I’m not so clear on this whole Pushcart Prize thing. I know it’s prestigious. I know there’s a book published every year. I’m not clear, though, on the whole nominating and awarding side of things. Nonetheless, I was delighted to see an announcement over on the Conjunctions website that Jonathan Carroll had been awarded the Pushcart Prize for his story “Home on the Rain” (I’ve not seen any other reporting of this, but I’m looking for it). I’m not simply delighted that Carroll won because I like his work (which I do), or because I like this story (which I also do). I’m delighted because this was a crisis of confidence story for me. I read it online, as you can do by following the link above, and wanted to include it in Fantasy: The Best of 2005. Unfortunately, while I loved it, my co-editor didn’t, and we left it out of the book. Every time I thought about the stories we were and weren’t using in Fantasy: The Best of 2005 I kept going back to “Home on the Rain” and to Geoff Ryman’s “The Last Ten Years in the Life of Hero Kai” from F&SF. If I could have added two more stories to the book, those are the stories I would have added. I felt, I don’t know, vindicated when I heard about the Pushcart. I should add that it was disappointing that I didn’t have the time to add “Home on the Rain” to my forthcoming solo anthology Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005, but if you read it now, consider it as being a part of that book. It should have been.
For those in the US literary loop, the Pushcart Prizes are the most prestigious and sought after story awards in America, notwithstanding the O’Henry and “Best of” collections which are usually simply reprints of the latest Updike, Oates, etcetera stories in The New Yorker. The Pushcarts are nominated by the editors of the magazines that published the stories. Then an independent panel of judges makes the final choices. What is most interesting about Carroll is how he is finally coming to be recognized by the mainstream community in the US as one of the great writers of our time. Not as a fantasy or sci fi writer (which he most decidedly isn’t), but as sui generis. Genre critics and readers have been trying to pigeonhole his work for years as “slipstream” or “dark fantasy,” or any number of other (wrong) things. But as those who read him know, his work does not fit those categories although it contains elements and tropes of them. He is an astonishing writer whose work just keeps getting better and better. HOME ON THE RAIN is just further proof of that. The daily blog he keeps on his website is further proof of that: http://www.jonathancarroll.com