I’ve been pretty good up until now about not using this journalistic platform to promote the Story Prize, which I’m judging this year along with Edwige Danticat and Mitchell Kaplan. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that all three finalists—Rick Bass, Mary Gordon, and George Saunders—will be on Leonard Lopate’s WNYC show this afternoon, starting around 1:20 p.m. The program says they’ll “compare notes,” so I’m not sure if they’ll actually be reading from their nominated works, but it should be a good show in any event. And of course they’ll definitely be reading tomorrow night at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium during the awards ceremony.
And I’m not about to give anything away here (heck, I haven’t even told Sarah or Mrs. GalleyCat who won), but it was tough deciding between three writers of this caliber… Heck, it was difficult narrowing the field down to those three, as yesterday’s runners-up for the PEN/Faulkner prize showed. Amy Hempel, Edward P. Jones, Charles D’Ambrosio and Deborah Eisenberg were just four of the authors who published wonderful short story collections last year…all of whom were overlooked by the fiction committees for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle, as were the Story Prize finalists.