Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction – serie

In this award-winning collection of short stories Edward Falco narrates the lives and times of our contemporaries, characters off the dizzying streets of end of the century America.Within these pages we meet such characters as Matt, the Midwestern boy who turns his back on an apple-pie lifestyle for the dubious pleasures of life as a drug-smuggler and guitarist for the Flesh Puppets; and Jim Renkowski, drug dealer turned family man whose run-in with the past is only as bad as his worst nightmare. Through characters like these, Falco unmasks the difficult truths that engage us at the deepest levels of our being. The stories in Acid entertain and engage us and, in the end, make new again some of the oldest and most intractable human struggles.

In this award-winning collection of short stories Edward Falco narrates the lives and times of our contemporaries, characters off the dizzying streets of end of the century America.Within these pages we meet such characters as Matt, the Midwestern boy who turns his back on an apple-pie lifestyle for the dubious pleasures of life as a drug-smuggler and guitarist for the Flesh Puppets; and Jim Renkowski, drug dealer turned family man whose run-in with the past is only as bad as his worst nightmare. Through characters like these, Falco unmasks the difficult truths that engage us at the deepest levels of our being. The stories in Acid entertain and engage us and, in the end, make new again some of the oldest and most intractable human struggles.

In his latest collection of literary fiction, Mark Brazaitis evokes with sympathy, insight, and humor the lives of characters in a small Ohio town. The ten short stories of The Incurables limn the mental landscape of people facing conditions they believe are insolvable, from the oppressive horrors of mental illness to the beguiling and baffling complexities of romantic and familial love. In the book's opening story, "The Bridge," a new sheriff must confront a suicide epidemic as well as his own deteriorating mental health. In "Classmates," a man sets off to visit the wife of a classmate who has killed himself. Is he hoping to write a story about his classmate or to observe the aftermath of what his own suicide attempt, if successful, would have been like? In the title story, a down-on-his-luck porn actor returns to his hometown and winds up in the mental health ward of the local hospital, where he meets a captivating woman. Other stories in the collection include "A Map of the Forbidden," about a straight-laced man who is tempted to cheat on his wife after his adulterous father dies, and "The Boy behind the Tree," about a problematic father-son relationship made more so by the arrival on the scene of a young man the son's age. In "I Return," a father narrates a story from the afterlife, discovering as he does so that he is not as indispensable to his family as he had believed.

Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling contains ten darkly funny short stories by Maura Stanton. Anything can happen in this swiftly narrated book, which provides glimpses of Gertrude Stein playing Ping-Pong with a G.I. in Paris during World War II, a famous contemporary writer giving a haircut in a bar in Eureka, California, and Katherine Mansfield struggling to write her final stories in Montana, Switzerland.Stanton introduces the reader to other unforgettable characters, such as a girl with a clown phobia who falls in love with Joujou the clown , and a woman who discovers that her dead sister has written a bad novel. The settings of Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling are as varied as the characters. A basket of steamed crabs might show up on a kitchen table in Baltimore; arctic air might freeze nose hairs in Minnesota; a blizzard might isolate a town in Nebraska; rain might cancel a rock concert in the Alps.The characters in Stanton's lively stories try to sort out their lives by telling stories or listening closely to the stories of other people. Two sisters interrogate each other about different versions of the party that changed their lives forever. A young woman entertains and shocks her friends in a café with a funny story about her first love affair. A landlady tries to reconstruct the life of a Sicilian immigrant whose ashes she finds in a trailer.In capturing with wit and sensitivity the struggles of its characters to make sense of the many strange and ordinary occurrences of everyday life, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling reminds us that we are all, in some sense, characters in many of life's different stories.This memorable collection is the 2002 winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction.

Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling contains ten darkly funny short stories by Maura Stanton. Anything can happen in this swiftly narrated book, which provides glimpses of Gertrude Stein playing Ping-Pong with a G.I. in Paris during World War II, a famous contemporary writer giving a haircut in a bar in Eureka, California, and Katherine Mansfield struggling to write her final stories in Montana, Switzerland.Stanton introduces the reader to other unforgettable characters, such as a girl with a clown phobia who falls in love with Joujou the clown , and a woman who discovers that her dead sister has written a bad novel. The settings of Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling are as varied as the characters. A basket of steamed crabs might show up on a kitchen table in Baltimore; arctic air might freeze nose hairs in Minnesota; a blizzard might isolate a town in Nebraska; rain might cancel a rock concert in the Alps.The characters in Stanton's lively stories try to sort out their lives by telling stories or listening closely to the stories of other people. Two sisters interrogate each other about different versions of the party that changed their lives forever. A young woman entertains and shocks her friends in a café with a funny story about her first love affair. A landlady tries to reconstruct the life of a Sicilian immigrant whose ashes she finds in a trailer.In capturing with wit and sensitivity the struggles of its characters to make sense of the many strange and ordinary occurrences of everyday life, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling reminds us that we are all, in some sense, characters in many of life's different stories.This memorable collection is the 2002 winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction.

Winner of the 2010 Richard Sullivan Prize in Fiction, Joan Frank's second story collection, In Envy Country, explores the uncertainties and triumphs of women and men in and out of love and marriage, at varying ages and stages of contemporary American life. By turns wry, pained, and amused, In Envy Country investigates those small, complex truths that gain clarity with time and distance. Frank, whose earlier books have been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and Publisher's Weekly, sets these stories in Paris, California, and Spain.

Advance Praise for Dinner with Osama"Marilyn Krysl is one of our most gifted, quirky, and delightful storytellers—unpredictable, funny, and wildly inventive in wondrous ways. Her new collection shows her at the top of her form as she details the ordinary, the absurd, and the apocalyptic in outrageous and deeply affecting ways." —Jay Neugeboren, author of 1940 and News from the New American Diaspora"Marilyn Krysl's astonishing Dinner with Osama somehow finds the intersection between deep anguish at the state of the world and brilliant, caustic, and hilarious sociopolitical satire of America post-9/11. Its effrontery is peculiarly female, its fierce intelligence that of a mother—or even ('Are We Dwelling Deep Yet?') a Great Mother—who needs to save and feed the world however she can. Its north and south must be 'Mitosis,' Krysl's heartbreaking life history of a young Dinka woman whose way of life, and source of food, have been destroyed by civil war in Sudan; its east and west is surely the title story, in the voice of a politically irreproachable matriarch of Boulder, Colorado, who does her part by extending a dinner invitation to Osama—yes, that Osama—through her 'pal' Abdullah at the local gyros stand; and Osama not only receives it, he accepts. Israelis and Palestinians, 'conflict'-addicted cliché-mongers of the creative writing workshop, violent extremists of every stripe, and above all the wealthy consumerist left are all skewered in this miraculous collection." —Jaimy Gordon, author of Bogeywoman and She Drove Without Stopping"We may have to invent a new term––'the political lyric,' perhaps––to describe the 'airy speech and inspired story' in Marilyn Krysl's brilliant new collection of short fiction, Dinner with Osama. What holds all the fiction together, as much as the impassioned political and cultural concerns that inform them, is the writing, which is lyrical in the best sense, lyrical as in musical, expressive, and vivid." —Ed Falco, author of Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories

What I Found Out About Her: Stories of Dreaming American, winner of the 2014 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, reaffirms Peter LaSalle's reputation as one of the most startlingly original writers working in the short fiction genre today.In this collection of eleven stories, LaSalle explores how everyday life for many—an FBI agent, a study-abroad student, a drug dealer's chic girlfriend, a trio of Broadway playwrights, among others—can often take on something much larger than that, almost the texture of a haunting dream. Marked by stylistic daring and a rare lyricism in language, this is intense, thoroughly moving fiction that probes the contemporary American psyche, portraying it in all its frequently painful sadness and also its brave and unflagging hope.

Memorable, haunting characters in memorable, haunting locales fill the pages of Jarda Cervenka's award-winning collection of stories. Cervenka takes us from Choco, the remotest jungle region of Colombia, to the infamous site of the Golden Triangle in Thailand, stopping along the way in Prague's Lesser Town, the island of Gore off the coast of Dakar, a village bar in Kamikawa, heaven, and Minneapolis.These stories are populated with well-meaning characters like Jindra, who disappears up the river in Papua New Guinea, towards "bad rapids and hostile folks who stick to some of the old, unpleasant dietary traditions," and the Bavarian professor who enjoys an idyllic, academic life, yet yearns to "disappear to some malarian hole at the edge of a jungle, with sauna-like heat and humidity, about as healthy as a hospital sewer, under a leaden sky that pours five meters of water per year on the palm-fronded roofs of some sorry shack sticking out of a permanent mudpie." Cervenka's characters are imperfect specimens of humanity, politically and otherwise incorrect, and his effortless revelation of their kindness leaves the reader cautiously optimistic and fully entertained.The Revenge of Underwater Man speaks to the optimist and adventurer in us all. This collection is edgy, erudite, irreverent, and funny—a rewarding read for those who treasure the true and the exceptional.

Solitude and Other Stories represents Arturo Vivante's quest to use writing to uncover hidden truths. These twenty-four short stories—set in Italy, New England, and Canada—explore various themes, including, as the title story says, solitude. Vivante begins the narrative with a self-oblivious solitude that will become loneliness. Day after day, night after night, Vivante's narrator becomes aware of his isolation, and he decides to seek the company of others. Companionship, therefore, becomes another theme developed in these stories.Although not explicitly autobiographical, many of these stories do have an autobiographical tone. Vivante writes about things that may have happened in his life. His stories often stem from the observation of a bright or meaningful moment, and always center on exploring the ideas and emotions of his characters.Written with clarity, simplicity, and sincerity, Solitude and Other Stories is a lovely collection from an accomplished author.

Winner of the 2006 Sullivan Prize, The Irish Martyr is a collection of ten stories by Russell Working, an award-winning fiction writer, Chicago Tribune reporter, and former foreign correspondent. With an impressive imaginative reach, Working peoples his stories with unforgettable characters, giving flesh and bone to issues in the headlines. Ranging widely in voice and place, these stories explore the emotional repercussions of fragile humans caught in often harsh situations beyond their control. That we respond to their pathos and humor, resignation and anger, testifies to Working's skill as a chronicler of fictive lives that all too clearly resonate with our world.In the Pushcart Prize–winning title story, we meet an Egyptian girl obsessed with an armed Irishman who moves next door to her family's Sinai beach house. In "Help," a man reflects on his career spent receiving multimillion-dollar payments from deposed generals and presidents, while "Perjury" considers what happens when a boy in a Pacific Northwest town is summoned to testify in the trial of his alcoholic father. A North Korean woman flees her homeland, allowing herself to be sold as a wife to a Chinese farmer in "Dear Leader." "Slava" describes how the Chechen war touches the life of a Russian doctor in the Pacific seaport of Vladivostok.

Kellie Wells is a writer of startling imagination whose "phantasmal stories," Booklist says, "shimmer with a dreamlike vibrancy." God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna, Wells's second collection of short stories and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, is populated with the world's castoffs, cranks, and inveterate oddballs, the deeply aggrieved, the ontologically challenged, the misunderstood mopes that haunt the shadowy wings of the world?s main stage. Here you will find a teacup-sized aerialist who tries to ingest the world's considerable suffering; a lonely god growing ever lonelier as the Afterlife swells with monkeys and other improbable occupants; a father fluent in the language of the Dead who has difficulty communicating with his living son; and Death himself, a moony adolescent with a tender heart and a lack of ambition. God-haunted and apocalyptic, comic and formally inventive, these stories give lyrical voice to the indomitability of the everyday underdog, and they will continue to resonate long after the last word has been read.

Kellie Wells is a writer of startling imagination whose "phantasmal stories," Booklist says, "shimmer with a dreamlike vibrancy." God, the Moon, and Other Megafauna, Wells's second collection of short stories and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, is populated with the world's castoffs, cranks, and inveterate oddballs, the deeply aggrieved, the ontologically challenged, the misunderstood mopes that haunt the shadowy wings of the world?s main stage. Here you will find a teacup-sized aerialist who tries to ingest the world's considerable suffering; a lonely god growing ever lonelier as the Afterlife swells with monkeys and other improbable occupants; a father fluent in the language of the Dead who has difficulty communicating with his living son; and Death himself, a moony adolescent with a tender heart and a lack of ambition. God-haunted and apocalyptic, comic and formally inventive, these stories give lyrical voice to the indomitability of the everyday underdog, and they will continue to resonate long after the last word has been read.

Down Along the Piney is John Mort's fourth short-story collection and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. With settings in Florida, California, Mexico, Chicago, the Texas Panhandle, and, of course, the Ozarks themselves, these thirteen stories portray the unsung, amusing, brutal, forever hopeful lives of ordinary people. Mort chronicles the struggles of "flyover" people who live not just in the Midwest, but anywhere you can find a farm, small town, or river winding through forested hills. Mort, whose earlier stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, and The Chicago Tribune, is the author of the award-winning Vietnam War novel Soldier in Paradise, as well as Goat Boy of the Ozarks and The Illegal. These ironic, unflaggingly honest stories will remind the reader of Jim Harrison, Sherwood Anderson, and Shirley Jackson.

Down Along the Piney is John Mort's fourth short-story collection and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. With settings in Florida, California, Mexico, Chicago, the Texas Panhandle, and, of course, the Ozarks themselves, these thirteen stories portray the unsung, amusing, brutal, forever hopeful lives of ordinary people. Mort chronicles the struggles of "flyover" people who live not just in the Midwest, but anywhere you can find a farm, small town, or river winding through forested hills. Mort, whose earlier stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, and The Chicago Tribune, is the author of the award-winning Vietnam War novel Soldier in Paradise, as well as Goat Boy of the Ozarks and The Illegal. These ironic, unflaggingly honest stories will remind the reader of Jim Harrison, Sherwood Anderson, and Shirley Jackson.

These prizewinning stories champion the everyday person who tries to do his or her best in demanding and even demeaning situations.The stories in A Common Person and Other Stories, R. M. Kinder's third short-story collection and the winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, expose the disruption in our modern life and the ever-present threat of violence, and, most importantly, they capture the real heroism of everyday people. The characters in these stories, most set deep in the middle of America, seem to invite trouble through their concern for others: a neighbor's mistreated dog, a boy standing up to a bully, a woman who faces cancer and the loss of love. Kinder's characters struggle with conflicts common to us all—to treat humans and animals with compassion, to open minds and hearts to diversity, all while balancing the welfare of the individual and the larger community. The characters aren't always loveable, but they have their moments of grace—they accept responsibility and take stands. These stories, by turns humorous, unsettling, and utterly believable, expose the dangers of ordinary life as their characters perform acts of defiance, determination, and connection. The memorable characters in A Common Person and Other Stories are, like us, doing the best they can, and that is often remarkable and admirable. Considered closely, Kinder shows us, no person is common.

These prizewinning stories champion the everyday person who tries to do his or her best in demanding and even demeaning situations.The stories in A Common Person and Other Stories, R. M. Kinder's third short-story collection and the winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, expose the disruption in our modern life and the ever-present threat of violence, and, most importantly, they capture the real heroism of everyday people. The characters in these stories, most set deep in the middle of America, seem to invite trouble through their concern for others: a neighbor's mistreated dog, a boy standing up to a bully, a woman who faces cancer and the loss of love. Kinder's characters struggle with conflicts common to us all—to treat humans and animals with compassion, to open minds and hearts to diversity, all while balancing the welfare of the individual and the larger community. The characters aren't always loveable, but they have their moments of grace—they accept responsibility and take stands. These stories, by turns humorous, unsettling, and utterly believable, expose the dangers of ordinary life as their characters perform acts of defiance, determination, and connection. The memorable characters in A Common Person and Other Stories are, like us, doing the best they can, and that is often remarkable and admirable. Considered closely, Kinder shows us, no person is common.

In these dense and startling stories, Maya Sonenberg telescopes seasons, decades, and generations in candid depictions of women's family lives.What happens when the urge to ditch your family outpaces the desire to love them? The stories in Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, attempt to answer this question, heading straight for the messiness of domestic relationships and the constraints society places on women as they navigate their obligations. Daughters desert their rheumy-eyed elders in dusty museums, steal a mother's favorite teacup, or consider throwing their dead parents' nostalgia-riddled belongings out the window. Mothers conclude that they love one child more than their others. Fathers puzzle over a wife's inability to balance family and career or accuse a partner of blaming their child for her own misdeeds. Women mourn the children they decided not to have and fret over the legacy they'll leave the children they do have. But sometimes the generations reconcile or siblings manage to rescue each other. Love tears these people apart, but it mends them too.The emotions expressed in these stories are combustible, both fraught and nuanced, uncontrollable and common, but above all often ignored or hushed because we're not supposed to be bored by our children or annoyed with our aged parents, even as we love them. The careful shapes of these stories adapted from fairy tales, verse, letters, or newspaper announcements, the surprise of their wordplay, and the blaze of their lyrical sentences allow them to dig into and contain all those messy emotions at the same time. In these works, constraint creates both understanding and fire.

In these dense and startling stories, Maya Sonenberg telescopes seasons, decades, and generations in candid depictions of women's family lives.What happens when the urge to ditch your family outpaces the desire to love them? The stories in Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, attempt to answer this question, heading straight for the messiness of domestic relationships and the constraints society places on women as they navigate their obligations. Daughters desert their rheumy-eyed elders in dusty museums, steal a mother's favorite teacup, or consider throwing their dead parents' nostalgia-riddled belongings out the window. Mothers conclude that they love one child more than their others. Fathers puzzle over a wife's inability to balance family and career or accuse a partner of blaming their child for her own misdeeds. Women mourn the children they decided not to have and fret over the legacy they'll leave the children they do have. But sometimes the generations reconcile or siblings manage to rescue each other. Love tears these people apart, but it mends them too.The emotions expressed in these stories are combustible, both fraught and nuanced, uncontrollable and common, but above all often ignored or hushed because we're not supposed to be bored by our children or annoyed with our aged parents, even as we love them. The careful shapes of these stories adapted from fairy tales, verse, letters, or newspaper announcements, the surprise of their wordplay, and the blaze of their lyrical sentences allow them to dig into and contain all those messy emotions at the same time. In these works, constraint creates both understanding and fire.

Advance Praise for Dinner with Osama"Marilyn Krysl is one of our most gifted, quirky, and delightful storytellers—unpredictable, funny, and wildly inventive in wondrous ways. Her new collection shows her at the top of her form as she details the ordinary, the absurd, and the apocalyptic in outrageous and deeply affecting ways." —Jay Neugeboren, author of 1940 and News from the New American Diaspora"Marilyn Krysl's astonishing Dinner with Osama somehow finds the intersection between deep anguish at the state of the world and brilliant, caustic, and hilarious sociopolitical satire of America post-9/11. Its effrontery is peculiarly female, its fierce intelligence that of a mother—or even ('Are We Dwelling Deep Yet?') a Great Mother—who needs to save and feed the world however she can. Its north and south must be 'Mitosis,' Krysl's heartbreaking life history of a young Dinka woman whose way of life, and source of food, have been destroyed by civil war in Sudan; its east and west is surely the title story, in the voice of a politically irreproachable matriarch of Boulder, Colorado, who does her part by extending a dinner invitation to Osama—yes, that Osama—through her 'pal' Abdullah at the local gyros stand; and Osama not only receives it, he accepts. Israelis and Palestinians, 'conflict'-addicted cliché-mongers of the creative writing workshop, violent extremists of every stripe, and above all the wealthy consumerist left are all skewered in this miraculous collection." —Jaimy Gordon, author of Bogeywoman and She Drove Without Stopping"We may have to invent a new term––'the political lyric,' perhaps––to describe the 'airy speech and inspired story' in Marilyn Krysl's brilliant new collection of short fiction, Dinner with Osama. What holds all the fiction together, as much as the impassioned political and cultural concerns that inform them, is the writing, which is lyrical in the best sense, lyrical as in musical, expressive, and vivid." —Ed Falco, author of Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories