The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition 2019

A Century of the O. Henry Prize
 
A hundred years ago, when O. Henry s friends and admirers created an annual book of short stories in his honor, they surely had a different idea than we do today of what constitutes a good story.

O. Henry was famous for his twist at the end of a tale, the unexpected turn or ironic revelation that made the insoluble problems and puzzles in his plot disappear in a puff of laughter or a few tears. Plots were generally more ornate in the early twentieth century, and so too was literary language. Furthermore, stories such as O. Henry s weren t expected to be ambivalent. The story s meaning, often spelled out as a lesson for the reader, was a natural part of the ending.

Today, stories come in a greater variety of voices and forms. A story can be written in any tense; in first, second, or third person; composed entirely of dialogue or with no dialogue at all; in one paragraph; in play form; with footnotes; and so on. Sometimes the past of the characters is spelled out and sometimes it is nonexistent, an effort on the writer s part to create an unending present. As for meaning, that s left up to the reader. The short story is now an open field for writers, and some of the results might be unrecognizable to an early-twentieth-century reader. Still, elements of the form persist: a certain relationship between different pieces of the story, in particular, the passionate desire of the beginning and ending for reunion.

So, too, the inner workings of the collection have changed. The earliest O. Henry Prize stories were chosen by several committees of readers who started with six hundred stories and passed them on in smaller and smaller batches until the final three judges whittled the remaining contenders down to seventeen finalists. Among those seventeen, the judges then ranked three as first-, second-, and third-prize winners.

The process is much simplified now and fairer to writer and reader. Instead

Tessa Hadley,  Funny Little Snake  The New Yorker

John Keeble,  Synchronicity,  Harper s Magazine

Moira McCavana,  No Spanish,  Harvard Review

Rachel Kondo,  Girl of Few Seasons,  Ploughshares Solos

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum,  Julia and Sunny,  Ploughshares

Stephanie Reents,  Unstuck,  Witness

Alexia Arthurs,  Mermaid River,  The Sewanee Review

Valerie O Riordan,  Bad Girl,  LitMag

Patricia Engel,  Aguacero,  Kenyon Review

Kenan Orhan,  Soma,  The Massachusetts Review

Sarah Hall,  Goodnight Nobody,  One Story

Bryan Washington,  610 North, 610 West,  Tin House

Isabella Hammad,  Mr. Can aan,  The Paris Review

Weike Wang,  Omakase,  The New Yorker

Caoilinn Hughes,  Prime,  Granta.com

Souvankham Thammavongsa,  Slingshot,  Harper s Magazine

Liza Ward,  The Shrew Tree,  Zyzzyva

Doua Thao,  Flowers for America,  Fiction

Alexander MacLeod,  Lagomorph,  Granta

John Edgar Wideman,  Maps and Ledgers,  Harper s Magazine

Laura Furman, series editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories since 2003, is the winner of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for her fiction. The author of several books, including the story collection The Mother Who Stayed, she taught writing for many years at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Central Texas.

Widely regarded as the nation s most prestigious awards for short fiction. The Atlantic Monthly