Books
Best Debut Short Stories 2024
The PEN America Dau Prize
The essential annual guide to the newest voices in literature, selected by Sindya Bhanoo, Ayşegül Savaş, and Sidik FofanaBest Debut Short Stories celebrates the most promising short story writers today. Selected by a panel of distinguished judges, these twelve stories are the 2024 winners of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, which recognizes outstanding debuts published in literary magazines.
Seeking Fortune Elsewhere
Stories
These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women’s lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power—a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winnerTraveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart.
In “Malliga Homes,” selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In "No. 16 Model House Road," a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In "Nature Exchange," a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In "A Life in America," a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students.
Sindya Bhanoo’s haunting stories show us how immigrants’ paths, and the paths of those they leave behind, are never simple. Bhanoo takes us along on their complicated journeys where regret, hope, and triumph appear in disguise.