Fiction / General

Winner of the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

The Johnstown Girls is a heartrending tale of twin sisters separated by the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Kathleen George masterfully blends a factual history of the flood into her story of two sisters, whose search for each other over the course of one hundred years unfolds after their lives were sent careening down different paths.

Winner of the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

This is a collection of unconventionally linked stories, each about a different young woman whose husband dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Ranging from traditional stories to lists, a quiz, a YouTube link, and even a lecture about creative writing, the stories grasp to put into words the ways in which we all cope with unspeakable loss.

This is the first English translation of an important Russian social novel (published in 1865) that enjoyed great popularity in its day, the period of Tsar Alexander’s great reforms. Sleptsov deals with complex political issues such as the abolition of serfdom, political repression, women’s rights, and the conflict between liberalism and radicalism among intellectuals. Highly readable, it provides important historical insights on the political and social climate of a volatile and transformative period in Russia history.

Winner of the 2014 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

The flight path of The Spirit Bird traces many landscapes and different transitory lives. A young man scratches out a living from the desert; a woman follows a rarely seen bird in the far reaches of Alaska; a poor single mother sorts out her life in a fancy mountain town. Other protagonists yearn to cross a racial divide, keep developers from a local island, explore their sexuality, and mourn a lost loved one. The characters in this collection are compelled to seek beyond their own horizons, and as the stories unfold, the search becomes the expression of their desires. The elusive spirit bird is a metaphor for what we’ve lost, for what we hope for, and what we don’t know about ourselves.

Winner of the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Winner of the 2010 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award

A compelling collection of short stories set in Saudi Arabia linked by various characters over a 50-year span, from the end of WWII to the mid-1990s. They’re native Saudis and expatriates going about their lives and loves and losses and discovering who they are and where they belong.

Winner of the 2008 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

Varallo’s short story collection gives voice to the disconnections of family and relationships, and the silent emotions that often speak louder than words. It tells of longings for meaningful expression and the complexities and escapism of human interactions that keep us from these truths.

Winner of the 2013 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeSelected by Amy Hempel

The Old Priest is a book of transformations. From the cigar-smoke-and-mirrors world of casino life, to the collection’s title character morphing into a goat-man before the narrator’s eyes, to a family drama upended by a miniature dinosaur in the backyard, Anthony Wallace writes about life-changing events. The characters seek to escape their earthly boundaries through artifice and fantasy, and those boundaries can be as elegant and fragile as a martini glass or as hardscrabble as an Indian reservation. The stories have to do with time and memory, and they convincingly open out beyond ordinary daily time to reveal something else—the present moment, perhaps, but a larger, more mysterious conception of it.

Winner of the 2002 Drue Heniz Literature Prize, this collection contains short stories set mostly in central Florida, populated by people living lives of disquieting longing and stubborn isolation.

Winner of the 2012 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeSelected by Sven Birkerts

The spine of this collection is a series of linked stories about Ruth Stein, a Brooklyn author whose first book has exposed her father’s abuses; while the voice here, speaking across a lifetime, ranges from bittersweet to humorous to lethal. Elsewhere, Bosworth explores the extended family, the bonds of friendship, an apocalyptic Vermont, the rank yet redeemable Gowanus Canal; also rites of passage, race relations, divorce, middle-aged romance, dementia, funerals, alcoholism, and the Jewish religion.

Winner of the 1996 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

To author Edith Pearlman, “The stories in Vaquita aim at an intimacy between writer and reader. That imagined reader wants to know who loves whom, who drinks what, and, mostly, who answers to what summons. Thank Heavens for Spike Lee! Before his movies writers and critics had to natter about moral stances; now I can say with a more tripping tongue that my characters are people in peculiar circumstances, aching to Do The Right Thing if only they can figure out what The Right Thing is. If not, they’ll at least Do Their Own Right Thing Right.”

Winner of the 2011 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Told in precise, evocative prose that skewers the heart of the matter time after time, these memorable stories view and illuminate the human condition from a compelling, funny and entirely original perspective.

Winner of the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

This book offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception.

Winner of the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

The stories explore America’s obsession with news and entertainment culture. In the title story, a theme park has attractions where visitors relive actual news events such as “OJ’s Bronco: The Ride”, and “Seige at Waco”.

Between Camelots is about the struggle to forge relationships and the spaces that are left when that effort falls short. The stories are not only about loss and fear, but also about the courage that drives us all to continue to reach out to the people around us.

Winner of the 2005 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Outstanding Achievement Award from Wisconsin Library Association, and the New Writers Award from Great Lakes College Association.