How to Read Prize-Winning Short Stories Like a Writer: A Craft-First Guide to Anthologies

Byron Turner
2026-04-16T18:39:00-05:00

There is a version of reading short stories that most writers fall into without quite noticing. You pick up the new Best American off the table at the bookstore. You read the first story, then the next, then the next. Some of them stay with you. Most blur. A month later you can name two writers from the volume and recall a single image from a third. The book did its job. You were entertained, occasionally moved, and now you are back to your own draft, no closer to understanding why those stories made it into the anthology and yours has not.

This post is about the other way to read.

If you want to learn how to read prize-winning short stories like a writer, you have to stop reading them as a reader. That sounds like a paradox, and the difference is real. A reader is hunting for the experience of the story. A writer reading as a writer is hunting for the choices that produced the experience. Same book, different prey. The four annual anthologies that define prestige in American short fiction (The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers) are the most concentrated craft education available in print, but only if you know how to read them.

What follows is the framework that uses three lenses, applied to a fixed corpus, with the explicit goal of carrying what you find back to your own desk.

What Counts as a "Prize-Winning" Short Story Anthology?

Four annual anthologies define the field. They are not interchangeable. Each one is built around a different definition of "best," and reading them productively starts with knowing what you are holding.

The Best American Short Stories, founded in 1915 and now the longest-running series in American letters, pairs a permanent series editor with a rotating guest editor each year. The guest editor's taste shapes the volume's character. Lauren Groff edited the 2024 volume around what she called "rawer, meaner, spikier" stories. Celeste Ng edited 2025. Reading the introductions across years gives you a moving snapshot of what serious editors are looking for in a given moment.

The O. Henry Prize Stories, founded in 1919 and now published as The Best Short Stories with the O. Henry Prize Winners, runs on a similar guest-editor model and has historically valued formal compression and stylistic precision. The 2025 volume, edited by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones, contains twenty stories drawn from the previous year's magazine publication, with brief commentary from each writer on what the story came from. Those writer notes are themselves a craft document.

The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, founded by Bill Henderson in 1976, is the most democratic of the four. It draws fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from hundreds of small literary magazines, deliberately excluding the big slicks like The New Yorker and The Atlantic. The result is a volume that maps the actual ecosystem most working short story writers will publish in. If you want to know which literary magazines are doing the most respected work each year, the masthead at the back of any recent Pushcart is the only ranking that matters.

The PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers, founded in 2014, is the youngest of the four and the most narrowly focused. It honors twelve debut short stories per year, each writer's first appearance in print. Reading PEN/Dau is the closest thing to watching a generation of new voices declare themselves in real time. For writers early in their own careers, it is the most useful anthology of the four, because the stories were written by people who were, until very recently, in your position.

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The First Lens: Reading for the Opening Move

Open any of the four anthologies to a random story and read only the first paragraph. Then read it again, slowly, and ask one question: what contract has the writer just made with you?

Every prize-winning short story opens with an implicit promise. Some openings promise a particular kind of trouble (a marriage about to come apart, a job already lost). Some promise a particular kind of voice (the opening sentence of a Bertino story sounds nothing like the opening sentence of a Daniel Mason story, and you can tell within five words). Some promise a particular relationship between narrator and reader (intimate, withholding, complicit, distant). Whatever the promise is, the rest of the story will spend itself either honoring or productively complicating that contract.

Submission-pile stories often have no opening contract at all. They begin in the middle of a vague situation, defer characterization, gesture at mood. The opening does not commit. A prize-winning opening commits, and the commitment is what makes the rest of the story possible.

Take Katherine Damm's "The Happiest Day of Your Life," anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2024. The story opens at a wedding reception, with a young husband at the wedding of his wife's ex-boyfriend. The contract is established immediately: this is a comedy of social discomfort, narrated from inside the discomfort, and the engine of the story will be how far that discomfort can be pushed before it becomes something else. You know the rules of the game by the second paragraph. The rest of the story plays the game with discipline.

The exercise: pick three stories from any recent anthology. Read only the first paragraph of each. Write one sentence describing the contract. If you cannot, the writer has done something more sophisticated than you are seeing yet, or the story is genuinely failing to commit. Both possibilities are worth investigating. Then look at the first paragraph of your own most recent draft and ask the same question. Most writers, asked this honestly, find their openings are negotiating rather than committing.

The Second Lens: Reading for Compression

The most teachable difference between a prize-winning story and a competent one is what gets left out.

A short story has, on average, fifteen to thirty pages to do work that a novel takes four hundred pages to do. The work is not less; the work is the same. The story has to render a world, develop characters, build a situation that matters, and arrive somewhere. The only way it can do that in twenty pages is by extracting load-bearing weight from every sentence and trusting the reader to carry the rest.

This is what experienced editors mean when they call a story "controlled." A controlled story implies more than it states. It uses dialogue not to transmit information but to reveal what the speakers are not saying. It treats backstory as a weapon to be used sparingly, often once, often late. It allows entire emotional arcs to happen in white space between scenes. It asks the reader to participate in constructing meaning, and trusts that the reader will.

To read for compression, take a paragraph from a prize story and rewrite it the way an undergraduate workshop participant would write it. Add the missing transitions. Spell out the implications. Fill the silences with explanatory dialogue. Watch what happens to the prose. It swells, doubles in length, loses its tension. The original paragraph was doing all that work in the gaps. Compression is not a stylistic preference. It is a structural commitment to leaving in only what cannot be cut.

Suzanne Wang's "Mall of America," also from BASS 2024, narrates a story about an elderly man in an after-hours mall arcade through the voice of an artificial intelligence. The narrative device sounds gimmicky in summary. On the page, it works because Wang refuses to over-explain the AI narrator. The voice carries assumptions, omissions, and small misreadings of human behavior, and the reader assembles the actual emotional content of the scene out of those gaps. The compression is not just at the sentence level. The whole conceptual frame compresses by withholding.

Read your own draft with this question in mind: where am I telling the reader something the reader could have inferred? Mark every instance. Most drafts have ten to twenty of them per page. Cutting half of them often transforms the prose.

"There have never been as many exquisitely built stories in existence than there are now."

— Lauren Groff, introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2024

The Third Lens: Reading for the Turn

Almost every anthologized short story has a turn. Most submission-pile stories do not.

The turn is the moment, usually somewhere between the midpoint and the three-quarter mark, when the situation the story began with becomes a different situation. Sometimes the turn is dramatic (a revelation, a death, an arrival). More often it is quiet: a sentence in which the reader understands the story is no longer about what it appeared to be about. The protagonist's small problem opens onto a larger one. A scene that seemed comic reveals itself as elegiac. A relationship that seemed stable shows the seam.

The turn is what gives a short story the feeling of having moved, of having arrived somewhere the opening did not predict. Stories without a turn tend to feel like sketches, regardless of how well-written the sentences are. They render a moment, hold it, release it. Editors at the prize anthologies are looking, often unconsciously, for the move from rendering to consequence.

To find the turn, read the story once for experience. Then on the second read, mark the page on which you first realize the story is no longer doing what the opening seemed to be doing. That page is the turn. Now look at the sentence on that page that delivers the shift. It is almost never the most ornate sentence in the story. Often it is plainspoken and brief. Sometimes it is a piece of dialogue. Sometimes it is a single line of action. The skill is in placing it precisely, after enough setup that the reader feels its weight, before the story has spent itself.

Marie-Helene Bertino's title story in her 2025 collection Exit Zero, which originally appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, executes the turn through a shift in what the narrator is willing to acknowledge. The opening situation appears domestic and slightly absurd. By a precisely placed moment in the second half, the absurdity has become metaphysical, and the reader's understanding of what the story is about reorganizes in real time. Bertino is on the WW faculty, and watching her teach this kind of move (in her own work and in students') is one of the educations available to writers studying with us.

How Do You Use These Reading Lenses on Your Own Drafts?

The reading is not the point. The reading is preparation for revision.

Once you have applied the three lenses (opening move, compression, and the turn) to a prize story, hold your own most recent draft up to the same questions. What contract does your first paragraph make? Where in your story is every sentence carrying the weight of three? At what point does the situation you began with become a different situation entirely?

The lenses do not generate fixes. They reveal what your draft is doing and not doing, which is the prerequisite for any honest revision. A draft without a clear opening contract is a draft whose first move you have not yet made. A draft that explains rather than implies is a draft you have not yet trusted. A draft without a turn is a draft you have not yet finished thinking through.

The honest difficulty is that most writers cannot see these things in their own work. The whole point of a workshop is the second pair of eyes (and the third, and the eighth) that can name what you cannot see. Reading prize stories carefully will make you a better reader of your own drafts than you currently are. It will not make you good enough. That is what teaching is for.

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A Reading List: Where to Start

If you have not been reading these anthologies, the question of where to begin is real. A few starting points.

Start with the most recent volume of the series whose taste matches yours. Read the guest editor's introduction first; that is where the year's editorial argument is laid out, often more candidly than in the stories themselves. The Best American Short Stories 2024, edited by Lauren Groff, is a strong entry point if you write toward strangeness or formal risk. The Best American Short Stories 2025, edited by Celeste Ng, leans toward different territory and is the most current volume in the series. The Best Short Stories 2025: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Edward P. Jones, contains twenty stories with short writer commentaries on each, which is unusually useful for craft study.

Read at least one Pushcart cover to cover. The recent volumes are massive (Pushcart XLVI runs over five hundred pages and includes over sixty pieces across genres). Pushcart will introduce you to small magazines you have never heard of, many of which are exactly the magazines a serious short story writer should be submitting to. The masthead at the back is itself a publishing strategy document.

Then go back ten years. Pick a single guest editor whose taste you respect (Lorrie Moore on Best American 2004, Joyce Carol Oates on Best American 2007, Junot Díaz on Best American 2016) and read that volume next to the most recent one. The two anthologies, ten years apart, will tell you more about how American short fiction has shifted than any single critical essay could.

For early-career writers, read PEN/Dau. Twelve debut stories per year, each one the writer's first published piece of fiction. The collection is the best available evidence that the path from unpublished to anthologized is shorter than it usually feels.

None of this reading is a substitute for the writing. The writing is what changes you. But the reading is the closest thing available to standing in the room with the writers whose work the field has agreed is essential, watching them make the decisions you have not yet figured out how to make. Done with attention, it is the cheapest education in serious short fiction you can buy.

Our alumni at WritingWorkshops.com have signed with literary agents, won the Halifax Prize from American Short Fiction and the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, and Columbia. The reading habit described above is one of the disciplines those writers shared, often before they shared anything else.

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WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.