The Bigness of the World
Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction (2008)
About the collection:
In Lori Ostlund's debut collection people seeking escape from situations at home venture out into a world that they find is just as complicated and troubled as the one they left behind.
In prose highlighted by both satire and poignant observation, Ostlund offers characters that represent a different sort of everyman—men and women who poke fun at ideological rigidity while holding fast to good grammar and manners, people seeking connections in a world that seems increasingly foreign. In "Upon Completion of Baldness" a young woman shaves her head for a part in a movie in Hong Kong that will help her escape life with her lover in Albuquerque. The precocious narrator of "All Boy" finds comfort when he is locked in a closet by a babysitter. In "Dr. Deneau's Punishment" a math teacher leaving New York for Minnesota as a means of punishing himself engages in an unsettling method of discipline. A lesbian couple whose relationship is disintegrating flees to the Moroccan desert in "The Children Beneath the Seat." And in "Idyllic Little Bali" a group of Americans gather around a pool in Java to discuss their brushes with fame and end up witnessing a man's fatal flight from his wife.
In the eleven stories in The Bigness of the World we see that wherever you are in the world, where you came from is never far away.
You can find reviews, links to buy the book, and read the backstory and excerpts from four of the stories here:
- “Upon Completion of Baldness”
- “Dr. Deneau's Punishment”
- “Bed Death”
- “The Bigness of the World”
About the Flannery O'Connor Award:
(from its website)
"More than fifty short-story collections have appeared in the Flannery O'Connor Award series, which was established to encourage gifted emerging writers by bringing their work to a national readership. The first prize-winning book was published in 1983; the award has since become an important proving ground for writers and a showcase for the talent and promise that have brought about a resurgence in the short story as a genre. Winners are selected through an annual competition that attracts as many as three hundred manuscripts.
Winners of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction include such widely read authors as Ha Jin, Antonya Nelson, Rita Ciresi, and Mary Hood."
For more information, visit: The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction website.