Books

Winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Longlist, 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction | Winner, Minnesota Book Awards of 2025 | Finalist, 2024 Foreword Indies Award Co-winner | The Boston Globe‘s Best 75 Books of 2024 Winner | The Minnesota Star Tribune Best Book of 2024 | Co-winner, Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2024 | Co-winner, The Continent‘s Top 5 ...

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 ...

Winner of the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Small in Real Life invokes the myth and melancholy of Southern California glamor, of starry-eyed women and men striving for their own Hollywood shimmer and the seamy undersides and luxurious mystique of the Golden State. Exiled to a Malibu rehab, an alcoholic paparazzo ...

This book is characterized by narrative vitality and emotional range. In Wetherell’s stories a suburban retiree’s assumptions about the ethos of Long Island life are challenged and dismissed by a younger generation, a young English woman achieves miracles by dancing with wounded soldiers during World War ...

Originally published in 1942, The Valley of Decision was an instant success, and its story of four generations of the Scott family—owners and operators of a Pittsburgh iron and steel works—has since captured the imagination of generations of readers. Absorbing and complex, it chronicles the family’s saga from ...

Geoffrey Becker’s Dangerous Men was selected by Charles Baxter as the winner of the fifteenth annual Drue Heinz Literature Prize. His manuscript was selected from nearly three hundred submitted by published writers. In these tightly drafted stories, Becker creates a wide variety of distinct voices, peculiar characters, and ...

The stories in this extraordinary collection are set in Northern Ireland, specifically Belfast, the center for more than thirty years of fighting between Roman Catholic nationalists and Protestants loyal to the British crown. Cornell is not preoccupied, however, with the details of the war. Her stories explore the emotional and ...

Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize This collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. In one story, a woman sleeps with the village priest, trying to gain back the land the church took from her family; in ...

2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize WinnerSelected by Frank ConroyIn the Gathering Woods contains a cast of characters who hail from the same Italian ancestors, but whose stories come at us unbounded by time and space. The book opens early in the twentieth century, with a narrator’s boyhood recollections of gathering ...

These nine stories are teeming with people on the margins, where destitute New Yorkers and determined immigrants are as much at the mercy of social services, media attention, opportunistic politicians, and “quality-of-life” campaigns as they are prey to grinding poverty, dangerous streets, and their own haunting memories. Delving into Lucy ...

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize was established in 1980 to encourage and support the writing and reading of short fiction. Over the past twenty years judges such as Robert Penn Warren, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Alice McDermott, and Frank Conroy have selected the best collections from ...

A boxer who brings his legs with him comes to the ring with the strength and stamina to make it through every round of a tough fight. In this new collection, winner of the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Darrell Spencer delivers fiction with just that kind of power.Bring ...

Between Camelots is about the struggle to forge relationships and the spaces that are left when that effort falls short. In the title story, a man at a backyard barbecue waits for a blind date who never shows up. He meets a stranger who advises him to give up the ...

News is “one of the few things that connects us as a nation” observes the protagonist in the title story of Newsworld, a new collection by Todd James Pierce that explores America’s obsession with news and entertainment culture. The characters in “Newsworld” seek to design realistic theme park attractions, ...

Winner of the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeThe Physics of Imaginary Objects, in fifteen stories and a novella, 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. Weaving in and out of the space that ...