The Story Prize has announced the 2009 shortlist for its annual twenty-thousand-dollar award. In the running for the honor, given for a short story collection published in the previous year, are National Book Award finalist Daniyal Mueenuddin for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton), Victoria Patterson for Drift (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Wells Tower for Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
The shortlisted books, all of them debut collections, were selected from seventy-eight titles submitted by fifty-three presses. The winner will be announced on March 3 at the New School in New York City after a reading by all three finalists, and two runners up will then be awarded a five thousand dollar prize.
Past winners of the prize, given since 2004, are Edwidge Danticat for The Dew Breaker (Knopf), Patrick O'Keeffe for The Hill Road (Viking), Mary Gordon for The Stories of Mary Gordon (Pantheon), Jim Shepard for Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf), and Tobias Wolff for Our Story Begins (Knopf).
In the video below, the title story of Tower's collection—a tale of Viking plunderers—is excerpted in an animated short.