Three for the Story Prize

The judges for The Story Prize (which honours collections of short fiction written in English and published in the US) has selected a shortlist of just 3 books out of the 73 submitted :

• Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno
• Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

Lahiri, remember, leapfrogged all the opposition in the Frank O'Connor last year. Most of the stories in Woolf's book have been taken from previous collections, but as BookFox observes :

... when a version of the National Book Award winner was published thirty years previously, I don't think that hurts Wolff's chances.

Meno's book, the only small press publication of the three, sounds very much my kind of thing :

Each of theses 20 stories evokes a different and surprising world, where, for instance, victims held at gunpoint fall in love with their captors, freed zoo animals roam the streets, a wife turns into a cloud whenever her husband makes a romantic overture, miniature elephants become prized and acutely sensitive pets, and a tiny city grows inside a woman like a cancer. Yet, no matter how imaginative the situation, the stories remain grounded in real empathy and plausible detail.