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The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction
This anthology of short stories marks the fifteenth anniversary of The Story Prize and includes one story from each of the annual winning collections—chosen by the authors themselves—beginning with Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker and concluding with Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible.
The founder of The Story Prize, Julie Lindsey, and its director, Larry Dark, created this award to address the lack of one specifically for collections of stories. Together they choose three finalists from the previous year’s publications, which are sent to three judges—an author, a bookseller or librarian, and a critic or editor—who, independently of one another, relay their choices. The prize is then presented at an annual celebration in New York, where the finalists read from their books and then discuss their work with Dark. Excerpts from these interviews—or, in a few cases, the judges’ citations—introduce each story in the book.
As for the stories themselves, as Dark writes: “If you’re looking for themes to mine from the fourteen stories collected here, good luck. Each is distinctive, sometimes jarringly different in tone, scope, and language from the story that proceeds and follows it. For instance, Patrick O’Keeffe’s elegiac novella set in rural Ireland hands the baton to Mary Gordon’s short humorous story that takes place in a New York City podiatrist’s office. After Tobias Wolff’s brief classic story about a literary critic who experiences a succession of memories in the nanoseconds before he dies from a gunshot wound comes Daniyal Mueenuddin’s detailed exploration of the life of a Pakistani servant that unfolds over many years."
The other winners whose stories are collected here are Jim Shepard, Anthony Doerr, Steven Millhauser, Claire Vaye Watkins, George Saunders, Elizabeth McCracken, Adam Johnson, and Rick Bass. The authors chose each of the stories included to read at the annual Story Prize event, and each is a small miracle of inventiveness and passion.
The founder of The Story Prize, Julie Lindsey, and its director, Larry Dark, created this award to address the lack of one specifically for collections of stories. Together they choose three finalists from the previous year’s publications, which are sent to three judges—an author, a bookseller or librarian, and a critic or editor—who, independently of one another, relay their choices. The prize is then presented at an annual celebration in New York, where the finalists read from their books and then discuss their work with Dark. Excerpts from these interviews—or, in a few cases, the judges’ citations—introduce each story in the book.
As for the stories themselves, as Dark writes: “If you’re looking for themes to mine from the fourteen stories collected here, good luck. Each is distinctive, sometimes jarringly different in tone, scope, and language from the story that proceeds and follows it. For instance, Patrick O’Keeffe’s elegiac novella set in rural Ireland hands the baton to Mary Gordon’s short humorous story that takes place in a New York City podiatrist’s office. After Tobias Wolff’s brief classic story about a literary critic who experiences a succession of memories in the nanoseconds before he dies from a gunshot wound comes Daniyal Mueenuddin’s detailed exploration of the life of a Pakistani servant that unfolds over many years."
The other winners whose stories are collected here are Jim Shepard, Anthony Doerr, Steven Millhauser, Claire Vaye Watkins, George Saunders, Elizabeth McCracken, Adam Johnson, and Rick Bass. The authors chose each of the stories included to read at the annual Story Prize event, and each is a small miracle of inventiveness and passion.
394 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
May 27, 2020
I'm trying to get to some of my books of short stories by reading one almost every morning, so I'll keep track here.
This collection features the winning story from the last 15 years of The Story Prize, from Edwidge Danticat to Elizabeth Strout. I'd read four of these stories in their own collections already, but really enjoyed every story in this book for different reasons.
"The Book of Miracles" by Edwidge Danticat
Phew, heavier when you realize how much the mother is carrying and can't share. I've always meant to read more by this author.
"The Postman's Cottage" by Patrick O'Keeffe
The village, the people, the story all reminded me of Reservoir 13.
"My Podiatrist Tells Me a Story About a Boy and a Dog" by Mary Gordon
Stories inside a story about how we build friendships through stories.
"The Zero Meter Diving Team" by Jim Shepard
"...Reason was the ability to use the powers of the surrounding world without ruining that world."
Another Chernobyl story but well-told from the perspective of an oldest brother in Pripyat.
"Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff
Well the narrator just makes me think of the author really.
"Saleema" by Daniyal Mueenuddin
A woman in Pakistan tries to find connection in her limited life situations. Not cheery!
"Memory Wall" by Anthony Doerr (from Memory Wall)
The title story of that collection, about a woman who records memories and organizes them on a wall. Yep!
"Snowmen" by Steven Millhauser (from We Others)
Gorgeous writing about snowmen that come to life.
"Ghosts, Cowboys" by Claire Vaye Watkins
I had no idea that the author was the daughter of one of Charles Manson's crew, and this is a story about that, kind of. It's also about how stories are told, who they impact, and the setting is interesting. Some of the gory details are not for the weak!
"Tenth of December" by George Saunders (from Tenth of December)
This is my third time reading this story and I can only hear it in the author's voice. I don't want to spoil it but it starts with a boy taking a walk.
"Something Amazing" by Elizabeth McCracken
Is any child safe in this neighborhood?
"Nirvana" by Adam Johnson (from Fortune Smiles)
Holograms of people to get through tough times.. I remember this one from when I first read it years ago!
"How She Remembers It" by Rick Bass
A story about a daughter and her father on a trip to Yellowstone, but the entire time you feel a foreboding... about change, about aging, about memory.
"The Sign" Elizabeth Strout
An aging man in a rural area visits a neighbor and it brings up past grievances. Strout writes so much like Kent Haruf at times - very character focused writing, with such attention to detail.
The publisher sent me a copy of this more than a year ago; my apologies for the delay but I finally read it!
This collection features the winning story from the last 15 years of The Story Prize, from Edwidge Danticat to Elizabeth Strout. I'd read four of these stories in their own collections already, but really enjoyed every story in this book for different reasons.
"The Book of Miracles" by Edwidge Danticat
Phew, heavier when you realize how much the mother is carrying and can't share. I've always meant to read more by this author.
"The Postman's Cottage" by Patrick O'Keeffe
The village, the people, the story all reminded me of Reservoir 13.
"My Podiatrist Tells Me a Story About a Boy and a Dog" by Mary Gordon
Stories inside a story about how we build friendships through stories.
"The Zero Meter Diving Team" by Jim Shepard
"...Reason was the ability to use the powers of the surrounding world without ruining that world."
Another Chernobyl story but well-told from the perspective of an oldest brother in Pripyat.
"Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff
Well the narrator just makes me think of the author really.
"Saleema" by Daniyal Mueenuddin
A woman in Pakistan tries to find connection in her limited life situations. Not cheery!
"Memory Wall" by Anthony Doerr (from Memory Wall)
The title story of that collection, about a woman who records memories and organizes them on a wall. Yep!
"Snowmen" by Steven Millhauser (from We Others)
Gorgeous writing about snowmen that come to life.
"Ghosts, Cowboys" by Claire Vaye Watkins
I had no idea that the author was the daughter of one of Charles Manson's crew, and this is a story about that, kind of. It's also about how stories are told, who they impact, and the setting is interesting. Some of the gory details are not for the weak!
"Tenth of December" by George Saunders (from Tenth of December)
This is my third time reading this story and I can only hear it in the author's voice. I don't want to spoil it but it starts with a boy taking a walk.
"Something Amazing" by Elizabeth McCracken
Is any child safe in this neighborhood?
"Nirvana" by Adam Johnson (from Fortune Smiles)
Holograms of people to get through tough times.. I remember this one from when I first read it years ago!
"How She Remembers It" by Rick Bass
A story about a daughter and her father on a trip to Yellowstone, but the entire time you feel a foreboding... about change, about aging, about memory.
"The Sign" Elizabeth Strout
An aging man in a rural area visits a neighbor and it brings up past grievances. Strout writes so much like Kent Haruf at times - very character focused writing, with such attention to detail.
The publisher sent me a copy of this more than a year ago; my apologies for the delay but I finally read it!
November 29, 2020
A solid and interesting (if not enormously diverse) collection of short stories — the five stars are for the best entries in the bunch, like Elizabeth Strout’s “The Sign,” which showcases Strout’s marvelous gift for depth of characterization and for capturing the pain of a gentle-hearted man constrained by twentieth-century masculinity. There’s Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet to the Brain,” a story I seem to encounter a couple of times a year in various contexts; my guess is that writers love it. There’s “Memory Wall,” a lengthy contribution from Anthony Doerr, in which an indigent boy romps around in the memories of a stuffy old woman, herself suffering from dementia, thanks to a technology that is more or less the Penseive from the Harry Potter stories. There’s also a bizarrely fascinating entry, “Ghosts, Cowboys” by Claire Vaye Watkins, who happens to be the daughter of a deeply-involved member of the Manson family (who later was a key prosecution witness). The story is half history, half...something else. I don’t know how much of it is true, but it’s got deep layers of symbolism running through it. I’ve never read a story quite like it.
July 20, 2022
I had previously read almost half of these superb stories before, but that was fine by me. Who doesn’t love reading “Bullet in the Brain” again after many years? Or the excellent “Nirvana,” by Adam Johnson. A fine collection.
November 24, 2018
This was a neat trip through some great short fiction of the century. So many of the short stories I've been reading lately have been focused on subject matter as much as style, but this is a greatest hits collection that's all about craft, and it was a pleasure to amble through with that in mind. Many of the stories I'd read and was glad to have a chance to revisit and really focus on, like Rick Bass's "How She Remembers It," Adam Johnson's "Nirvana," and Elizabeth McCracken's "Something Amazing," to name three standouts. And some were the first time around for me, and exciting in that sense. Particularly the knockout story, in my opinion (and also I think the longest), Anthony Doerr's "The Memory Wall." That one was a killer—so well plotted, beautifully written, strange and full of wonder.
Official LJ review on deck.
Official LJ review on deck.
August 28, 2020
Read several of these already but happy to revisit. "Memory Wall" by Anthony Doerr in particular was a revelation. What a masterpiece that I overlooked the first time I read it—probably because it's so damn long and a little sci-fi (read: improbable). But it is gorgeous and I'm so glad I finally GOT IT.
The final story, "The Sign" by Elizabeth Strout blew me away. So many more... for short writers and readers, this collection is indispensable and shows the love and care taken by Mr. Dark in its curation.
The final story, "The Sign" by Elizabeth Strout blew me away. So many more... for short writers and readers, this collection is indispensable and shows the love and care taken by Mr. Dark in its curation.
August 26, 2021
Since they come from award-winning collections, there are no duds here as one would expect. Three stories really stood out for me:
"Bullet in the Brain" - Tobias Wolf - A book reviewer is so critical of others that he actually laughs at the trite expressions used by a bank robber during a hold-up. The robber puts a bullet in his brain for it. As the bullet travels it sparks memories and answers the question - "what made this guy this way?" Turns out the one memory that is familiar to him is the time as a child that he first heard another use the expression "they is." It was different. That is what he has sought for his whole life. A different voice in literature; everything, including the language used by bank robbers to be devoid of triteness. An original idea carried out to perfection by Wolf.
"The Postman's Cottage" by Patrick O'Keeffe - Novella length masterpiece. The mystery is what happened to a young Irish man who disappeared after selling his mom's cattle at the fair. His clothes are found folded with a note expressing remorse for what will happen to the children and signed by him. Did he abscond to America with the money - didn't seem like him. Did he kill himself? No body. Did he fall into the swollen canal and get washed out to the sea? The one idea never pursued was that he was murdered. O'Keeffe moves the story many years into the future where we meet a woman who married the disappeared man's best friend. On a train-ride home she meets the nephew of the vanished former love and we can surmise that she prefers him to her own son. Then, with flashbacks we get one clue at a time that leads us to the truth. Her now deceased husband killed him as a rival. He did not even have to. She had already resolved to marry him because as an only child he stood to inherit a wonderful cottage while the rival had 9 siblings and no prospects. The story ends with her coming to this realization, which it seems, she did not want to put together in the past. Unstated but clear is that a life with the murdered boy would have been better. Her husband always wanted to look to the future just as her son now does as he will move to Dubai. The nephew is what she would have wanted - a son who was glad to return to the farms of Ireland. It is such a well-told story. When you get to the end you look back and realize that every word was there for a reason.
"The Sign" by Elizabeth Strout - Quite a bit happens in just 20 pages. The lesson is that people struggle to do what is right, but what makes us human is if we feel remorse. One character whose job in WWII was to march Germans through the concentration camps wonders about those who put their heads up and refused to cry. Will some not see the difference between evil and good on this Earth? Strout also plays with the idea of if God intervenes and things happen for the best. And finally, the story helps us to understand, not judge others. A man who the protagonist thought was an abusive father turns out to have beeen a troubled WWII vet who according to his son, loved his kids, did terrible things that he could not control, but had remorse. Perhaps it was the mom who was the real monster. This one meets Steinbeck's criteria for great literature - it is about understanding people.
"Bullet in the Brain" - Tobias Wolf - A book reviewer is so critical of others that he actually laughs at the trite expressions used by a bank robber during a hold-up. The robber puts a bullet in his brain for it. As the bullet travels it sparks memories and answers the question - "what made this guy this way?" Turns out the one memory that is familiar to him is the time as a child that he first heard another use the expression "they is." It was different. That is what he has sought for his whole life. A different voice in literature; everything, including the language used by bank robbers to be devoid of triteness. An original idea carried out to perfection by Wolf.
"The Postman's Cottage" by Patrick O'Keeffe - Novella length masterpiece. The mystery is what happened to a young Irish man who disappeared after selling his mom's cattle at the fair. His clothes are found folded with a note expressing remorse for what will happen to the children and signed by him. Did he abscond to America with the money - didn't seem like him. Did he kill himself? No body. Did he fall into the swollen canal and get washed out to the sea? The one idea never pursued was that he was murdered. O'Keeffe moves the story many years into the future where we meet a woman who married the disappeared man's best friend. On a train-ride home she meets the nephew of the vanished former love and we can surmise that she prefers him to her own son. Then, with flashbacks we get one clue at a time that leads us to the truth. Her now deceased husband killed him as a rival. He did not even have to. She had already resolved to marry him because as an only child he stood to inherit a wonderful cottage while the rival had 9 siblings and no prospects. The story ends with her coming to this realization, which it seems, she did not want to put together in the past. Unstated but clear is that a life with the murdered boy would have been better. Her husband always wanted to look to the future just as her son now does as he will move to Dubai. The nephew is what she would have wanted - a son who was glad to return to the farms of Ireland. It is such a well-told story. When you get to the end you look back and realize that every word was there for a reason.
"The Sign" by Elizabeth Strout - Quite a bit happens in just 20 pages. The lesson is that people struggle to do what is right, but what makes us human is if we feel remorse. One character whose job in WWII was to march Germans through the concentration camps wonders about those who put their heads up and refused to cry. Will some not see the difference between evil and good on this Earth? Strout also plays with the idea of if God intervenes and things happen for the best. And finally, the story helps us to understand, not judge others. A man who the protagonist thought was an abusive father turns out to have beeen a troubled WWII vet who according to his son, loved his kids, did terrible things that he could not control, but had remorse. Perhaps it was the mom who was the real monster. This one meets Steinbeck's criteria for great literature - it is about understanding people.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 7, 2019
I’d never heard of The Story Prize before I got this anthology, but this $20k award given to one short story collection a year has been around for 15 years! The Story Prize anthology collects a story by each of the winners. Most are well-known names—Edwidge Dandicat, George Saunders—but some were new to me. Some of the stories were compelling and memorable, others less so, but overall the collection was informative of prevailing literary tastes.
April 26, 2019
Loved how different each story was. You never knew what you were about to stumble upon when you started the next. Some were definitely more memorable to me than others, but I thought they were all pretty well written, interesting, and worth reading.
April 3, 2019
Classic short stories
September 17, 2019
Even though I liked being able to read different short stories from different authors in this book, there were only a few I liked.
December 14, 2019
Most every story in the anthology has gorgeous language, craft, and setting. Not all were my favorites, but I enjoyed reading them.
December 26, 2019
There were a couple of knock-out stories in here, my favorites being Anthony Doerr and Elizabeth Strout.
May 25, 2020
It's harder to rate a collection of short stories by different authors. Some I didn't like or get, others were wonderful and some fell in between.
September 14, 2020
Perfect length for my attention span in this smoky pandemic world. "How She Remembers It" so beautifully captured my own ethos - don't squander the moments!
August 11, 2022
A good collection that introduced me to some authors I haven’t read before and others who I know well.
March 19, 2023
Excellent collection. Thanks, Ellie!!
May 19, 2025
Some incredible short stories in this collection. Bypassed one or two, but I found new authors among the very interesting others.
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September 26, 2021Some of these stories are divine, and some of them are meh.
I loved the stories by Mary Gordon, Tobias Wolff, George Saunders and Elizabeth Strout. Many of the others were also excellent.
I won't name the few that I didn't enjoy, but I will say that this is a good introduction to contemporary literary fiction. It has a diverse group of stories that all do some neat things. I read it for a creative writing class, and I'm glad I did.
I loved the stories by Mary Gordon, Tobias Wolff, George Saunders and Elizabeth Strout. Many of the others were also excellent.
I won't name the few that I didn't enjoy, but I will say that this is a good introduction to contemporary literary fiction. It has a diverse group of stories that all do some neat things. I read it for a creative writing class, and I'm glad I did.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews