Six Shorts 2017: The finalists for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award

Copyright

SIX SHORTS 2017

The finalists for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award

Your chance to read the six shortlisted stories by Kathleen Alcott, Bret Anthony Johnston, Richard Lambert, Victor Lodato, Celeste Ng and Sally Rooney

Collection copyright © Times Newspapers Ltd 2017

All rights reserved, not to be copied or reproduced without permission

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2017 ISBN: 9780008259198

Contents

Introduction

Reputation Management by Kathleen Alcott

Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses by Bret Anthony Johnston

The Hazel Twig and the Olive Tree by Richard Lambert

The Tenant by Victor Lodato

Every Little Thing by Celeste Ng

Mr Salary by Sally Rooney

The Sponsors

Follow the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award on Twitter @ShortStoryAward #STEFG and at the website www.shortstoryaward.co.uk

Introduction

The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is the world’s richest and most prestigious prize for a single short story, with £30,000 going to the winner and £1,000 to each of five other shortlisted authors.

Launched in 2010 by Matthew Evans, the former chairman of EFG Private Bank, and Cathy Galvin of The Sunday Times, the award has quickly grown to be one of the most significant literary awards in the literary calendar, with shortlisted authors including previous winners of the Pulitzer, Orange and Man Booker prizes.

The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is open to any fiction writer from anywhere in the world who has been published in the UK or Ireland, and whose submitted story, written in English, is 6,000 words or under. The prize’s seven previous winners – CK Stead from New Zealand (2010), Anthony Doerr from the United States (2011), Kevin Barry from Ireland (2012), Junot Diaz from the United States (2013), Adam Johnson from the United States (2014), Yiyun Li from China/United States (2015), and last year’s winner Jonathan Tel from the United Kingdom – have emphasised the prize’s international reach.

More than 1,000 authors submitted stories for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. The judging panel – of Booker-winning novelist and short story writer Anne Enright, broadcaster and novelist Mark Lawson, Booker-shortlisted novelist Neel Mukherjee, and the Orange- and Whitbread-winning novelist and short story writer Rose Tremain, plus the Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate – in February produced a longlist of 14, from which this shortlist of six is now drawn.

The judges’ winning story will be announced at a gala dinner at Stationers’ Hall in London on Thursday, April 27.

Before then, though, here is your chance to read all six stories yourself.

We hope you enjoy the stories. For more shortlisted stories from the prize’s previous years, visit www.shortstoryaward.co.uk

Reputation Management

by Kathleen Alcott

Alice Niemand had been working for the company two years when the young Hasidic man died, and it made her look at her things, the cashmere cardigans and the pebbled bathmats, and consider how she had earned the money to buy them. On a normal day, it was easy enough not to examine: she never went into a workplace, never talked to anyone who did the same job she did, never discussed aloud the clients whose reputations she had repaired, never shook their hands or heard their voices, these lawyers and dentists and PTA mothers with some angry review or mug shot to suppress. The man who was dead – 19, a boy really – had been the victim of sexual abuse by the Yeshiva teacher who had been Alice’s client. The boy had claimed to be his victim, she reminded herself, but then came another feeling, lower in her body, which seemed to ask, in the way it roiled: why would anyone claim that?

On the coast of California where the garnet had eroded to make the sand purple, and from a multi-coloured veranda in the New Orleans garden district, and in view of children pushing toy boats in the Jardin du Luxembourg, she had reviewed files summarising lives and careers and misdemeanours, had typed the stiff sentences that financed her comfortable life. Her parents were as impressed by her new place in the world as they were intimidated by the gifts she sent to their sagging split-level home in the middle of the country. What could they do with an iPad that they couldn’t do on their computer, the pauses between their thank yous said, what should they put on these asymmetrical walnut serving boards? Would she be visiting sometime? They were sorry to say they did not have the money to make it to New York. It was never mentioned that the cost of the things Alice sent could have easily covered the flights that would put the three of them in a room together.

Alice had bumped from one Craigslist apartment to the next in the years after college, making friends chiefly to learn from them, when to tilt the head in the course of flirtation, how to conduct oneself in an expensive restaurant, never telling anyone about her father’s job ringing up purchases of gas and Snickers, her mother’s meagre income selling Mary Kay cosmetics. She had visited the office, a hyper-colour portrait of Silicon Valley opulence, for three interviews and a training session. It was her last month in San Francisco and the last hiring period in which the company bothered to meet anyone in person.