I'm not sure how prestigious this is given that I've never heard of it before, but the Story Prize has been awarded to Jim Shepard for his short story collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway. The prize includes a $20,000 cash award, which is a nice little boost for a great writer who doesn't sell a lot of books. Oh, and he received an engraved silver bowl, too.

It's certainly a worthy book, an adventurous and ambitious collection that was among the best books I read in 2007. In my Monday Interview with Shepard in December, we talked about his stories, and I noted that they seemed like the result of challenges he had issued to himself.

"I think they are challenges to myself -- that's a nice way of putting it -- nearly always in terms of stretching the capacities of my empathetic imagination," he said. Going on to talk about a story in his previous collection, Love and Hydrogen, he continued, "A story narrated by John Ashcroft began with my fulminating about yet another one of his inconceivably bad decisions as attorney general, for example, and then asking myself, ‘How does he do something like that, and live with himself?’ And then asking myself the question more seriously, and deciding that I would read all about him and try to find out."

The Story Prize itself is a bit of a mystery. Information about its provenance on its web site states that it is "an annual book award honoring the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction with a $20,000 cash award. Each of two runners-up will receive $5,000. Eligible books must be written in English and first published in the United States during a calendar year."

Past winners are Edwidge Danticat in 2004 for The Dew Breaker, Patrick O'Keeffe in 2005 for The Hill Road and Mary Gordon in 2006 for The Stories of Mary Gordon.

There is some credibility behind the effort, however. Shepard was up against Tessa Hadley's Sunstroke and Other Stories and Vincent Lam's Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, while the contest was judged by author and critic David Gates, librarian Patricia Groh and editor and poet Meghan O'Rourke.

Labels: books, criticism