Two short-fiction heavyweights and an upstart who wrote one of the best books I read last year are the three finalists for the fifth annual Story Prize.

The annual award for short fiction has announced that Jhumpa Lahiri, Tobias Wolff and Joe Meno are the finalists for the 2008 award. They were selected from among 73 collections published by 56 different publishers or imprints.

Lahiri is nominated for Unaccustomed Earth, he second short story collection and her third book. Wolff's Our Story Begins is a new and selected collection that gathered 16 stories from previous collections and 10 new stories. Meno's Demons in the Spring is this innovative young writer's latest.

While I haven't read either Lahiri's or Wolff's books, I can highly recommend their work. Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies was masterful, and Wolff's three story collections that lend some of their pieces to Our Story Begins are uniformly excellent. Meno's book, my first -- but not last -- experience with his work, was fantastic. I must admit that I was turned off of his work without reading a word thanks to his early promotion and seemingly ridiculous titles like Hairstyles of the Damned. My loss. Demons in the Spring is the work of an assured writer, each of its 20 stories each creating a world that feels perfectly lived in completely different from the others. For added appeal, each is illustrated by a different comic or graphic artist, adding a pleasing dimension to the work.

Prize founder Julie Lindsey and director Larry Dark selected the finalists, and three judges will select the winner: Daniel Menaker,former executive editor-in-chief of Random House, fiction editor at The New Yorker, and an author; Rick Simonson of Seattle’s Elliott Bay Books who founded and directs the store’s reading series; and Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and Animal Crackers and the editor of literary magazine One Story.

The winner will be announced at a March 4 event in New York. The winner will be presented with $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl; the two runners-up will each receive $5,000.

Past Story Prize winners are The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat (2005), The Hill Road by Patrick O’Keeffe (2006), The Stories of Mary Gordon by Mary Gordon (2007), and Like You’d Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard (2008).

Labels: books, criticism