Prize Stories 1990: The O. Henry Awards

by William Abrahams

Overview

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

The O. Henry Prize Stories 1990 gathers 20 of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines.

Stories include:
Leo E. Litwak "The Eleventh Edition" (first prize)
Peter Matthiessen "Lumumba Lives" (second prize)
Lore Segal "The Reverse Bug" (third prize)
Joyce Carol Oates "Heat"
Carolyn Osborn "The Grands"
James P. Blaylock "Unidentified Objects"
Jane Brown Gillette "Sins Against Animals"
Julie Schumacher "The Private Life of Robert Schumann"
Joanne Greenberg "Elizabeth Baird"
Alice Adams "1940: Fall"
T. Coraghessan Boyle "The Ape Lady in Retirement"
Marilyn Sides "The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife"
David Michael Kaplan "Stand"
Meredith Steinbach "In Recent History"
Claudia Smith Brinson "Einstein's Daughter"
Felicia Ackerman "The Forecasting Game"
Reginald McKnight "The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas"
Bruce Fleming "The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein"
Devon Jersild "In Which John Imagines His Mind as a Pond"
Janice Eidus "Vito Loves Geraldine"

"One of the most welcome signs of the literary spring is the appearance of the annual O. Henry Awards collection."--Los Angeles Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385264990
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/1990
Series:	The O. Henry Prize Collection
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Born in 1919, William Abrahams published four successful novels and a number of poems before finding his true calling as an editor. He presided over the O. Henry Awards for more than 30 years starting in 1965. Abrahams also worked as the west coast editor of Atlantic Monthly Press and collaborated on nonfiction books with his partner, Peter Stansky. He passed away in 1998.

Editorial Reviews

The American short story has been notable in the 20th century for a tremendous variety of technique and subject matter, but this diversity finds little expression in the 70th edition of The O. Henry Awards , which contains primarily works musing in the traditional realist style on familiar aspects of heterosexual love and the return to small-town or suburban origins . However, within those limits many of the 20 well-crafted pieces here--including Leo E. Litwak's first-prize-winning ``The Eleventh Hour,'' in which a graduate student chooses quotidian human struggles over academe's flights of intellect--are deeply satisfying. To mention two others: Lore Segal's ``The Reverse Bug,'' which postulates a device that forces people to listen to the screams of the 20th century, and Joanne Greenberg's ``Elizabeth Baird,'' the account of a Southern nurse who comes home from a Japanese POW camp to find her loyalties have grown astoundingly complex. The space for author's comments at the back of the book tempts some writers to give pedestrian explanations and weighty morals that they carefully avoid in their fiction. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly