THE STORY PRIZE FINALISTS FOR BOOK PUBLISHED IN 2024 ARE FIONA McFARLANE, RUBEN REYES JR., AND JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS
The Story Prize, now in its 21st year, is pleased to honor as its finalists three outstanding short story collections chosen from 107 submissions representing 82 different publishers or imprints:
Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr. (Mariner Books)
Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens (And Other Stories)
Highway Thirteen portrays moments in the lives of characters peripherally connected to an Australian serial killer—from a next door neighbor to an actor playing him in a limited series to one of the arresting officers. There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven offers formally inventive narratives reflecting on and riffing on Central American migration to the U.S. Ghost Pains provides a series of precisely written and keenly observed stories about characters in Europe and America facing quotidian predicaments amid a dissonant age.
Our three judges—writer and editor Elliott Holt, writer Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and bookseller Lucy Yu—will determine the winner.
On March 25, The Story Prize will livestream a private event that will feature readings by and interviews with each of the three finalists, culminating in the announcement of the winner, who will receive $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000. A link to the livestream will be available via The Story Prize website and social media.
About The Authors
Photo © Andy Barclay
Fiona McFarlane is the author of The Night Guest (2013) and The High Places (2016), which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker and Zoetrope: All-Story. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
Photo © Maria Jesús Contreras
Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants and the author of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Harvard College, his writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Originally from Southern California, he now lives in Brooklyn.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of the novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q (2020), named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Visitors (2022). Ghost Pains was chosen as a best book of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews and LitHub. Her reporting on climate and politics appears regularly in Foreign Policy. She also writes essays, criticism, and fiction for The Nation, The New Yorker online, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Bookforum, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Middlebury College and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at Universität Zürich.
The Story Prize Spotlight Award
Beyond the three finalists The Story Prize announces each year, we honor an additional short story collection of exceptional merit with The Story Prize Spotlight Award. Winners can be promising works by first-time authors, collections in alternative formats, or works that demonstrate an unusual perspective on the writer's craft. The award comes with a prize of $1,000.
We’re pleased to announce the 13th winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award, The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck (Viking). This beautifully written collection takes an original approach to connecting the stories—all set in New England and ranging in time from 1796 to the present—ordering them according to a traditional eighteenth-century rhyme scheme, with the first and last stories framing five other matched pairs and the collection as a whole.
Ben Shattuck is the author of Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, which was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of Spring, a New York Times Best Book of Summer, a New England Indie Bestseller, and was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife and daughter on the coast of Massachusetts, where he owns and runs the oldest general store in America, built in 1793. He is also the director and founder of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency.
PAUL YOON’S THE HIVE AND THE HONEY WAS THE 20th AND MOST RECENT WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE, ANNOUNCED IN MARCH 2024
About The Story Prize
Past winners have been Edwidge Danticat, Patrick O'Keeffe, Mary Gordon, Jim Shepard, Tobias Wolff, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Anthony Doerr, Steven Millhauser, Claire Vaye Watkins, George Saunders, Elizabeth McCracken, Adam Johnson, Rick Bass, Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, Edwidge Danticat (again), Deesha Philyaw, Brandon Taylor, Ling Ma, Ling Ma, and, most recently, Paul Yoon.
The deadlines for submitting 2025 books are July 1 for books published in the first half of the year and Nov. 15 for books published in the second half. You can find a list of short story collections submitted for The Story Prize in 2024 at Bookshop.org.
