Books

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008
Edited by Laura Furman, Anchor, 2008, 400 pp.

There's something intensely spiritual about The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008.

The stories selected are those you cannot touch, and yet despite their distance, the emotion each piece evokes is personal and transcendent. As with any spiritual journey, significant conflict is built into all the works.

The patchwork of themes is rich and detailed. From love, morality, friendship, coming of age, death, racial and sexual identification to escape, the established writers — Alice Munro, William H. Gass, William Trevor and Michael Faber — all perform brilliantly, but it is the newcomers who really steal the show.

In the context of spirituality, Ha Jin's "Composer and his Parakeets" is a story about art and love. Bori, a parakeet, has been left in care of composer Falin. And despite Falin's initial unease, the bird wins his heart and forces Falin to reevaluate the relationship to art and love.

"Bye Bye Natalia" is perhaps my favorite piece. Writer Michael Faber takes us inside the world of disease and poverty and introduces us to the destitute but optimistic Natalia. It is the story of a mail-order bride in search of an American man who could potentially pluck her out of her world and give her a better life. In a twist ending, Faber reminds us that we can never give up and shouldn't settle for anything that isn't true.

The only piece that touches on race — but does so in a big way — is Sharon Palmer's "Bad Neighbors." A piece colored by the civil rights era, the story follows a black family who is discriminated against and forced out of the white neighborhood they have moved into.

Palmer paints the story remarkably well and forces us to cast the decision as to who really is the bad character.

White versus black, love versus hate, good versus bad, understanding versus misunderstanding and truth versus stereotype, the stories confront relevant issues that still confront us today. The poignant racial struggle makes the "Neighbors" piece a striking one.

"The Transitional Object," the unfortunate story about a starving student in Paris forced to extremes in order to survive, illustrates society's desensitization to issues of immorality. Writer Shelia Kohler's character Claire is knowingly taken advantage of by her professor but doesn't come out empty-handed. She is a product of contemporary society who quickly learns that life isn't always just. Forced to turn tricks in order to eat and get by, writer Kohler castrates morality and does so in a relevant fashion.

A popular theme through the collection is the issue of death, with the related themes of grief and imprisonment. Both Lore Segal's "Other People's Deaths," about a circle of friends who shun their widowed friend because they are fearful of her grief, and Alexi Zentner's "Touch," about a family living in a Canadian logging country, touch on this theme.

"Touch" follows the family's tragic loss when the father and daughter are accidentally killed, leaving behind a family who will have to relearn how to survive. Zenter writes expressively about the way the family and the logging community are defined and imprisoned by the place in which they live.

Arguably one of the strongest pieces that truly identifies with the theme of spirituality and coming to know one's purpose and self better is Alice Munro's "What Do You Want to Know For." The story parallels a woman's discovery of a mysterious tomb with her recent breast cancer diagnosis.

Munro beautifully articulates the woman's curiosity in wanting to learn more about a forgotten piece of local history and how this mystery relates to her own possible death — and whether the mystery will give a reason to fight for her life.

The stories that comprise the O. Henry Prize collection are a living and literary testament to the founder William Sydney Porter, aka O. Henry's character. An individual with a tainted past and known for his surprise endings, O. Henry was gritty and wrote about life, in all its many different shapes and forms.

The writers in this year's collection are by no means naive and all share a "lived" quality. The stories have seen, experienced and survived some form of conflict that teaches us lessons about our own lives. This year's collection is definitely one of the best so far.

Ashley Boyd is a junior majoring in journalism and creative writing at the University of Alabama.