2011-12 Contest
Jonathan Callahan's The Consummation of Dirk is the winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, as selected by Final Judge Zachary Mason
JONATHAN CALLAHAN of Fukuoka, Japan, is the winner of the 8th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction competition. He will receive $1,500 and publication in Starcherone Books’ 2012-13 season.
THE CONSUMMATION OF DIRK, a collection of short stories, was selected from among five finalists by contest final judge ZACHARY MASON, author of the internationally celebrated debut, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, and himself a former winner of the prize. A total of 232 manuscripts were submitted for the prize.
Callahan’s collection represents an exceptional level of accomplishment for a debut author, mixing styles, humor, and various international identities and locales, as well as highly wrought representations of misery. Callahan has said that the initial working title for the collection was “The Book of Pain,” a title that fails to account for the imagination and wit that also pervades the book.
Said final judge Zachary Mason, in making the award,
“The stories in this collection have the texture of the long bad nights that one keeps to oneself and is prone to think no one else experienced. The gifted child contemplating murder, the husband drowning in melancholy, the pro basketball athlete finding his road to Damascus all emerge from adept torrents of words that bear comparison with Virginia Woolf and David Foster Wallace.”
Callahan’s stories from the collection have appeared or are forthcoming in The Collagist, Kill Author, The Lifted Brow, Pank, Underwater New York, Unsaid, and Washington Square Review. The title piece in the book, a mini-novella featuring Dallas Maverick Dirk Nowitzki that first appeared in The Collagist, achieved brief blogosphere notoriety last autumn, written up at both Deadspin and ESPN.com.
Callahan has also written non-fiction, including a lengthy essay of Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, and David Foster Wallace for The Collagist and essays on Rick Moody and Adam Novy in The Fiction Writers Review. He grew up in Honolulu, studied fiction at Sarah Lawrence, where he worked with Stephen O' Connor, Melvin Bukiet, and David Hollander, and taught writing at SUNY Purchase for a year. Currently he lives and works in Fukuoka, Japan.
Callahan’s book was chosen from among five finalists. The titles of these manuscripts were announced in July, while the names were held back to keep the judging blind. The other finalists, listed alphabetically, were:
Roxanne Carter, Beyond This Point Are Monsters
Leah Shlachter, Invisible Women
Lucas Southworth, Everybody Here Has a Gun: Stories
Steve Yates, Some Kinds of Love: Stories
In addition, 13 books received Honorable Mentions from Starcherone’s in-house judges:
Locals, Claire Bateman
Injuring Eternity and Other Traumas, Tom Bradley
The Company of Cannibals, Jan Clausen
Domestic Disturbances, Peter Grandbois
Hubbub, Linnea Johnson
The Poison that Purifies You, Elizabeth Kadetsky
Nineteen Remarks on the Edge of the World, Nate Liederbach
Stories of the Unexplained, Pedro Ponce
Earplugs, Bram Riddlebarger
Unreal Things Vanish, Garrett Rowlan
One Hundred Histories, Aurelie Sheehan
The Hashimoto Complex, Paul Takeuchi
Death & Other Holidays, Marci Vogel
While the Starcherone Prize is not specifically structured as a first-book competition, this marks the 8th consecutive occasion (out of eight times the prize has been awarded) that a debut book has been selected as the winner. Notable past winners include Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey and Alissa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Woman and Girls.
Starcherone Books is a literary educational nonprofit with a mission “to stimulate public interest in works of innovative prose fiction and nurture an understanding of the art of fiction writing by publishing, disseminating, and affording the public opportunities to hear readings of innovative works” as well as “encouraging the development of authors and their audiences.” Founded by author Ted Pelton in 2000, Starcherone incorporated as a nonprofit in 2003. Starcherone’s contest traditionally accepts entries between Oct. 1 and Feb. 15 each year. The press publishes three to four books per year, including the contest winner. In 2011, Starcherone became an imprint of Dzanc Books, and its titles are distributed by Consortium Distribution and Small Press Distribution.
Last year's winning book, the novel Animal Sanctuary by Sarah Falkner, will be released this Fall.