The PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories 2010

Introduction 
 
For the reader, the short story is nothing less than a brief and intense residence in another world. This other place offers escape from yourself and your own world, as well as the rarest of gifts the possibility of becoming someone else. Each crucial element of fiction character, place, time, event offers the opportunity for intimacy and compassion. These two words, so quiet and loaded, contain difficult and threatening emotions, but they are also the emotions that in the end make us feeling beings. The short story, while you re reading, includes you as a witness and imaginary
participant, and allows you to suffer and rejoice.
 
The reader s entrance into the new world depends, mysteriously, on the language used to tell the tale. Unless the teller s voice is true, the reader won t have the courage to go to Pakistan, to a hollow or gorge or prairie, to a village in Malaysia, certainly not into the mind and heart of a character quite unlike the reader.

Read the statements of the authors in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010. Some of the writers have impressive bodies of work, others are beginning, but none claims to be in complete control of a story or to say that it came out as planned. The impulse to write is not an impulse to control. It s more like an experienced sailor going to sea once more. Writing a short story is akin to being on a voyage to India and ending up in Indiana. There are discoveries to be made along the way, and the new land has its points of fascination, but it isn t where you thought you were going.
 
Ron Rash, one of our best living storytellers, lives and writes close to his Appalachian roots. Into the Gorge, he tells us, came from a story he d heard as a child. The story is emblematic of Rash s work and his precise, modest, often beautiful prose. His people are rooted to their landscape, and it in turn is at the mercy of its long-staying temporary residents. Rash seems at times to be

Introduction      Laura Furman, Series Editor

Annie Proulx, Them Old Cowboy Songs, The New Yorker
Kirstin Allio, Clothed, Female Figure, Iowa Review
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Headstrong Historian, The New Yorker
Wendell Berry, Stand By Me, Atlantic Monthly
Jess Row, Sheep May Safely Graze, Threepenny Review
Preeta Samarasan, Birch Memorial, A Public Space
Brad Watson, Visitation, The New Yorker
William Trevor, The Woman of the House, The New Yorker
Daniel Alarcón, The Bridge, Granta
Daniyal Mueenuddin, A Spoiled Man," The New Yorker
James Lasdun, Oh, Death, Paris Review
Natalie Bakopoulos, Fresco, Byzantine, Tin House
Peter Cameron, The End of My Life in New York, Subtropics
Ted Sanders, Obit, Indiana Review
Damon Galgut, The Lover, Paris Review
George Bradley, An East Egg Update, Yale Review
Ron Rash, Into the Gorge, Southern Review
John Edgar Wideman, Microstories, Harper s Magazine
Alice Munro, Some Women, The New Yorker
Lore Segal, Making Good," The American Scholar
 
Reading The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010
The Jurors on Their Favorites:
Junot Díaz on A Simple Man by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Paula Fox on Oh, Death by James Lasdun
Yiyun Li on The Woman of the House by William Trevor
 
Writing The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010
The Writers on Their Work
 
Recommended Stories 2010

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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.

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