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THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2017

Name: THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2017
Author: Laura Furman
ISBN: 978-0-525-43250-0

edited by Laura Furman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2017

Essential, as ever, for students and budding practitioners of the short story form.

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The venerable annual honors volume approaches its centenary but shows no signs of tiring out.

There are few surprises but plenty of pleasures in the latest installment of the O. Henry Award anthology, in recent years edited by novelist and short story writer Furman. One pleasant surprise is that, finally, no one is trying to write like Raymond Chandler—or David Foster Wallace, for that matter. Another is that no matter how vignette-ish, most of the stories here entertain large ideas. There is refreshing attention to work by writers of South Asian origin, among them California-born Shruti Swamy, who writes affectingly of a single moment, full of symbolic portent, in which a dog confronts a cobra: “There is a depth that dogs’ eyes have,” she writes, “which snakes’ eyes lack. Snakes’ eyes are flat and uncompromising, and reveal no animating intelligence. Perhaps that’s why we never trust them.” As do so many others, the story ends on a sententious note, in the literal sense: “What you have left is what you have.” Indeed. Martha Cooley’s “Mercedes Benz” blends high-end cars, Janis Joplin, and visions of the Italian countryside arresting enough to make the reader book a flight to Rome, while Gerard Woodward’s existentialist-tinged “The Family Whistle” relates a story of assumed identity that might have been a footnote to The Return of Martin Guerre. “You wouldn’t believe the stories of his life then,” says one character of the presumed con artist. “They amused me while we were in the camp, but only in the way that men together will be amused by such stories—in the real world they would have disgusted me.” The strongest in the volume is Amit Majmudar’s “Secret Lives of the Detainees,” straight from the headlines, in which poetry defeats even the best-armed imperial force in the end; how real-world that scenario is may be debatable, but there’s no arguing the beauty of the writing.

Essential, as ever, for students and budding practitioners of the short story form.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-525-43250-0

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2019
edited by Laura Furman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2018
edited by Laura Furman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2016
edited by Laura Furman

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
PRECIPICE
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
ACT OF OBLIVION
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
V2
by Robert Harris

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.