What do you think?
Rate this book
Prize Stories: the Best of 1998: The O. Henry Awards
Established in 1918 as a memorial to O. Henry, this annual literary tradition has presented a remarkable offering of stories over its seventy-seven-year history. O. Henry first-prize winners have included Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, John Cheever, John Updike, and Cynthia Ozick, as well as some lesser-known writers such as Alison Baker and Cornelia Nixon. Many talented writers who were unknown when first chosen for an O. Henry Award later went on to become seminal voices of contemporary American fiction. Representative of the very best in contemporary American fiction, these are varied, full-bodied fictional creations brimming with life--proof of the continuing strength and variety of the American short story.
468 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 1998
3 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 16, 2024
In my view this O. Henry Prize Awards anthology didn’t hold up to the BASS collections I have read. This surprised me because there are three jurors who decide on the three best stories. I would have thought their top three would have been better selections.
People like That Are the Only People Here by Lorrie Moore was number one. The story was good, but I didn’t feel it was the best of the lot. A couple finds themselves become members of the “parents of critically ill children” club. Moore’s portrayal of the trauma the parents go though was very well done.
The Knife Thrower by Steven Millhauser in second place was a miss for me. I didn’t get it. I went back and re-read Millhauser’s contributor note and that did not add any clarity. (me shrugging)
The Children Stay by Alice Munro came in third. I read this story a few weeks ago in Monro’s book The Love of a Good Woman. My reaction at the end of my first read was anger with the protagonist at her actions. I didn’t understand how or why she would have left her small children and husband to run off with a lover. Upon re-reading I caught the nuances of her unhappiness with her life as a wife and mother that I first missed. I still felt the choices she made were wrong on a personal level but at least this time I followed her mindset leading up to the event.
I would rate the story as pretty well written despite the sad storyline.
Me and My Enemy by Karen Heuler A woman who everyone sees as very empathetic are always confessing things to her and sharing things about their lives. She gets a job at an import warehouse where her boss does the same to her. He keeps asking her to go out for drinks or dinner. She is up front with him telling him she is not interested in him. Unfortunately she relents and goes out with him “as friends”. He is relentless in his pursuit of her even though he is married. She starts to avoid him and finds that he is stalking her. "All my life I’ve tried to do the right thing and only the right thing. It isn’t just that I was willing to listen to them all; I wanted to. I wanted them to throw a little of their sorrowing away, that’s all, these people staggering under their worries and guilts. I wanted to be the little blessed secret in their life, touching them, leaving them better off." Good intentions can go bad. This was thought provoking. A good story.
Tarantula by Thom Jones This was funny. Not slapstick funny but ironic funny. A young man with high ambitions gets a job as vice principal at a high school in Detroit. He’s come down from a job at a detention center in Canada. He is working on completing his doctorate thesis and sees himself replacing the current principal and moving up from there. He has delusions of grandeur. When the principal gives him more responsibilities including supervising the custodial staff things go from bad to worse all around. One of his quirks is he keeps a tarantula in a glass case on his desk as a form of intimidation. It doesn’t quite work out the way he thinks it should. In fact his whole plan doesn’t work out as he envisioned.
Boot by Reginald McKnight This was a good one. A guy working as a butcher in a grocery store recalls to a coworker his time as a Marine recruit living through boot camp and one sadistic drill instructor in particular. In the telling of the details of his experience, there is a question of whether he lived through the particular part of his story or not. The DI, he and a couple other men are caught out cheating on shooting qualifications. The punishment was to be put through Corrective Custody Platoon, work camp from hell. Did he really live through it or is he lying?
Crimson by Josip Novakovich This was a tough read. The setting is the war between the Serbs and Croats in Croatia.
Movietone: Detour by Peter Weltner This was a tough read as well. It takes place during WWII in NYC when a Navy ship docks and the sailors go on leave. It is about one of the sailors in particular. The story has an extraordinary twist in the end.
The Chimpanzees of Wyoming Territory by Don Zancanella This was heartbreakingly sad. A former civil war soldier travels to meet his brother who is a gold miner in Wyoming. With him are two chimpanzees who put on shows performing different scenarios. He is concerned for the chimps and cares for them the best he can, but it is an uncivilized country with bad characters.
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx I’ve read most of Annie Proulx including her short story collections Bad Dirt and Close Range which contained this story. I also read Brokeback Mountain as a standalone and saw and liked the movie adaptation. I don’t recall the story being quite so rough in my first reads. Maybe I was still envisioning the handsome movie actors as the characters, quite different from Proulx's description in the story. It still packs quite a punch.
The rest of the stories were not to my taste. They were either too obscure or I did not get the point or they were too long with an ungratifying ending.
People like That Are the Only People Here by Lorrie Moore was number one. The story was good, but I didn’t feel it was the best of the lot. A couple finds themselves become members of the “parents of critically ill children” club. Moore’s portrayal of the trauma the parents go though was very well done.
The Knife Thrower by Steven Millhauser in second place was a miss for me. I didn’t get it. I went back and re-read Millhauser’s contributor note and that did not add any clarity. (me shrugging)
The Children Stay by Alice Munro came in third. I read this story a few weeks ago in Monro’s book The Love of a Good Woman. My reaction at the end of my first read was anger with the protagonist at her actions. I didn’t understand how or why she would have left her small children and husband to run off with a lover. Upon re-reading I caught the nuances of her unhappiness with her life as a wife and mother that I first missed. I still felt the choices she made were wrong on a personal level but at least this time I followed her mindset leading up to the event.
I would rate the story as pretty well written despite the sad storyline.
Me and My Enemy by Karen Heuler A woman who everyone sees as very empathetic are always confessing things to her and sharing things about their lives. She gets a job at an import warehouse where her boss does the same to her. He keeps asking her to go out for drinks or dinner. She is up front with him telling him she is not interested in him. Unfortunately she relents and goes out with him “as friends”. He is relentless in his pursuit of her even though he is married. She starts to avoid him and finds that he is stalking her. "All my life I’ve tried to do the right thing and only the right thing. It isn’t just that I was willing to listen to them all; I wanted to. I wanted them to throw a little of their sorrowing away, that’s all, these people staggering under their worries and guilts. I wanted to be the little blessed secret in their life, touching them, leaving them better off." Good intentions can go bad. This was thought provoking. A good story.
Tarantula by Thom Jones This was funny. Not slapstick funny but ironic funny. A young man with high ambitions gets a job as vice principal at a high school in Detroit. He’s come down from a job at a detention center in Canada. He is working on completing his doctorate thesis and sees himself replacing the current principal and moving up from there. He has delusions of grandeur. When the principal gives him more responsibilities including supervising the custodial staff things go from bad to worse all around. One of his quirks is he keeps a tarantula in a glass case on his desk as a form of intimidation. It doesn’t quite work out the way he thinks it should. In fact his whole plan doesn’t work out as he envisioned.
Boot by Reginald McKnight This was a good one. A guy working as a butcher in a grocery store recalls to a coworker his time as a Marine recruit living through boot camp and one sadistic drill instructor in particular. In the telling of the details of his experience, there is a question of whether he lived through the particular part of his story or not. The DI, he and a couple other men are caught out cheating on shooting qualifications. The punishment was to be put through Corrective Custody Platoon, work camp from hell. Did he really live through it or is he lying?
Crimson by Josip Novakovich This was a tough read. The setting is the war between the Serbs and Croats in Croatia.
Movietone: Detour by Peter Weltner This was a tough read as well. It takes place during WWII in NYC when a Navy ship docks and the sailors go on leave. It is about one of the sailors in particular. The story has an extraordinary twist in the end.
The Chimpanzees of Wyoming Territory by Don Zancanella This was heartbreakingly sad. A former civil war soldier travels to meet his brother who is a gold miner in Wyoming. With him are two chimpanzees who put on shows performing different scenarios. He is concerned for the chimps and cares for them the best he can, but it is an uncivilized country with bad characters.
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx I’ve read most of Annie Proulx including her short story collections Bad Dirt and Close Range which contained this story. I also read Brokeback Mountain as a standalone and saw and liked the movie adaptation. I don’t recall the story being quite so rough in my first reads. Maybe I was still envisioning the handsome movie actors as the characters, quite different from Proulx's description in the story. It still packs quite a punch.
The rest of the stories were not to my taste. They were either too obscure or I did not get the point or they were too long with an ungratifying ending.
July 5, 2023
Love these collections — obviously not every story within is a 5 star but the selection is amazing and every story is worth reading. Also a great opportunity to identify new (or in the case of this 1998 book, new *to you*) writers you might enjoy without having to commit to a whole novel or single-author anthology.
February 1, 2011
I know. A year plus later, I finally picked up and finished this collection. I think after reading that Amy Bloom book, I thought, you know what, I can still read literary fiction. Finishing this made me remember though that I just don't enjoy it the way I used to. In fact, I'm not sure what I used to enjoy about it so much.
Did I just used to enjoy misery a lot more? Or at least, reading about the misery of others? Lord knows it wasn't reading about Montana that I enjoyed. Note to lit-fic authors: No one gives that much of a rat's about Montana. It's not that interesting. You need to drop it. Viz. the Rick Bass story in this compilation ("The Myths of Bears") which I swore I had read before, but it turned out no, I had read a different story that was about a hermit, his wife, and surviving in the snow. And you know what? They both pretty much sucked. Similarly, I could have sworn I had read D.R. McDonald's "Ashes" before, but it was another one where no, I had just read a really similar story about an old man attempting to defend a piece of land he feels he has blood ties to, even if he no longer is legally bound to it.
Maybe I'm devolving. Maybe my taste for sugary YA fiction has made me less mature. But at the same time, maybe spending all this time reading YA series and the like -- where repetitiveness is somewhat integral to the genre -- has made me more aware of the tedious tropes of literary fiction. I mean, these people act like they're inventing something new, artistic, elevated, and good. But really, I feel like you know what, let's just write one ultimate literary short story -- something where a rural Montana wife who has recently immigrated from India feels guilty about her infidelity toward her husband, but she is just having a hard time dealing with their child's terminal illness and, oh yeah, their dog just died. Violently.
See what I mean? It just gets old. I had high hopes for this O. Henry when I bought it, thinking that it was just that I wasn't liking recent literary short fiction, but that if I went back to older stuff, from when I knew I really enjoyed it, I'd be pleasantly surprised. In short (as if it weren't blatantly clear at this point) I wasn't. The high points of this collection were obvious, and were fairly well-known and widely-anthologized stories I had read before -- Lorrie Moore's always heartbreaking "People Like That Are the Only People Here," and Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" (yes, the basis for the movie). Even the piece by Thom Jones ("Tarantula"), who I usually like, was singularly unpleasant. Long story short, this may be it for me and the O. Henry Prize Stories, which is a bummer, because I know that somehow, for some reason, I used to really enjoy reading these each year.
Did I just used to enjoy misery a lot more? Or at least, reading about the misery of others? Lord knows it wasn't reading about Montana that I enjoyed. Note to lit-fic authors: No one gives that much of a rat's about Montana. It's not that interesting. You need to drop it. Viz. the Rick Bass story in this compilation ("The Myths of Bears") which I swore I had read before, but it turned out no, I had read a different story that was about a hermit, his wife, and surviving in the snow. And you know what? They both pretty much sucked. Similarly, I could have sworn I had read D.R. McDonald's "Ashes" before, but it was another one where no, I had just read a really similar story about an old man attempting to defend a piece of land he feels he has blood ties to, even if he no longer is legally bound to it.
Maybe I'm devolving. Maybe my taste for sugary YA fiction has made me less mature. But at the same time, maybe spending all this time reading YA series and the like -- where repetitiveness is somewhat integral to the genre -- has made me more aware of the tedious tropes of literary fiction. I mean, these people act like they're inventing something new, artistic, elevated, and good. But really, I feel like you know what, let's just write one ultimate literary short story -- something where a rural Montana wife who has recently immigrated from India feels guilty about her infidelity toward her husband, but she is just having a hard time dealing with their child's terminal illness and, oh yeah, their dog just died. Violently.
See what I mean? It just gets old. I had high hopes for this O. Henry when I bought it, thinking that it was just that I wasn't liking recent literary short fiction, but that if I went back to older stuff, from when I knew I really enjoyed it, I'd be pleasantly surprised. In short (as if it weren't blatantly clear at this point) I wasn't. The high points of this collection were obvious, and were fairly well-known and widely-anthologized stories I had read before -- Lorrie Moore's always heartbreaking "People Like That Are the Only People Here," and Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" (yes, the basis for the movie). Even the piece by Thom Jones ("Tarantula"), who I usually like, was singularly unpleasant. Long story short, this may be it for me and the O. Henry Prize Stories, which is a bummer, because I know that somehow, for some reason, I used to really enjoy reading these each year.
August 10, 2017
Any year of this series is good bedside reading. this one includes Brokeback Mountain
January 10, 2020
There were only two stories in here that I liked. Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain - I was stunned by. It's a masterpiece! And Akhil Sharma's story called Cosmopolitan, I also liked.
April 9, 2022
Great collection of short stories for those interested in writing their own
April 11, 2022
Contains wuite a few good stories including Brokeback Mountain. For those who enjoy short stories, this would be a recommended read.
December 12, 2008
The first short story, the winner, was absolutely amazing. I want the whole world to read it, but since most of my close friends at the time were either pregnant or had new babies, I decided that particular story was probably a bad idea. Maybe I'll recommend it to them all next year. Unfortunately, I wasn't as thrilled with the rest of the stories, and in fact it became really tough for me to finish this book. I didn't care enough to want to pick it up after it had been put down.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews