The O. Henry Prize Returns to the Republic of the Short Story
I remember reading somewhere — perhaps in a Paris Review interview, perhaps in a footnote — that the Danish writer Isak Dinesen once described the short story as "a pact between the writer and silence." The writer says what must be said; everything else, the reader supplies. This year’s O. Henry Prize anthology, selected by Tommy Orange, reads like a reminder that this pact still holds.
Orange, who received a MacArthur Fellowship and whose own fiction moves between sparseness and accumulation, chose twenty stories that, as series editor Jenny Minton Quigley put it, "take risks and ask questions about the communities in which we live." It is a characteristically American statement — the assumption that literature and community are never far apart — and yet the stories themselves range far beyond any single territory.
There is Colm Tóibín’s "Five Bridges," published in The New Yorker, a writer whose careful, almost reluctant prose has long reminded me of Natalia Ginzburg’s quiet devastations. Tóibín, at this point in his career, writes sentences that seem to arrive already knowing where they need to end. And then there is Louise Erdrich’s "Love of My Days," also from The New Yorker — Erdrich, whose work has built a literary landscape as layered and haunted as any in contemporary fiction.
What strikes me most about Orange’s selections, though, is not the established names but the breadth of geography. Three stories arrive in translation: Samanta Schweblin’s "Welcome to the Club" (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, in The Yale Review), Evgenia Nekrasova’s "She-Bear" (from Russian, in The Kenyon Review), and Guka Han’s "Earshot" (from Korean, in The Dial). There is also João Pedro Vala’s "Inês" in The Common and Ismael Ramos’s "The Hare," translated by Jacob Rogers. The short story, that most supposedly parochial of forms, here becomes a crossing point — between languages, traditions, ways of understanding silence.
Brandon Taylor contributes "American Realism" in The Atlantic, a title one suspects is not entirely without irony. Weike Wang offers "Case Study," Catherine Lacey provides "The Ghost Coat" in Granta, and Jenny Xie — better known as a poet — brings "Stick Season" from The Sewanee Review. The list resists any single school or sensibility. It is generous in that way.
In Scandinavia, where I grew up, short fiction has always occupied a peculiar space — respected but faintly orphaned, caught between the novel’s prestige and poetry’s intensity. In the United States, the short story retains a cultural weight that can feel almost civic, as though writing a good story were a form of public service. The O. Henry Prize has reinforced this for over a century. Orange’s curation suggests something slightly different: that the short story is not a national treasure but a portable one, capable of crossing borders as easily as it crosses the page.
Twenty stories. A dozen magazines. At least five languages. What kind of silence are we being asked to supply?
