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PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010
A collection of the twenty best contemporary short stories selected by series editor Laura Furman from hundreds of literary magazines, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010 brings to life a dazzling array of a street orphan in Malaysia, a cowboy and his teenage bride, a Russian nanny in Manhattan, a nineteenth-century Nigerian widow, and political prisoners on a Greek island. Also included are essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.
Them Old Cowboy Songs
Annie Proulx
Clothed, Female Figure
Kirstin Allio
The Headstrong Historian
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Stand By Me
Wendell Berry
Sheep May Safely Graze
Jess Row
Birch Memorial
Preeta Samarasan
Visitation
Brad Watson
The Woman of the House
William Trevor
The Bridge
Daniel Alarcón
A Spoiled Man
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Oh, Death
James Lasdun
Fresco, Byzantine
Natalie Bakopoulos
The End of My Life in New York
Peter Cameron
Obit
Ted Sanders
The Lover
Damon Galgut
An East Egg Update
George Bradley
Into the Gorge
Ron Rash
Microstories
John Edgar Wideman
Some Women
Alice Munro
Making Good
Lore Segal
For author interviews, photos, and more, go to www.ohenryprizestories.com
A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to support the PEN Readers & Writers Literary Outreach Program.
Them Old Cowboy Songs
Annie Proulx
Clothed, Female Figure
Kirstin Allio
The Headstrong Historian
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Stand By Me
Wendell Berry
Sheep May Safely Graze
Jess Row
Birch Memorial
Preeta Samarasan
Visitation
Brad Watson
The Woman of the House
William Trevor
The Bridge
Daniel Alarcón
A Spoiled Man
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Oh, Death
James Lasdun
Fresco, Byzantine
Natalie Bakopoulos
The End of My Life in New York
Peter Cameron
Obit
Ted Sanders
The Lover
Damon Galgut
An East Egg Update
George Bradley
Into the Gorge
Ron Rash
Microstories
John Edgar Wideman
Some Women
Alice Munro
Making Good
Lore Segal
For author interviews, photos, and more, go to www.ohenryprizestories.com
A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to support the PEN Readers & Writers Literary Outreach Program.
512 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Laura Furman
69 books59 followersLaura J. Furman (born 1945) is an American author best known for her role as series editor for the O. Henry Awards prize story collection. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Mirabella, Ploughshares, Southwest Review.
She has written three collections of stories (The Glass House, Watch Time Fly, and Drinking with the Cook), two novels (The Shadow Line and Tuxedo Park), and a memoir (Ordinary Paradise).
She founded American Short Fiction, which was a three-time finalist for the National Magazine Award. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing. Most recently, she has announced that she has submitted a collection of short stories to her agent, and the subsequent collection will be her first new work to follow the release of 2001's Drinking with the Cook.
She has written three collections of stories (The Glass House, Watch Time Fly, and Drinking with the Cook), two novels (The Shadow Line and Tuxedo Park), and a memoir (Ordinary Paradise).
She founded American Short Fiction, which was a three-time finalist for the National Magazine Award. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing. Most recently, she has announced that she has submitted a collection of short stories to her agent, and the subsequent collection will be her first new work to follow the release of 2001's Drinking with the Cook.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
January 25, 2012
My successful Crown Books trip led me to a minor Amazon splurge to begin catching up on all the annual anthologies I used to read but had stopped reading. This collection was, for me, just okay. Even though they were a couple years old by now, I had wayyy too clear a memory of the New Yorker stories (though yes, I'm a completist, so I re-read them), so there's like a third of it right there. I didn't really dislike any of the stories, I just didn't find anything that really fired me up. I liked "Visitation" (Brad Walker), though I'm worried mostly for the level of San Diego/North County detail (I never thought I'd read something set at Pizza Port!). I also quite liked "Clothed, Female Figure" (Kirstin Allio) which surprised me a bit more. In all honesty though, probably the biggest thrill I got out of reading this collection was finding out that Annie Proulx is originally from Norwich -- who knew?!
February 3, 2013
I'm giving this barely three stars, more like two and a half. Sadly, this 2010 edition of the venerable O'Henry Prize best of the year story collection favors literary pyrotechnics over readability (particularly in Allio's "Clothed, Female Figure," Bradley's "East Egg Update," and Ted Sanders' "Obit") and exotic locations over intriguing characters (Samarasan's "Beech Memorial," Galgut's "The Lover"). Thank goodness for the selection of Alice Munro ("Some Women") and James Lasdun ("Oh, Death"). The choice of their stories give me hope that in future editions the lure of the foreign and the experimental for the series editor might fade, leaving only what I, at least, turn to these collections to find - great stories.
August 26, 2014
I enjoyed and learned from nearly all the stories in this collection. The O. Henry style’s virtues are coming into focus for me. The emphasis on clipped, almost-too-hip prose is reduced in favor of a more thoughtful approach to characters. Here are some thoughts on the stories that stood out.
Annie Proulx has contributed one of her Wyoming stories, “Them Old Cowboy Songs.” Interestingly, it’s a story about the frontier featuring not the success of hard work and the indomitable American spirit but, rather, failure despite those things. The frontier was as hard a place to live as any on this earth, as Proulx’s sad and poignant tale amply demonstrates.
Kirstin Allio writes of intimacy coming late in life, perhaps too late, in “Clothed, Female Figure.” A precocious young woman makes all the mistakes the older, wiser narrator recalls from her own past, yet the narrator never gives the young woman warning, or any feedback at all. Instead the narrator leaves the young woman to live her life forward while the narrator sits quietly back and understands her own life backward.
Chimamanda Adichie’s “The Headstrong Historian” recounts the legacy of an African family, cursed to difficult births and single children, beset by colonization and the inevitable whiplashes of modernization. The story deftly explores the value of holding onto family identity and old values in a world constantly searching for the new and modern. Another story, Wendell Berry’s “Stand By Me,” explores a family legacy over generations. However, this one features the father/son war that often erupts when a family loses its wife and mother. The hardships of farm life stand too stark and real to be brushed aside by the grieving and the pained men left to work them, and those men turn on each other with enough force to tear the family apart.
Other stories deal with the trinity of family, loss, and violence. Ron Rash’s “Into the Gorge” explores whether its main character can escape a family’s ties to the land. When the man returns to a patch of land haunted by his own dead family, just to harvest a budget-saving crop planted decades earlier by his own father, he turns out to be one bad decision away from losing everything. Jess Row’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” offers up a career bureaucrat who knows he is indirectly responsible for death and mayhem, given what is printed on the paper he pushes and staples. But when his daughter’s death forces a reckoning upon him, he must choose whether to bring violence into his life first-hand, in order to make the world a better place in ways he can see up close, or to leave good and evil to the abstract domains they have inhabited throughout his life. This was an excellent story for its ability to sift the subtleties of moral conflict and to bring those conflicts convincingly to life.
Daniel Alarcon’s “The Bridge” explores the loss of two blind people, uncle and aunt to the narrator, whose lives were more connected and immersed in their environments that any sighted person seems capable of believing, including the narrator. This story’s structure is reminiscent of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” in the way its narrator circles the characters at the story’s center, growing ever closer to them, until he gets as close in the final pages as it is possible for him to get. The journey promises to enlarge the narrator’s own capacity for real intimacy, which is as touching and fitting a tribute as his uncle could have hoped for.
Preeta Samarasan’s “Birch Memorial” presents a thrilling, eminently readable voice for its charming narrator, who struggles to provide for her crippled brother in a desperate city. She fights the unwelcome advances of sniggering men, whom she serves from her food cart, until a British man shows up looking to interview her for a project and, maybe, give her something more. The narrator is given a chance to compromise her integrity in a pleasurable way, and to thereby bring close goals that up to that moment seemed out of reach. This story’s ending is particularly well conceived and beautifully executed. Another story exploring the hazards of newfound wealth is Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “A Spoiled Man,” which follows a poverty-stricken old man through his elevation to a life of relative ease, and then riches he could not have imagined, before charting his inevitable downfall. In the end he loses everything, which the story uses as an opportunity to expose the profound sadness of the way poverty grinds down people’s capacity for self-worth, even as poverty relegates entire lifetimes to a margin that wealthier people can all too easily avoid seeing.
Another narrator in desperate circumstances can be found in Peter Cameron’s “The End of My Life in New York.” It’s the story of an anxiety-addled man who finds himself stuck inside the city he used to love, now savaged by its ever-increasing hostility. As his relationship falls apart and he succumbs to pain and paranoia, he grows closer to seeing the mistakes that led him there and verges upon allowing himself kindness and forgiveness, if only some nice stranger can show him how to be kind.
Brad Watson’s “Visitation” delivers yet another narrator living in desperate circumstances, though his are much more of his own making. Alcohol-addled and failing at his fatherly duties, the narrator bumbles passively through his life searching for deliverance, never seeming to realize all the shackles his terrible habits have placed upon him. Routine is similarly explored in William Trevor’s superlative “The Woman of the House,” which is as good a story as Trevor writes. Subtle, smart, well-paced, and firmly grounded, this story shows what can happen when routine replaces intimacy in the life of two cousins, both of whom seem to be using each other and neither of whom comes to a good end for it. The gypsy handymen are perfect additions to the story, and Trevor’s use of point of view here is expert.
I had read James Lasdun’s “Oh, Death” in its original publication, so I skipped it for this collection. I recall it as an aching tale of class differences and the struggle to live in community despite them. The story’s final image still haunts me, a tour de force that perfectly concludes the piece.
Political disenfranchisement and imprisonment are the context for Natalie Bakopoulos’ “Fresco, Byzantine,” which ends up exploring how even the most unwelcome settings can become spaces set aside from normal life, in which we make important connections to one another that would not survive the real world. The story also argues powerfully for the relevance and vitality of art, which glues together people from anywhere and which binds culture even as it communicates and infuses and deconstructs culture, too. For all this it’s also a beautiful, sad love story.
Damon Galgut’s novella “The Lover” irritated me at first with its length alone, then charmed me with its voice and rapid pacing, finally seducing me into mourning for what its main character loses in his travels. He searches for what motivates all of us, but his timing is always off. Can real intimacy ever be found among strangers? Maybe, but never easily.
George Bradley seems to write a cover-story of The Great Gatsby in his witty “An East Egg Update.” It’s a fun story with an honest, pinpoint accurate class critique embedded in its rapid narrative. The structure is particularly interesting here: ten sections, each just one long sentence.
John Edgar Wideman clears out his closets of several “Microstories,” many of which read like journal entries with more reflection or cultural critique than narrative. All of them were worth reading, though I admit to almost losing patience with a few.
Alice Munro’s excellent “Some Women” shows her commitment to the stories of young, naive country girls sent to work in the households of wealthier, more complicated citizens. This one feels more daring, more reflective, with an ending that takes chances only an expert of the craft like Munro can pull off.
Annie Proulx has contributed one of her Wyoming stories, “Them Old Cowboy Songs.” Interestingly, it’s a story about the frontier featuring not the success of hard work and the indomitable American spirit but, rather, failure despite those things. The frontier was as hard a place to live as any on this earth, as Proulx’s sad and poignant tale amply demonstrates.
Kirstin Allio writes of intimacy coming late in life, perhaps too late, in “Clothed, Female Figure.” A precocious young woman makes all the mistakes the older, wiser narrator recalls from her own past, yet the narrator never gives the young woman warning, or any feedback at all. Instead the narrator leaves the young woman to live her life forward while the narrator sits quietly back and understands her own life backward.
Chimamanda Adichie’s “The Headstrong Historian” recounts the legacy of an African family, cursed to difficult births and single children, beset by colonization and the inevitable whiplashes of modernization. The story deftly explores the value of holding onto family identity and old values in a world constantly searching for the new and modern. Another story, Wendell Berry’s “Stand By Me,” explores a family legacy over generations. However, this one features the father/son war that often erupts when a family loses its wife and mother. The hardships of farm life stand too stark and real to be brushed aside by the grieving and the pained men left to work them, and those men turn on each other with enough force to tear the family apart.
Other stories deal with the trinity of family, loss, and violence. Ron Rash’s “Into the Gorge” explores whether its main character can escape a family’s ties to the land. When the man returns to a patch of land haunted by his own dead family, just to harvest a budget-saving crop planted decades earlier by his own father, he turns out to be one bad decision away from losing everything. Jess Row’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” offers up a career bureaucrat who knows he is indirectly responsible for death and mayhem, given what is printed on the paper he pushes and staples. But when his daughter’s death forces a reckoning upon him, he must choose whether to bring violence into his life first-hand, in order to make the world a better place in ways he can see up close, or to leave good and evil to the abstract domains they have inhabited throughout his life. This was an excellent story for its ability to sift the subtleties of moral conflict and to bring those conflicts convincingly to life.
Daniel Alarcon’s “The Bridge” explores the loss of two blind people, uncle and aunt to the narrator, whose lives were more connected and immersed in their environments that any sighted person seems capable of believing, including the narrator. This story’s structure is reminiscent of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” in the way its narrator circles the characters at the story’s center, growing ever closer to them, until he gets as close in the final pages as it is possible for him to get. The journey promises to enlarge the narrator’s own capacity for real intimacy, which is as touching and fitting a tribute as his uncle could have hoped for.
Preeta Samarasan’s “Birch Memorial” presents a thrilling, eminently readable voice for its charming narrator, who struggles to provide for her crippled brother in a desperate city. She fights the unwelcome advances of sniggering men, whom she serves from her food cart, until a British man shows up looking to interview her for a project and, maybe, give her something more. The narrator is given a chance to compromise her integrity in a pleasurable way, and to thereby bring close goals that up to that moment seemed out of reach. This story’s ending is particularly well conceived and beautifully executed. Another story exploring the hazards of newfound wealth is Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “A Spoiled Man,” which follows a poverty-stricken old man through his elevation to a life of relative ease, and then riches he could not have imagined, before charting his inevitable downfall. In the end he loses everything, which the story uses as an opportunity to expose the profound sadness of the way poverty grinds down people’s capacity for self-worth, even as poverty relegates entire lifetimes to a margin that wealthier people can all too easily avoid seeing.
Another narrator in desperate circumstances can be found in Peter Cameron’s “The End of My Life in New York.” It’s the story of an anxiety-addled man who finds himself stuck inside the city he used to love, now savaged by its ever-increasing hostility. As his relationship falls apart and he succumbs to pain and paranoia, he grows closer to seeing the mistakes that led him there and verges upon allowing himself kindness and forgiveness, if only some nice stranger can show him how to be kind.
Brad Watson’s “Visitation” delivers yet another narrator living in desperate circumstances, though his are much more of his own making. Alcohol-addled and failing at his fatherly duties, the narrator bumbles passively through his life searching for deliverance, never seeming to realize all the shackles his terrible habits have placed upon him. Routine is similarly explored in William Trevor’s superlative “The Woman of the House,” which is as good a story as Trevor writes. Subtle, smart, well-paced, and firmly grounded, this story shows what can happen when routine replaces intimacy in the life of two cousins, both of whom seem to be using each other and neither of whom comes to a good end for it. The gypsy handymen are perfect additions to the story, and Trevor’s use of point of view here is expert.
I had read James Lasdun’s “Oh, Death” in its original publication, so I skipped it for this collection. I recall it as an aching tale of class differences and the struggle to live in community despite them. The story’s final image still haunts me, a tour de force that perfectly concludes the piece.
Political disenfranchisement and imprisonment are the context for Natalie Bakopoulos’ “Fresco, Byzantine,” which ends up exploring how even the most unwelcome settings can become spaces set aside from normal life, in which we make important connections to one another that would not survive the real world. The story also argues powerfully for the relevance and vitality of art, which glues together people from anywhere and which binds culture even as it communicates and infuses and deconstructs culture, too. For all this it’s also a beautiful, sad love story.
Damon Galgut’s novella “The Lover” irritated me at first with its length alone, then charmed me with its voice and rapid pacing, finally seducing me into mourning for what its main character loses in his travels. He searches for what motivates all of us, but his timing is always off. Can real intimacy ever be found among strangers? Maybe, but never easily.
George Bradley seems to write a cover-story of The Great Gatsby in his witty “An East Egg Update.” It’s a fun story with an honest, pinpoint accurate class critique embedded in its rapid narrative. The structure is particularly interesting here: ten sections, each just one long sentence.
John Edgar Wideman clears out his closets of several “Microstories,” many of which read like journal entries with more reflection or cultural critique than narrative. All of them were worth reading, though I admit to almost losing patience with a few.
Alice Munro’s excellent “Some Women” shows her commitment to the stories of young, naive country girls sent to work in the households of wealthier, more complicated citizens. This one feels more daring, more reflective, with an ending that takes chances only an expert of the craft like Munro can pull off.
August 4, 2023
An assorted yummy chocolate box with short stories that are sure to please.
January 10, 2011
Couldn't get through it - maybe I was just looking for lighter reading. I love the short story format because it gives you little nuggets of insight into different worlds - which this collection did. What was missing for me is that each of the stories I read was heavy, weighted down by the cares of the world and ended with a twist of unhappy irony. I missed the poignant mixture of happiness and that gift-of-the-magi touch I associate with O Henry. As I moved through the stories, I anticipated how they would end because they inevitably evolved towards the more pessimistic of the possible outcomes.
October 26, 2011
The 2010 edition of this ongoing series is pretty solid overall. The stand outs are not surprising: Annie Proulx's story of a young cowboy and his wife is as spare and brutal as you would expect from Proulx; Daniel Alarcón's tale of a young man learning about his blind uncle is as beautifully written as anything else Alarcón has penned; and William Trevor's story of a woman caring for an ailing elderly man is lovely, haunting, and a bit nerve wracking all at once.
In general, if you like short stories, any one of the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories compilations are worth picking up.
In general, if you like short stories, any one of the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories compilations are worth picking up.
September 29, 2011
Good. Maybe not as affecting as other books in this series, but I was still impressed. One or two pieces in here, like Lore Segal's 'Making Good,' do not feel as fleshed out as the others, but at least one, Jess Row's 'Sheep May Safely Graze' is haunting, even heartbreaking (be sure to read the author's note for that one--it will spook you...so to speak.)
February 21, 2012
Most of this year's stories are great. Especially, I like 「Sheep May Safely Graze」by Jess Row, 「Stand By Me」by Wendell Berry, and 「Them Old Cowboy Songs」by Annie Proulx. I didn't like only one story, 「Microstories」by John Edgar Wideman. This was the kind of omnibus story, but consists of too short stories. I couldn't understand how wonderful this is.
May 14, 2010
Oh I couldn't finish these. Must every award-winning story involve death? I loved Annie Proulx's submission, depressing as it was (of course it was it's Annie), but reading the rest in quick succession was a bit too much for me.
July 24, 2012
I'd forgotten that I'd read this book two years ago (OOOOOPS! Maybe because many of the pieces didn't tickle my fancy? Or perhaps I'm just forgetful.), so I got it at la bibliotheka when I went recently. Meh: this collection still doesn't do much for me.
September 8, 2010
There were two stories in this series I couldn't even finish, which is rare for an O. Henry book for me, but I really enjoyed most of the stories. Clothed, Female Figure, The Headstrong Historian, Birch Memorial, and Visitation were my favorites.
May 25, 2010
There are some winners in this compilation.
August 8, 2010
WAY better than this year's Best American Short Stories.
January 19, 2012
This year's stories were by and large forgettable, besides the expected exceptions (Trevor, Munro, Proulx almost never disappoint with their best work, and here is no exception).
January 15, 2013
A really solid collection. I'll definitely look out for these anthologies in future.
February 13, 2016
A solid collection, personal favorites were "The Woman of the House" and "Some Women."
February 8, 2016
Very good collection of short stories. Some of the ones that stand out are Damon Galgut's "The Lover" and "Them old cowboy songs" by Annie Proulx.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews