Prize Stories 1999: The O. Henry Awards

Best ones: DFW's The Depressed Person; Alice Munro's Save the Reaper (which will remind you of that Flannery O'Connor story in which a traveling family is meets a very bad man); T.C. Boyle's The Underground Gardens, inspired by a real immigrant's story; Pam Houston's Cataract (she had more heft that I had assumed; yes, what is that re the way men can't own up to fear, even near death fear?); Annie Proulx's, The Mud Below, concerning a reckless rodeo bull rider; Pinckney Benedict's Miracle Boy, concerning the bullying of a disabled boy; Michael Chabon's Son of Wolfman, wherein a man lives through his wife's pregnancy, the outcome of a rape (he's so good at physical description, and emotional nuances*); Sign by Charlotte Forbes, in which show more the handyman gets very scary; Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies reminds me that I must get the full novel; George Saunders' white trashy Sea Oak.

Julia Whitty's A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga--I had read before in Harper's but it's still nice. Michael Cunningham's Mister Brother--well, I didn't read that in DoubleTake.

* "A dark circle of hair had appeared between her legs, surrounded by the fiery pink ring of her straining labia.."

*"She gave off a pleasant smell of sugary coffee. Over one shoulder she carried a big leather sack covered in a worn patchwork of scraps of old kilims. He noticed, wedged in among the tubes of jojoba oil and medical instruments, a rolled copy of The Daily Racing Form."

"The front porch had been overwhelmed years before by a salmon-pink bougainvillea, and a disheveled palm tree murmured in the back yard, battering the roof at night with inedible nuts ... In the afternoon there was a smoky tinge of eastern, autumnal regret in the air that they only later learned was yearly blown down from raging wildfires in the hills.'

"They would drink Tecate from the can and arrive home just as the palmist's string of electric jalapenos were coming on in her window, over the neon hand, its fingers outspread in welcome or admonition."

"For the first time, she caught or allowed herself to notice that jagged, broken note in his voice, the undercurrent of anger that had always been there but from which her layers of self-absorption, of sheer happy bulk, had so far insulated her." show less