longing, and instead of air, there is memory. Within these parameters, Doerr unspools the lives of men and women who are haunted by the past’s proximity. In the brilliant title novella, a woman in South Africa undergoes a dangerous procedure which allows her failing memories to be restored to their original state in replayable cartridges—only to have them stolen. Other stories take place in Estonia, Germany, Korea, and Wyoming, as if Doerr is making a political point that not only are our memories ourselves, they are the bedrock in which nations plant their strongest roots. The heroes of these stories are equally wide-ranging—from Holocaust survivors to a storied sturgeon which reappears, long after people assumed it was dead. They all stand before the same existential dread – erasure, and the vanishing of memory. “Every hour,” Doerr writes in “Afterworld,” “all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. This astonishing collection identifies what needs to be preserved. And brings us right to the water’s edge, where the sand bags are being put down.

photo © Eric Richards 

Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall Wins The Story Prize

Anthony Doerr has won The Story Prize for his extraordinary collection of stories, Memory Wall, in which memory serves as a theme to connect six stories set in disparate times and places. Founder Julie Lindsey presented him with the $20,000 award and an engraved silver bowl at an event that took place at The New School in New York City on Wednesday night, March 4. The other finalists, Yiyun Lin for Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and Suzanne Rivecca for Death Is Not an Option, each received $5,000. All three authors read from and discussed their work onstage.

More details will follow, including the judges' citations for all three books. A Web cast will follow on FORA.tv in a few weeks. We'll post photos from both the event and reception on The Story Prize Web site in the days ahead and will also link to notable press coverage. We're grateful to all three writers for their participation and, most of all, for their wonderful books.

It was a pleasure meeting and talking to Tony, Yiyun, and Suzanne. And all three read beautifully, and we look forward to more great work from them.

Author Posts on TSP: So Far, So Very Good

We're at the halfway point of our entry period, having received 49 story collections as entries for The Story Prize as of the July 15 deadline for books published in the first half of 2010. The deadline for books published July through December is November 15.

Just some of the collections so far entered for The Story Prize

We're not nearly halfway through our ambitious plan to dedicate a post to each book, having run 18 posts so far. But we have several more lined up and promised. The form the posts have generally taken has either been a short essay by or a Q&A with the author. And we'll write our own posts about the books for which we don't get author contributions.

The aim of The Story Prize, of course, is to promote the short story form. Our efforts in past years have focused on the three books we choose as finalists each year and the six books our judges have chosen as winners. But we've always wanted to do more to promote our objective. We added a long list of other notable books the second year because more good collections come out each year than we can honor. But even our long list isn't long enough. So we decided to use this modest platform to shine the spotlight on every book we read and consider. Many of these books (I'd hazard to say most of them) get far less attention than they deserve.

I was, admittedly, reluctant to do this at first. I'm always concerned about remaining neutral, not wanting to reveal what we think of individual collections until we announce our finalists and long list in January. But neutrality hasn't turned out to be a problem with the posts. The introduction for each is short and straightforward; we're letting the authors' words speak for themselves rather than hype the books. And because we're posting about each one, we can remain evenhanded.

What has been surprising to me has been how consistently interesting these posts have been. Our contributors' insights into their own process, what interests them, and how their collections took shape reveal just how different and personal each writer's approach is. What they have in common is a sense of being attuned to the world and a desire to make something that reflects and amplifies their unique sensibilities.

Thanks to the thoughtful essays and answers the authors have provided, we're beginning to amass a good resource for readers, students, and writers interested in the short story form. We're only going to build on that in the months ahead. So stay tuned.

For Every Story Collection, A Post

I've set an ambitious goal for this blog. I hereby pledge to write a post about every single book entered for The Story Prize in 2010. The posts may be observations about the book, a focus on design, a Q&A with the author, an author essay, a book trailer--who knows.

I hope this will bring a little more attention to a lot more story collections. Last year we read 78 of them, and I expect about the same number this year. So brace yourselves.