Although I disagreed with last year’s choices, I had no quarrel with the jury’s selections this time. They had a very tough task because the 2009 Prize Stories are of very high quality. The brilliance of these works stems in the fact that they allow the reader to see many different perspectives, and that doesn’t just mean globally. The setting and social customs of India in Mohan Sikka’s “Uncle Musto Takes a Mistress” and Bejing in E.V. Slate’s “Purple Bamboo Park” can be just as foreign to someone with limited travels as the parental perspectives of mother to son in Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s “The Nursery” and father to daughter in Alistair Morgan’s “Icebergs” are to a childless adult.
In her introduction Furman writes about the goal of the O. Henry Prize Stories being “to strengthen the art of the short story.” The discipline is certainly well fortified by the practitioners and their pieces collected herein.
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