BookFox

Frank O'Connor Short Story Award

The 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the heftiest cash prize in the literary world for the short form (35,000 euros), has announced its longlist. Thirty-nine authors from around the globe are nominated. Only one Canadian was up (no, it wasn't Alice Munro) as opposed to fourteen British writers (!). But the nice thing about this award is that they actually make good on the their promise/goal of highlighting up-and-coming authors. On the American side of things, I'm glad to see Benjamin Percy nominated for "Refresh, Refresh," although both Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth" and Jim Shepard's "Like You'd Understand, Anyway" are obvious picks. (Tobias Wolff wasn't eligible because "Our Story Begins" collected previously published stories).

I'm also glad to see Nam Le nominated under the Australian category for "The Boat," which is his first book and which comes out this month. Roddy Doyle is up for Ireland, but his latest collection, "The Deportees and Other Stories," is underwhelming. Anne Enright, who won the Man Booker Prize for her novel "The Gathering," is also up under the Irish section, but since I haven't read her collection, "Taking Pictures," I can't pass judgment. If you remember, last year the prize went to Miranda July for "No One Belongs Here More Than You," and the shortlist was quirky, bypassing Alice Munro and favoring writers like the Israeli Edgar Keret. So it seems likely that an up-and-comer has a good chance with this prize.

Jhumpa Lahiri Unaccustomed Earth

I've been enjoying an advance copy of Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short fiction, Unaccustomed Earth. These stories don't significantly diverge from her previous fiction, either in theme or tone or style, but they still are moving renditions of Indian immigrants torn between being American and being Indian. Of these eight stories, only three (so far) were published in The New Yorker, and, strangely enough, because more than half haven't been seen before, I think that might help sales. In The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'ambrosio, six of the eight stories were published in The New Yorker, and I think that was a reason for poor sales -- people had already read most of what was selling for $24. For those of you who want a sneak peak at Unaccustomed Earth, I'll offer this excerpt from the title story, which is not one of the previously published.

After her mother's death, Ruma's father retired from the pharmaceutical company where he had worked for many decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent he'd never seen. In the past year he had visited France, Holland, and most recently Italy. They were package tours, traveling in the company of strangers, riding by bus through the countryside, each meal and museum and hotel prearranged. He was gone for two, three, sometimes four weeks at a time. When he was away Ruma did not hear from him. Each time, she kept the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator, and on the days he was scheduled to fly she watched the news, to make sure there hadn't been a plane crash anywhere in the world.

Occasionally a postcard would arrive in Seattle, where Ruma and Adam and their son Akash lived. The postcards showed the facades of churches, stone fountains, crowded piazzas, terra-cotta rooftops mellowed by late afternoon sun. Nearly fifteen years had passed since Ruma's only European adventure, a month-long EuroRail holiday she'd taken with two girlfriends after college, with money saved up from her salary as a parale-gal. She'd slept in shabby pensions, practicing a frugality that was foreign to her at this stage of her life, buying nothing but variations of the same postcards her father sent now. Her father wrote succinct, impersonal accounts of the things he had most recently seen and done: "Yesterday the Uffizi Gallery. Today a walk to the other side of the Arno. A trip to Siena scheduled tomorrow." Occasionally there was a sentence about the weather. But there was never a sense of her father's presence in those places.