The O Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition 2019

Now celebrating its centenary, this prestigious annual anthology gathers the twenty best new short stories published in the previous year. An Anchor Books Original. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019--continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence--contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. The winning writers are an impressive mix of celebrated names and new, emerging voices. Their stories evoke lives both near and distant, in settings ranging from Jamaica, Houston, and Hawaii to a Turkish coal mine and a drought-ridden Northwestern farm, and feature an engaging array of characters, including Laotian refugees, a Colombian kidnap victim, an eccentric Irish schoolteacher, a woman haunted by a house that cleans itself, and a strangely long-lived rabbit. The uniformly breathtaking stories are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines. List of 2019 winners: Tessa Hadley John Keeble Moira McCavana Rachel Kondo Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Stephanie Reents Alexia Arthurs Valerie O’Riordan Patricia Engel Kenan Orhan Sarah Hall Bryan Washington Isabella Hammad Weike Wang Caoilinn Hughes Souvankham Thammavongsa Liza Ward Doua Thao Alexander MacLeod John Edgar Wideman Prize Jurors 2019: Lynn Freed, Elizabeth Strout, Lara Vapynar

Now celebrating its centenary, this prestigious annual anthology gathers the twenty best new short stories published in the previous year. An Anchor Books Original. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019--continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence--contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. The winning writers are an impressive mix of celebrated names and new, emerging voices. Their stories evoke lives both near and distant, in settings ranging from Jamaica, Houston, and Hawaii to a Turkish coal mine and a drought-ridden Northwestern farm, and feature an engaging array of characters, including Laotian refugees, a Colombian kidnap victim, an eccentric Irish schoolteacher, a woman haunted by a house that cleans itself, and a strangely long-lived rabbit. The uniformly breathtaking stories are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines. List of 2019 winners: Tessa Hadley John Keeble Moira McCavana Rachel Kondo Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Stephanie Reents Alexia Arthurs Valerie O’Riordan Patricia Engel Kenan Orhan Sarah Hall Bryan Washington Isabella Hammad Weike Wang Caoilinn Hughes Souvankham Thammavongsa Liza Ward Doua Thao Alexander MacLeod John Edgar Wideman Prize Jurors 2019: Lynn Freed, Elizabeth Strout, Lara Vapynar

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017 contains twenty breathtaking stories—by a vibrant mix of established and emerging writers—selected by the series editor from the thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The collection includes essays by the three eminent guest jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and a comprehensive resource list of the many magazines and journals, both large and small, that publish short fiction. “Too Good To Be True,” Michelle Huneven “Something for a Young Woman,” Genevieve Plunkett “The Buddhist,” Alan Rossi “Garments,” Tahmima Anam “Protection,” Paola Peroni “Night Garden,” Shruti Swamy “A Cruelty,” Kevin Barry “Floating Garden,” Mary La Chapelle “The Trusted Traveler,” Joseph O’Neill “Blue Dot,” Keith Eisner “Lion,” Wil Weitzel “Paddle to Canada,” Heather Monley “A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness,” Jai Chakrabarti “The Bride and the Street Party,” Kate Cayley “Secret Lives of the Detainees,” Amit Majmudar “Glory,” Lesley Nneka Arimah “Mercedes Benz,” Martha Cooley “The Reason Is Because,” Manuel Muñoz “The Family Whistle,” Gerard Woodward “Buttony,” Fiona McFarlane The jurors this year are David Bradley, Elizabeth McCracken, and Brad Watson. For author interviews, photos, and more, go to www.ohenryprizestories.com

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The winning stories come from a mix of established writers and emerging voices, and are uniformly breathtaking. They are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired their stories, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. "The Tomb of Wrestling," Jo Ann Beard, Tin House "Counterblast," Marjorie Celona, The Southern Review "Nayla," Youmna Chlala, Prairie Schooner "Lucky Dragon," Viet Dinh, Ploughshares "Stop ’n’ Go," Michael Parker, New England Review "Past Perfect Continuous," Dounia Choukri, Chicago Quarterly Review "Inversion of Marcia," Thomas Bolt, n+1 "Nights in Logar," Jamil Jan Kochai, A Public Space "How We Eat," Mark Jude Poirier, Epoch "Deaf and Blind," Lara Vapnyar, The New Yorker "Why Were They Throwing Bricks?," Jenny Zhang, n+1 "An Amount of Discretion," Lauren Alwan, The Southern Review "Queen Elizabeth," Brad Felver, One Story "The Stamp Collector," Dave King, Fence "More or Less Like a Man," Michael Powers, The Threepenny Review "The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies," Jo Lloyd, Zoetrope "Up Here," Tristan Hughes, Ploughshares "The Houses That Are Left Behind," Brenda Walker, The Kenyon Review "We Keep Them Anyway," Stephanie A. Vega, The Threepenny Review "Solstice," Anne Enright, The New Yorker Prize Jury for 2018: Fiona McFarlane, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elizabeth Tallent

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Surnames are much more than convenient identity tags; they are windows into our families’ pasts. Some suggest ancestral trades (Butcher, Smith, Roper) or physical appearance (Long, Brown, Thynne). Some provide clues to where we come from (McDonald, Evans, Patel). And some – Rymer, Brocklebank, Stolbof – offer a hint of something just a little more exotic or esoteric. All are grist to the mill for David McKie who, in What’s in a Surname?, sets off on a journey around Britain to find out how such appellations have evolved and what they tell us about ourselves. En route he looks at the surname’s tentative beginnings in medieval times, and the myriad routes by which particular names became established. He considers some curious byways: the rise and fall of the multi-barrel surname and the Victorian reinvention of ‘embarrassing’ surnames among them. He considers whether fortune favours those whose surnames come at the beginning of the alphabet. And he celebrates the remarkable and the quirky, from the fearsome Ridley (the cry of which once struck terror in the hearts of their neighbours) to the legend-encrusted Tichborne, whose most famous holders were destined to suffer misfortune and controversy. Elegiac and amusing by turns, he offers a wonderfully entertaining wander along the footpaths of the nation’s history and culture, celebrating not just the Smiths and Joneses of these islands but the Chaceporcs and Swetinbeddes, too.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories take place in such far-flung locales as a gorgeous sailboat in Hong Kong, a Cuban sugar plantation, the Kenai River in Alaska, a mansion in New Delhi, a ship torpedoed by a German U-boat, and the ghost-haunted rubble of a Turkish girls’ school. Also included are the editor’s introduction, essays from the jurors (Lauren Groff, Edith Pearlman, and Jim Shepard) on their favorite stories, observations from the winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.

“In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once. All of them convince and sing. All of them shine.”—Zadie Smith An O: The Oprah Magazine “Top 15 Best of the Year” • A Well-Read Black Girl Pick Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret—Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In “Mash Up Love,” a twin’s chance sighting of his estranged brother—the prodigal son of the family—stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In “Bad Behavior,” a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In “Mermaid River,” a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In “The Ghost of Jia Yi,” a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in “Shirley from a Small Place,” a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother’s big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital. Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction’s most dynamic and essential authors. Praise for How to Love a Jamaican “A sublime short-story collection from newcomer Alexia Arthurs that explores, through various characters, a specific strand of the immigrant experience.”—Entertainment Weekly “With its singular mix of psychological precision and sun-kissed lyricism, this dazzling debut marks the emergence of a knockout new voice.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Gorgeous, tender, heartbreaking stories . . . Arthurs is a witty, perceptive, and generous writer, and this is a book that will last.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties “Vivid and exciting . . . every story rings beautifully true.”—Marie Claire

In Spy Runner, a noir mystery middle grade novel from Newbery Honor author Eugene Yelchin, a boy stumbles upon a secret that jeopardizes American national security.