Good prose provides an emotional experience (feeling) wrapped in an intellectual experience (reading). The particular problem of short prose is—well, its shortness. How can several hundred words compel without begging? Allow me to introduce Erica Olsen’s “Grand Canyon II.”
The story begins innocuously—“For a long time I wanted to go back to the Grand Canyon”—but ends by doubting the worth of the entire actual world. Like all good narratives, it suggests great consequence. This ultimately comforting story, in its intense particularity and assiduous coherence, casts a beacon on elemental themes: the past is another country. The task of memory is impossible. No one exists and nothing ever happened. But somewhere in your brain, a beautiful lie is being spun….
Sarah Manguso
contest judge
Sarah Manguso is the author of the book-length essay The Guardians, the memoir The Two Kinds of Decay, the short-story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, and the poetry collectionsSiste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The London Review of Books, McSweeney’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, three volumes of the Best American Poetry series, and elsewhere. Honors for her writing include a Hodder Fellowship and the Rome Prize.
