Fiction / General

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for ashort fiction, John Wideman has compiled an anthology featuring stories from each of the past winners.

Winner of the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the nine stories in this selection are full of quirky, complex, and vividly drawn characters who live on the margins of New York society.

Winner of the 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Frank Conroy. Inter-connected short stories about a family with roots in a remote Italian mountain village.

Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Fado and Other Stories is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. Katherine Vaz is never afraid to confront her subject’s ambiguities and her characters’ conflicts – the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life’s discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.

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’s stories explore the emotional and psychological consequences of the struggle to endure not only violence, but loss, failure, and the inability to believe.

Winner of the fifteenth annual Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Dangerous Men contains a wide variety of distinct voices, peculiar characters, and odd settings, with tantalizing emphasis on lonliness, loss, and the ever-present struggle to find one’s place in the world. These are stories you will not forget.

Pittsburgh author Marcia Davenport’s absorbing and complex chronicle of a family’s fortunes from the economic panic of 1873 through the dramatic rise of American industry and trade unionism, through waves of immigration, class conflict, natural disaster, World War I, to Pearl Harbor.

Winner of the 1985 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. 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 II, a tennis-mad bachelor plays an interior game as real to him as an actual match, and a black drifter converts an Asian couple to his bleak vision of American life and finds strange kinship with them.

Our all-time bestselling title, this classic and powerful novel spanning three generations of a Slovak immigrant family. It has been adopted for course use in more than 300 colleges and universities nationwide.