Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013: Including stories by Donald Antrim, Andrea Barrett, Ann Beattie, Deborah Eisenberg, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Kelly Link, Alice Munro, and Lily Tuck

SERIES EDITORS

PAST JURORS

AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 2013

Copyright 2013 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Random House LLC
Introduction copyright 2013 by Laura Furman

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

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Permissions appear at the end of the book.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

eISBN: 978-0-345-80326-9

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Cover design by Mark Abrams

v3.1

To Susan Williamson, with thanks
for friendship, stories, and Passovers.

The staff of Anchor Bookseditorial, design, production, publicityis devoted to publishing the highest-quality literature. Their intelligence, dedication, respect for writers, and professional skill make it an honor to work with them and a pleasure to participate in each O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. Editor Diana Secker Tesdell is a gentle, steady force for good. The series editor is grateful for Anchors excellence.

Mimi Chubb and Kate Finlinson were devoted, invaluable, and brilliant editorial assistants for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. The series editor is grateful to them for their acuteness and hard work.

The Graduate School and Department of English of the University of Texas at Austin supports The O. Henry Prize Stories in many ways, especially with the editorial graduate fellowship. The series editor expresses her gratitude.

LF

Many readers have come to love the short story through the simple characters, easy narrative voice and humor, and compelling plotting in the work of William Sydney Porter (18621910), best known as O. Henry. His surprise endings entertain readers, even those back for a second, third, or fourth look. Even now one can say Gift of the Magi in a conversation about a love affair or marriage, and almost any literate person will know what is meant. Its hard to think of many other American writers whose work has been so incorporated into our national shorthand.

O. Henry was a newspaperman, skilled at hiding from his editors at deadline. A prolific writer, he wrote to make a living and to make sense of his life. He spent his childhood in Greensboro, North Carolina, his adolescence and young manhood in Texas, and his mature years in New York City. In between Texas and New York, he served out a prison sentence for bank fraud in Columbus, Ohio. Accounts of the origin of his pen name vary: one story dates from his days in Austin, where he was said to call the wandering family cat Oh! Henry!; another states that the name was inspired by the captain of the guard at the Ohio State Penitentiary, Orrin Henry.

Porter had devoted friends, and its not hard to see why. He was charming and had an attractively gallant attitude. He drank too much and neglected his health, which caused his friends concern. He was often short of money; in a letter to a friend asking for a loan of fifteen dollars (his banker was out of town, he wrote), Porter added a postscript: If it isnt convenient, Ill love you just the same. The banker was unavailable most of Porters life. His sense of humor was always with him.

Reportedly, Porters last words were from a popular song: Turn up the light, for I dont want to go home in the dark.

Eight years after O. Henrys death, in April 1918, the Twilight Club (founded in 1883 and later known as the Society of Arts and Letters) held a dinner in his honor at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. His friends remembered him so enthusiastically that a group of them met at the Biltmore Hotel in December of that year to establish some kind of memorial to him. They decided to award annual prizes in his name for short-story writers, and formed a Committee of Award to read the short stories published in a year and to pick the winners. In the words of Blanche Colton Williams (18791944), the first of the nine series editors, the memorial was intended to strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.

Doubleday, Page & Company was chosen to publish the first volume, O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories 1919. In 1927, the society sold all rights to the annual collection to Doubleday, Doran & Company. Doubleday published The O. Henry Prize Stories, as it came to be known, in hardcover, and from 1984 to 1996 its subsidiary, Anchor Books, published it simultaneously in paperback. Since 1997 The O. Henry Prize Stories has been published as an original Anchor Books paperback.

As of 2003, the series editor chooses the twenty O. Henry Prize Stories, and each year three writers distinguished for their fiction are asked to evaluate the entire collection and to write an appreciation of the story they most admire. These three writers receive the twenty prize stories in manuscript form with no identification of author or publication. They make their choices independent of each other and the series editor.

All stories originally written in the English language and published in an American or Canadian periodical are eligible for consideration. Individual stories may not be nominated; magazines must submit the years issues in their entirety by July 1. Editors are invited to submit online fiction for consideration. Such submissions must be sent to the series editor in hard copy. (Please see for details.)

The goal of The O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.