The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

had to lock the nutty father away in a mental institution. Committing the father also softened the narrator's anger, which in turn cut down the number of personal cruelties in the story. The pain spread out beyond the petty question of personal fairness, widening into sympathy. All the quotes were removed from the dialogue-which is how I’d had it originally-and that fixed a tonal problem, since all the dialogue was written to sound reported rather than realistic. Thus my first vague impulse was integrated back into the narrator's voice. The sentences felt healthy and true again. The engine driving the story had always been anger, but in the last stages of rewriting a new note of love crept in. If anger is endless and the deepest urge of love is toward completion, then love, I’d have to say, did the trick-however unliterary that insight may seem.

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of The Point and Other Stories and The Dead Fish Museum. His fiction appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and various anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. His nonfiction appears regularly in Nest Magazine and The Organ Review of Arts. D’Ambrosio lives in Portland, Oregon.

Ben Fountain, “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers”

I was sitting at my daughters piano recital watching all those kids ripping the keyboard in that extraordinary way which we tend to take for granted, the fingers hitting the keys bam-bam-bam-bam as if each separate finger had its own brain, and two things occurred to me more or less simultaneously. One, that artistic skill and achievement of this sort are an everyday miracle that ought to blow our minds, and, two, how would throwing an extra finger into the mix change things? I walked around with those notions for a couple of days, pretty sure that I wanted to write a story about a piano prodigy, a young girl, with eleven fingers, and after a few more days I realized that I’d begun thinking about her in the context of that lost, hyperattenuated world of the Jewish intelligentsia of fin de siecle Vienna. Which felt right to me; after that it was just a question of doing the work.

Ben Fountain grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina and Duke University Law School, and practiced law in Dallas before quitting to write fiction. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Threepenny Review, Zoetrope, and The Pushcart Prize, and in 2002 he won the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award. He is working on a novel set in Dallas, where he lives with his wife and their two children.

Paula Fox, “Grace”

My family and I took in a small stray dog many years ago. She was rather like Grace, both timid and stubborn. The title refers not only to the dog in the story, but also to John Hillman's implied evolution to a state of grace.

Paula Fox was born in 1923, and in the 1960s began to publish both novels and books for young people. Since her first novel, Poor George, and first book for children, Maurice's Room, she's published another twenty-eight books, the most recent a memoir, Borrowed Finery. Fox lives in New York City.

Nell Freudenberger, “The Tutor”

I started writing this story during a two-month stay in Bombay. I knew I was writing a book that would take place mostly in India, but I didn’t like the idea of “looking for” stories. At the same time I made choices that seem, in retrospect, suspiciously scavengerish: I rented a room in a family-owned boardinghouse that doubled as a maternity hospital; I pestered a Parsi friend to take me walking around the Towers of Silence, the sacred compound where Zoroastrians expose their dead; I spent an inordinate amount of time convincing the staff of the historic David Sassoon library to give me reading privileges. Some of my happiest (but least “exotic”) days in Bombay were spent with a friend of a friend from home, who had set up a business tutoring high school students for college entrance exams. One afternoon he mentioned that the teenage girls he taught were bored by poetry, with the exception of Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress.” The idea that sixteen-year-old girls in Bombay were responding to Marvell fascinated me; according to my friend, they immediately understood the poem as a seduction strategy. That got me started, and I finished the story after I came home to New York. I hope that my feeling for Bombay is in “The Tutor,” but I also know that the core of the story is something native to me: my own response to certain poems as a teenager. I worried that being away from home would either keep me from writing stories, or help so much that I would depend on it; I like the idea that my friend's anecdote, for which I’m grateful, is one I could have heard at home. Maybe stories aren’t such delicate things that a trip over the ocean can make or break them.

Nell Freudenberger's stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta. Lucky Girls, her first book, won the PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award for Fiction. She has taught English in Bangkok and New Delhi. Freudenberger lives in New York City.

Tessa Hadley, “The Card Trick”

For me, the oddest thing about this story, “The Card Trick,” is that inside it I have made up the whole career of an imaginary celebrated novelist, John Morrison; and even some of his work. This is not something I’ve ever done elsewhere. It was surprisingly easy to supply the biography, and an impression of the novels; much easier than making up one's own work. I just imagined a whole oeuvre, absolutely of its period, intense and melancholy, austere. I thought of a writer I’d love to discover, and read. Well, of course, I didn’t actually have to write John Morrison's novel, only imagine how it ought to be, if it was really good: which is the easy bit. In retro- spect, I’m struck by my cheek in inventing him. He's almost too much- too big-to be used only in one story; I am playing with the idea of bringing him into something else, to do him justice, make his influence on the history of the novel more strongly felt and pervasive. The idea of bringing Literature into literature, so to speak, really interests me. All my own living has been so saturated with my reading, it seems a kind of lie to leave books out of books.

But the germ of the story began with the card trick itself: the only even moderately good one I know. I did try to write enough into the story so that anyone who cared to follow it could see how it was done. I remember learning this trick as a child, from a boy, in fact (reversing what happens in the story), son of a family friend. I had been too shy to talk to him, until we came together over this trick. I remember the wonderful sense of power it gave me, dissolving awkwardness and incapacity, giving me a way of performing with a mastery that otherwise I didn’t seem to have. The twist, that the trick seems to hand over mastery from the performer to the subject who unknowingly deals out, is an adult irony overlaid onto the child's excitement. I have made it have something to do with sex, with the way women have sometimes made themselves abject in order to keep control. Gina-unknowingly, of course-may be up to something like this, in her teenage helplessness.

Tessa Hadley was born in Bristol, England. She has published two novels, Accidents in the Home and Everything Will Be All Right, and her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Big Issue, among others. She is the author of Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, and teaches English and creative writing at Bath Spa University College. Hadley has lived in Cardiff, Wales, for more than twenty years.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “Refuge in London”

In earlier years I wrote mostly about India-or rather, my experience of India-but later I more often turned back to my European background. Although of course the characters and setting of “Refuge in London” are the usual lies and fusions that the fictional memory performs, I did grow up as a refugee in London during the war years. And I did sit for a once-famous artist, who was also a refugee and couldn’t afford another model; and he did read Beaudelaire to me from a little book he must have acquired in Paris during his youthful years there. Later, when he returned to Germany (where he again became successful), he gave me that book and I took it with me to India. I still have it there. He had drawn a bookplate for me and pasted it inside, and that is the only drawing of his I possess.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany in 1927 and escaped to England with her parents in 1939. She went to school and college in London, where she met and married the Indian architect C. S. H. Jhabvala. They lived in India from 1951 to 1975. She published her first novel in 1955, and since then has published twelve novels, including Heat and Dust and A Backward Place, and six collections of short stories. She has written most of the screenplays for the films of Merchant Ivory, with whom she has been associated since 1962. Jhabvala lives in New York, with frequent return visits to India.