From Publishers Weekly
A new, wider-ranging selection process (allowing the consideration of all English-language writers appearing in North American publications regardless of citizenship) makes this one of the strongest O. Henry collections in recent years, with stories by, among others, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ("The American Embassy"), A.S. Byatt ("The Thing in the Forest") and William Trevor ("Sacred Statues"). Other standouts include Anthony Doerr's "The Shell Collector," which details the daily rituals of a blind shell gatherer; Bradford Morrow's "Lush," the tale of an alcoholic husband forced to confront the possibility of redemption after the loss of his equally addicted wife; and the enchantingly bucolic "Swept Away" by T. Coraghessan Boyle, in which a strange set of circumstances brings together a grizzled Scotsman and a demure American birdwatcher. Ann Harleman incorporates crossword puzzles and e-mails into "Meanwhile," a story about the pressures of attending to a chronically ill spouse, while Evan S. Connell's delightfully clever "Election Eve" juxtaposes marital and political conflict against the backdrop of a pre-election masquerade party. Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams," which could arguably be classified as a novella, is a sweeping, dreamlike portrait of the American west as seen through the eyes of a man who has lost his wife and young daughter in a fire. An extra bonus is an appendix in which the 2003 jurors (Jennifer Egan, David Guterson and Diane Johnson) weigh in on their top choices. This is a collection of literary gems that would surely please the man for whom the prize is named. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Laura Furman, taking the editorial helm of this respected annual, posits that when reading short stories, "we are better than we are in life, more ready to be empathic, more ready to see why another made the choices he did." Among Furman's 20 selections are established masters such as Alice Munro, T. Correghessan Boyle, and Tim O'Brien. Standouts include Marjorie Kemper's "God's Goodness," in which a dying teenager tests the faith of the Christian immigrant who cares for him; and "The High Road," by Joan Silber, in which a jaded ballet teacher has his heart broken by a young student. Two writers on the prize jury selected Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams" as their favorite; the astonishing novella documents the life and death of a simple hermit widower out West, and also mourns the passing of a particular way of life. Regular fans of the anthology may miss the list of 50 "short-listed" stories, which, in this volume, has been whittled down to 15. Nonetheless, students, teachers, and all short story aficionados who seek this volume out will be rewarded. James Klise
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"You won't go away hungry . . . you'll make new friends. In the 2003 'O. Henry' . . . new series editor, Laura Furman, picked all sorts of treats." --The Seattle Times

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


Review
"You won't go away hungry . . . you'll make new friends. In the 2003 'O. Henry' . . . new series editor, Laura Furman, picked all sorts of treats." --The Seattle Times

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


Book Description
Since its establishment in 1919, the O. Henry Prize stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. Such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (1927); William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1939); Carson McCuller’s A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud (1943); Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1949); J.D. Salinger’s For Esme with Love and Squalor (1963); John Cheever’s The Country Husband (1956) ; and Flannery O’Conner’s Everything that Rises Must Converge (1963) all were O. Henry Prize stories.

An accomplished new series editor--novelist and short story writer Laura Furman--has read more than a thousand stories to identify the 20 winners, each one a pleasure to read today, each one a potential classic. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 also contains brief essays from each of the three distinguished judges on their favorite story, and comments from the prize-winning writers on what inspired their stories. There is nothing like the ever rich, surprising, and original O. Henry collection for enjoying the contemporary short story.

The Thing in the Forest A. S. Byatt
The Shell Collector Anthony Doerr
Burn Your Maps Robyn Jay Leff
Lush Bradford Morrow
God’s Goodness Marjorie Kemper
Bleed Blue in Indonesia Adam Desnoyers
The Story Edith Pearlman
Swept Away T. Coraghessan Boyle
Meanwhile Ann Harleman
Three Days. A Month. More. Douglas Light
The High Road Joan Silber
Election Eve Evan S. Connell
Irish Girl Tim Johnston
What Went Wrong Tim O’Brien
The American Embassy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Kissing William Kittredge
Sacred Statues William Trevor
Two Words Molly Giles
Fathers Alice Munro
Train Dreams Denis Johnson


From the Inside Flap
Since its establishment in 1919, the O. Henry Prize stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. Such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (1927); William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1939); Carson McCuller’s A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud (1943); Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1949); J.D. Salinger’s For Esme with Love and Squalor (1963); John Cheever’s The Country Husband (1956) ; and Flannery O’Conner’s Everything that Rises Must Converge (1963) all were O. Henry Prize stories.

An accomplished new series editor--novelist and short story writer Laura Furman--has read more than a thousand stories to identify the 20 winners, each one a pleasure to read today, each one a potential classic. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 also contains brief essays from each of the three distinguished judges on their favorite story, and comments from the prize-winning writers on what inspired their stories. There is nothing like the ever rich, surprising, and original O. Henry collection for enjoying the contemporary short story.

The Thing in the Forest A. S. Byatt
The Shell Collector Anthony Doerr
Burn Your Maps Robyn Jay Leff
Lush Bradford Morrow
God’s Goodness Marjorie Kemper
Bleed Blue in Indonesia Adam Desnoyers
The Story Edith Pearlman
Swept Away T. Coraghessan Boyle
Meanwhile Ann Harleman
Three Days. A Month. More. Douglas Light
The High Road Joan Silber
Election Eve Evan S. Connell
Irish Girl Tim Johnston
What Went Wrong Tim O’Brien
The American Embassy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Kissing William Kittredge
Sacred Statues William Trevor
Two Words Molly Giles
Fathers Alice Munro
Train Dreams Denis Johnson


From the Back Cover
Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction.” --The Atlantic Monthly


About the Author
Laura Furman's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and other magazines. She is the founding editor of the highly regarded American Short Fiction (three-time finalist for the American Magazine Award). A professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, she teaches in the graduate James A. Michener Center for writers. She lives in Austin.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction

A reader, given a moment with a writer, will often pose the question: “Do you have a reader in mind when you write?”

The question is as interesting as the many answers it inspires, for the thrust of the reader’s question is, “How did you know me?”

Sometimes a story matches an incident in the reader’s life; at other times the congruence is to an emotional, spiritual, or intellectual experience. The short story, even more than the novel, creates an instant and lasting relationship between writer and reader, perhaps because we experience the story and its characters as we do life. Our understanding of the lives of others, even those we think we know well and whom we love, comes over time yet in intense glimpses, revealed most often by stress or loss, the twin capitals of the short story’s dominion. The peace of daily life, even the dullness of it, is what is decimated in the short story and replaced by the nightmare or sometimes the consolation of understanding another’s existence or our own. The realization, often called compassion, that everybody else lives in their own unique and solitary universe, can feel shattering, liberating, even amusing, depending on how the reader comes to it. Through our experience of the short story, we are better than we are in life, more ready to be empathic, more ready to see why another made the choices he did.

The writer, whose imagination and voice have given us this brief and intense experience through language alone, often becomes a source of curiosity for the reader, who wishes for further clarification. Do you have an ideal reader? Did I get it? Did you write it for me? The literal answer has to be no, but literal answers aren’t everything.

Years ago, when I had the opportunity to publish a story by Hortense Calisher in American Short Fiction, I asked her so many questions about the manuscript that she finally declared, “Posit an intelligent reader.” The intelligent reader, she meant, can tolerate waiting for full information and can survive the absence of data. The reader of fiction doesn’t have the same expectations as a newspaper reader. The intelligent fiction reader, in fact, wants to suspend judgment and disbelief, to take a vacation from daily attention to gain another kind of attention through the story. As a writer, teacher, and editor, I’ve come to see that, in fiction, mystery is as important as transparency.

I cannot answer all the questions that readers will have about the twenty stories included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003. Neither can the writers and neither can our three jurors. As intelligent, perceptive, and interesting as the remarks about the stories by our jurors and writers are, there is no such thing as a final understanding of a good short story. Authors can’t know everything, and any good work of art lends itself to revisiting and reinterpretation. In The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 two of the three jurors were most taken with the same story—and for quite different reasons.

At its best, the experience of reading a short story is an immersion into the complete world of the story. Mavis Gallant, to whom The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 is dedicated, asked readers of her selected stories not to read her book straight through. “Stories are not chapters of a novel,” she wrote. “Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” Sometimes, though, the hunger to read trumps everything else, and the reader goes straight on to the next story and the next. The stories in this collection are arranged so that the reader can move from the beginning to the end of the book with pleasure.

Finding the twenty stories for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 meant reading many times that number. I’m an incorrigible reader, so even when a story was not of the quality of a prize story, I often finished it to find out how it ended. After a thousand or so stories, my habit was bent if not broken. Any tedium associated with the necessity of sorting through so much material was balanced by the thrill of finding a prize story. Some of the stories I chose the moment I finished them; some needed two or three readings and comparison to other excellent possibilities. A list of fifteen additional recommended stories appears on page 342. In a vast ocean of published prose, they and their writers are worth remembering.

This year we have welcomed all English-language writers who appeared in North American publications, regardless of citizenship. This means we can include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, A. S. Byatt, and William Trevor, whose work rightly belongs in the O. Henry collection. The venerable O. Henry is enriched by the inclusion of such wonderful writers in our common English language.


The longest story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 stretches the conventional idea of the short story. Some might argue that it should be called a novella, yet in the time of Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw” and Anton Chekhov’s “My Life,” “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson wouldn’t have been thought especially long. The shortest story in the 2003 collection, “Kissing” by William Kittredge, would now be called a short short. Both stories evoke decades of personal life and human history. Both achieve a world unto themselves. The O. Henry’s mission is not to build walls around the short story, but to demonstrate how generous and flexible the form can be.

Although the twenty stories in this collection are very different, some qualities and concerns are shared. There are folkloric, larger-than-life elements in “The Thing in the Forest,” “The Shell Collector,” “Swept Away,” and “Train Dreams.” “Meanwhile” uses every means of communication possible, including e-mail, to illustrate the shapes love can take in extremis. “Two Words,” “God’s Goodness,” and “Lush” are also moving portraits of love molded by a crisis of physical deterioration. In “The American Embassy,” “Bleed Blue in Indonesia,” “Burn Your Maps,” “What Went Wrong,” and “The Story,” we see characters living with the aftereffects of war and repression, though the thrust of those stories is not primarily political. In “Election Eve,” national politics serve as a convenient metaphor for the main character’s contentious marriage. A number of stories revolve around the effect of a particular moment or action in a character’s life, such as the stunning accident in “Irish Girl” and the foolish benevolent act that brings such desperate trouble to the carver’s family in “Sacred Statues.” Other stories offer the pattern of the main character’s life, like that of the dancer in “The High Road,” who understands at last how to suffer for love. As ever, Alice Munro in “Fathers” gives us the short story as a meditation on the past, the considered reflection of a character on the formation of her heart and mind. “Fathers” has in common with “The Thing in the Forest” middle-aged characters wondering who it was that they were so long ago. With the death of one man in “Train Dreams,” a history of the world is obliterated.

In 1926, there was a horse race for The O. Henry Prize Stories between “Bubbles” by Wilbur Daniel Steele and “My Mortal Enemy” by Willa Cather. “Bubbles” is a readable tale of horror, seen through the blankly innocent eyes of a much-deceived child. “Bubbles” is dated in its idea of human character in a way that older (and better) stories, including “My Mortal Enemy,” are not. The stories were neck and neck when the committee of judges learned that Cather’s tale was to be published in a separate volume and was therefore unavailable for inclusion. It now seems inconceivable that there was much of a contest between “Bubbles” and “My Mortal Enemy.”

All of which is to say that times change and so does taste. I don’t know any more than the 1926 judges did what will last. We live in times when some predict the demise of the book entirely. We’ll value the songs we love now and let the future sing for its own supper.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Since its establishment in 1919, the O. Henry Prize stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. Such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway's The Killers (1927); William Faulkner's Barn Burning (1939); Carson McCuller's A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud (1943); Shirley Jackson's The Lottery (1949); J.D. Salinger's For Esme with Love and Squalor (1963); John Cheever's The Country Husband (1956) ; and Flannery O'Conner's Everything that Rises Must Converge (1963) all were O. Henry Prize stories.

An accomplished new series editor--novelist and short story writer Laura Furman--has read more than a thousand stories to identify the 20 winners, each one a pleasure to read today, each one a potential classic. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 also contains brief essays from each of the three distinguished judges on their favorite story, and comments from the prize-winning writers on what inspired their stories. There is nothing like the ever rich, surprising, and original O. Henry collection for enjoying the contemporary short story.

The Thing in the Forest A. S. Byatt
The Shell Collector Anthony Doerr
Burn Your Maps Robyn Jay Leff
Lush Bradford Morrow
God's Goodness Marjorie Kemper
Bleed Blue in Indonesia Adam Desnoyers
The Story Edith Pearlman
Swept Away T. Coraghessan Boyle
Meanwhile Ann Harleman
Three Days. A Month. More. Douglas Light
The High Road Joan Silber
Election Eve Evan S. Connell
IrishGirl Tim Johnston
What Went Wrong Tim O'Brien
The American Embassy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Kissing William Kittredge
Sacred Statues William Trevor
Two Words Molly Giles
Fathers Alice Munro
Train Dreams Denis Johnson

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A new, wider-ranging selection process (allowing the consideration of all English-language writers appearing in North American publications regardless of citizenship) makes this one of the strongest O. Henry collections in recent years, with stories by, among others, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ("The American Embassy"), A.S. Byatt ("The Thing in the Forest") and William Trevor ("Sacred Statues"). Other standouts include Anthony Doerr's "The Shell Collector," which details the daily rituals of a blind shell gatherer; Bradford Morrow's "Lush," the tale of an alcoholic husband forced to confront the possibility of redemption after the loss of his equally addicted wife; and the enchantingly bucolic "Swept Away" by T. Coraghessan Boyle, in which a strange set of circumstances brings together a grizzled Scotsman and a demure American birdwatcher. Ann Harleman incorporates crossword puzzles and e-mails into "Meanwhile," a story about the pressures of attending to a chronically ill spouse, while Evan S. Connell's delightfully clever "Election Eve" juxtaposes marital and political conflict against the backdrop of a pre-election masquerade party. Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams," which could arguably be classified as a novella, is a sweeping, dreamlike portrait of the American west as seen through the eyes of a man who has lost his wife and young daughter in a fire. An extra bonus is an appendix in which the 2003 jurors (Jennifer Egan, David Guterson and Diane Johnson) weigh in on their top choices. This is a collection of literary gems that would surely please the man for whom the prize is named. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

KLIATT - Nola Theiss

The O. Henry Prize Stories have been collected annually since 1919 and have included work from some of North America's most well regarded writers. These stories continue that tradition as well as the tradition of including essays by the jury of judges in which they explain their choices. The collection also includes short essays by each of the authors that explain their inspiration and the process of writing the stories. Some of the authors, such as Alice Munro and Evan S. Connell, are well known and some have published only a few pieces, yet the quality of writing is consistent. Although this is a collection of recent North American stories, the setting and time of the stories ranges from WW II to the present and from Cambodia to Canada. There is something for everyone in this collection of excellent and varied tales. KLIATT Codes: SA-Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Random House, Anchor, 366p., Ages 15 to adult.

Kirkus Reviews