Winner of the 2025 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Stories of Ordinary People Experiencing Extraordinary Circumstances
The eleven stories in A Place in the World are character-driven portrayals of various lives transformed by random events or twists of fate. A young woman living on the coast of Maine confronts her painful past ...
Winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Longlist, 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction | Winner, Minnesota Book Awards of 2025 | Winner, 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award | Finalist, 2024 Foreword Indies Award | Cowinner, The Boston Globe‘s Best 75 Books of 2024 Winner | The Minnesota Star Tribune Best Book of 2024 | Cowinner, Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2024 | Cowinner, ...
Winner of the 2011 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Shannon Cain’s stories chart the treacherous territory of the illicit. They expose the absurdity of our rituals, our definitions of sexuality, and above all, our expectations of happiness and self-fulfillment. Cain’s protagonists are destined to suffer—and sometimes enjoy—the consequences ...
Poised on the precipice of mystery and longing, each character in Now You Know It All also hovers on the brink of discovery—and decision. Set in small-town North Carolina, or featuring eager Southerners venturing afar, these stories capture the crucial moment of irrevocable change. A young waitress accepts an ...
Winner, 2023 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction, Texas Institute of Letters | Winner of the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Happiness and connection prove fickle in this debut collection of eleven linked stories introducing Babbie and Donnie. She is a thrice-divorced former call girl, and he is a sobriety-challenged ...
Winner, 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize | Finalist, 2021 Northern California Book Award | Longlist, 2021 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize | Longlist, 2020 The Story Prize
Exploring what it means to be human through the Korean diaspora, Caroline Kim’s stories feature many voices. From a teenage girl in 1980’s America, to a boy growing up in ...
William Wall is the first international winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
In this collection of interconnected stories, the beautiful and ravaging forces of sea and land collide with the forces of human nature, through isolation and family, love and loss, madness and revelation. The stories follow the lives ...
A Library Journal Best Book of 2019Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a love letter to women moving through violence. These linked stories are set in the streets and the bars, the old homes, the tiny apartments, and the landscape of a working-class Boston. Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat ...
The 14 stories of The Dogs of Detroit each focus on grief and its many strange permutations. This grief alternately devolves into violence, silence, solitude, and utter isolation. In some cases, grief drives the stories as a strong, reactionary force, and yet in other stories, that grief evolves quietly over long ...
WINNER OF THE 2016 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE Winner of the 2017 California Book Awards, first fiction category
Many of these richly layered stories juxtapose the miracles of modern medicine against the inescapable frustrations of everyday life: awkward first dates, the indignities of air travel, and overwhelming megastore cereal aisles. In “Go ...
WINNER OF THE 2015 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE Selected by Jill McCorkleThis Angel on My Chest 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 ...
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 ...
For Jill, a young American living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, life is in “a holding pattern” of long days in a restrictive place-“sandlocked nowhere,” as another expat calls it. Others don’t know how to leave, and try to adopt the country as their own. And to ...
WINNER OF THE 2008 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE
Selected by Scott Turow
Feeling distanced from her friends and family, middle-aged divorcee Caitlin Drury is encouraged by her daughter to express her feelings in a diary, but she is hesitant: I feel lonely she wrote, then crossed it out. She didn’t ...
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 ...
