George Saunders Wins His First Book Award, The Story Prize, for Tenth of December

George Saunders with the winner's bowl
(photo by Beowulf Sheehan)

To say that George Saunders' work has been widely celebrated, is something of an understatement. He has been a fellow of both the McArthur and Guggenheim variety. He has won the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and Harper's magazine and have been chosen for the annual O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Story collections numerous times. He has appeared on Charlie Rose, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Colbert Report. Magazine cover stories have been written about him, and he has had a best-selling book, which appeared on the The New York Times lists for 15 weeks and reached as high as no. 2 on the hardcover list (all for a short story collection!).

Pretty heady stuff—especially considering that those are just some of the highlights. Still, one thing George Saunders had never accomplished—that is until last night—was winning a book award. Well, now he has. Saunders' story collection, Tenth of December, is this year's winner of The Story Prize. After he and fellow finalists Andrea Barrett and Rebecca Lee read from and discussed their work on stage at The New School in New York City, the Founder of The Story Prize, Julie Lindsey, announced Saunders as the winner, and he took the stage to accept the award.

In the days ahead, here and on our Web site, we'll post more about this, including citations from the judges, photos (also on Instagram) from the event and the after party, video, and links to media coverage.

The Story Prize and McNally Jackson: It's All About the Books

The Story Prize event is tomorrow night (March 5) at 7:30 p.m. at The New School's auditorium at 66 West 12th Street. The three finalists, Andrea Barrett (Archangel), Rebecca Lee (Bobcat), and George Saunders (Tenth of December) will read from and discuss their work on-stage. At the end, we'll announce the winner. We hope you can join us.

The evening aims, most of all, to be a celebration of these three authors, their incredible books, and, more broadly, short story collections. We're pleased to have one of the top independent booksellers around, McNally Jackson, selling signed copies at the event. And McNally Jackson is making it especially easy for anyone there—and those who can't be—to get copies. 

The McNally Jackson book table at last year's event
(L to R, Brett Duquette, and booksellers Anna Chen and Javier Molea)
photo © Beowulf Sheehan

• Let's say you're at the event and want to buy signed copies of the books, but you don't want to lug them around all night (or are prone to accidentally leaving things behind, like some of us are). No problem: McNally Jackson will provide free shipping for anyone who buys three or more books. You walk out empty handed (or no more burdened than you were when you arrived), and the books show up later at your house.
• Let's say a book is sold out, and you want a copy. McNally Jackson will follow up by shipping it after the event.
• Let's say you can't make the event and still would like signed copies of Archangel, Bobcat, or Tenth of December. For one month after the event, McNally Jackson will ship signed copies of the three finalists' books for free (while supplies last) when ordered from their Web site. All you need to do to get free shipping is to type into the comment box at checkout: Free Shipping-The Story Prize.

We're very pleased that McNally Jackson is the official bookseller of The Story Prize. And last year, bookseller-in-chief Sarah McNally served as one of our judges. Our ultimate aim is to get more short story collections into readers' hands, particularly those of our finalists. Hats off to our bookseller for making it easier to buy these books—and, we hope, a little harder not to.

Day Four at AWP Seattle: Dear Writer...

With The Story Prize event just days away, we're unable to attend this year's AWP Conference—the Association of Writers & Writing Programs' annual gathering. So we've enlisted Molly Reid, a Portland-based writer, to report from the goings on in Seattle. 

AWP Conference, Seattle, 2014: Day Four

Speaking Swaghili

My bag is heavy. Such lovely books, some as small as a postcard, others the size of a newspaper, with haunting covers in matte and gloss and simple paper, beckoning you to touch, smell the ink, read the words inside. The Saturday afternoon mob at the bookfair is a polite mob, a literary mob. There is little malice here, just the frenzied feeding on free swag. The magazines and presses are giving away their wares so they don’t have to lug it all home, if not for free then severely discounted. And even though you know you can’t fit another thing into your suitcase, it’s hard to pass up the new issue of Mid-American Review. 

The man in the iron horse

Not just books. There are magnets, notepads, postcards, pins, screen cleaners, oranges, candy, T-shirts, bags, broadsides, and fortune cookies. Rumors circulate: So-and-so has the best chocolate (Omnidawn by unofficial consensus). There is a table offering a shot of whiskey (I search in vain, going up and down the aisles; with 650 exhibitors, it can be hard to find what you’re looking for, especially if you don’t have the name of a journal and you’re afraid to ask, "Where is the free whiskey?"). At Iron Horse Review, you can take your picture with someone wearing a rubber horse head.  

The bookfair is a chance to actually meet the people who read and publish—or reject—your work. The process of submitting can feel anonymous and disheartening, sending out stories and poems into the void, or maw, whatever vast or violent metaphor is appropriate for the piece and the nature of the rejection. After putting everything into your work, sweating in the dark private rooms of your soul, you offer your creation to the world, to someone, probably, you’ve never met before—nameless, faceless—who more often than not rejects it, sometimes with a form letter that doesn’t even have your name, just “Dear Writer, Thank you for the opportunity to consider this. I’m sorry to say, this piece is not right for us at this time.”

The bookfair reveals these editors and interns to be actual people, who are genuinely interested in you and your work, who work so hard to put good art into the world. The bookfair joins writers with the places and people who help them reach an audience, with most of that audience roaming the aisles. It brings the community of presses and magazines and writing programs together and allows them to interact and put names to faces and meet the writers they champion. “One of the most valuable things here,” Stephanie G’Schwind, editor of Colorado Review, says, “is meeting the authors we work closely with, and meeting our potential authors, letting them see there’s a face, a human being, behind the magazine.”
 

At the tables: actual people

The bookfair is the big crooked beating heart at the center of AWP, and as I watch the interns carefully pack all their books and magazines and key chains into boxes, chocolate foils crinkled on the carpet at their feet, I feel sad this is all coming to a close, and so very grateful for these literary pioneers and architects. An editor gave me a bottle of wine she couldn’t fit, and, even though I had no room in my bag, I accepted it with pleasure—it was the least I could do.  

—Molly Reid

Days Two and Three at AWP Seattle: A Hallucinatory Experience

With The Story Prize event just days away, we're unable to attend this year's AWP Conference—the Association of Writers & Writing Programs' annual gathering. So we've enlisted Molly Reid, a Portland-based writer, to report from the goings on in Seattle. 

AWP Conference, Seattle, 2014: Days Two and Three

Writing advice with a smile at the One Story booth (P34)
(L-R: author Marie-Helene Bertino, someone else)

It’s morning, day three of the conference, and I am hung over. But not in the traditional sense. New ideas, old friends, epiphanies, readings, and okay a little alcohol—combine to create a brand new kind of vertigo. There is a zombie quality now to the escalator throngs. The sort of daze that arrives after so much engagement. Everyone is ruffled at this point. Only Chang-rae Lee still looks dapper (at least as far as I could tell—he was on the other side of the bar surrounded by friends and fans).
 
After listening to people talk about novel structure and character-driven plot and the pure messy magic of ink, I realize I trust them, these panelists: They choose their words with such care. They say what I’ve thought but haven’t been able to articulate and also what I’ve never thought but is so true it’s accompanied by ache. Sure there are duds in the bunch, and standing-room only out the door at some panels (I was squeezed out of “Magic and the Intellect” with Rikki Ducornet, which I have a feeling would have changed my life), but I for one still feel like I’m getting my money’s worth. There is a genuine attempt to gather failure and success and impart something.    

One thing that’s great about AWP is that people don’t come to bag an agent or impress an editor, which makes it easier to see that there is such authentic warmth and support. People spend all day going to panels and manning tables at the book fair, and then they spend all night going to readings to hear people they love and those they admire and some they’ve never heard of read their work. Voluntarily. Exhausted. Hungry. They go, and they listen intently, and they clap and holler.

Literary journals host readings of the coolest writers you’ve never heard of, and their juxtaposition—these writers who live all over the country and are rarely in the same place at the same time—creates a lovely hallucinatory experience. At The Southern Humanities Review/Carolina Wren Press reading last night, a woman read an essay about a lucky dress worn to her husband’s surgery. This was immediately followed by a poet’s image of a man giving CPR to a lady gorilla. Another poet talked about the cities we build inside ourselves. Someone read from a novel about a Cuban-American family’s struggle with dreams and expectations.

As the night goes on, there is an exodus, as writers are kicked out of one place and move onto another, searching for one last piece of goodness, brilliance, laughter—from the bar to the Elliott Bay Book Company to the Hugo House, back to the bar. The Hugo House is so crowded the reading is piped in to the other rooms like commands from a submarine captain you can’t see.

Hint: His name rhymes with AWP

But it’s our submarine. We are the ones manning this ship—is it heading to the rocks, or open water? (Sorry about that metaphor, but I went to a panel yesterday called “From Sea to Sea: Poets on the Power of Water” and everything’s running together, in a good way.)
     —Molly Reid

Day One at AWP Seattle: Practical Concerns

With The Story Prize event just days away, we're unable to attend this year's AWP Conference—the Association of Writers & Writing Programs' annual gathering. So we've enlisted Molly Reid, a Portland-based writer, to report from the goings on in Seattle. 

AWP Conference, Seattle, 2014: Day One

Enlightenment? Or Oblivion?

This seems familiar, doesn’t it? The dark-rimmed glasses, the lanyards (this time a bright lime-green), the endless coffee cups and totes and carefully cultivated air of discernment. Going up a series of escalators into the bright wash of light that you hope will offer enlightenment but suspect might be oblivion.

Panels like “Daydreaming at the Mini-Mart: The Suburbs and Literary Imagination,” “The Word is a Door: Contemporary Arabic Literature and the Poetics of Revolution,” and “In Your Next Letter I Wish You’d Say: Epistolary Impulse and Innovation”: When you marked them a month ago in the online planner, you felt already inspired, just like you remembered when you were younger, in grad school, when this conference, with its days dedicated to serious discussions of craft and teaching and how to live as a writer, was something you looked forward to all year.

Which is why you wanted to go this year—low on inspiration, looking for a good dance party and a few free drinks and maybe a little camaraderie, the AWP conference sounded like just the kind of charge you and your writing needed.  

However, despite your best efforts, you seem to no longer be interested in the same brand of inspiration you used to. You attend “The Third Degree: Why Writers Pursue Additional Education Beyond the Master’s” and “Beef Jerky, Bras, and Car Parts: What We Write About When We Write for Money.” You write down things like “Pitch to the holes,” and, “Quest antithetically and live to beget yourself.” Also, that writing copy for porn reviews and car commercials could be the greatest thing you never knew you wanted to do.

And—not that these panels aren’t interesting and enlightening—because they are—but you discover you’re a little disgusted with yourself that this is what you care about now: practical concerns. Not just how to be inspired, but how to live, how to be paid. You can practically hear your mother approving. When did this shift happen?  

You can’t help but think about the last time you were at AWP, or the first time, the sense of hope and possibility. When being a “real” writer, “making it,” was just a matter of time and not perspective. When you knew better than to use the second person as another cheap trick to distance yourself from the action.

Maybe inspiration is something that now you have to ease into, approach at an angle, be surprised by. Maybe you no longer trust the search of it—it’s here, just not as obvious as before. This is only the first day.

On a related note, the Mid-American Review is holding a My Little Pony writing contest, 500 words or less, poetry or prose, due by 3pm Friday. Could Applejack finally receive the recognition she deserves? Only time will tell.

—Molly Reid

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...

What We Tweet About When We Blog About Instagram

The Story Prize is on Instagram (@TheStoryPrize). What you can expect to see, should you choose to follow, are: a preview of the printed program for our March 5 event at The New School (see below), behind-the-scenes shots from that day, post event photos, plus other images relating to The Story Prize throughout the year.

Art by Tomas A. Allen, design: Steven Charny

We're also on Twitter (@TheStoryPrize) and Facebook. So expect us to Tweet our Instagrams, Facebook our blog posts, etc., etc., etc.