“Widely regarded as the nation’s most prestigious awards for short fiction”—
The Atlantic Monthly
The O. Henry
Prize Stories 1990
gathers 20 of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines.
Stories include:
Leo E. Litwak “The Eleventh Edition” (first prize)
Peter Matthiessen “Lumumba Lives” (second prize)
Lore Segal “The Reverse Bug” (third prize)
Joyce Carol Oates “Heat”
Carolyn Osborn “The Grands”
James P. Blaylock “Unidentified Objects”
Jane Brown Gillette “Sins Against Animals”
Julie Schumacher “The Private Life of Robert Schumann”
Joanne Greenberg “Elizabeth Baird”
Alice Adams “1940: Fall”
T. Coraghessan Boyle “The Ape Lady in Retirement”
Marilyn Sides “The Island of the Mapmaker’s Wife”
David Michael Kaplan “Stand”
Meredith Steinbach “In Recent History”
Claudia Smith Brinson “Einstein’s Daughter”
Felicia  Ackerman “The Forecasting Game”
Reginald McKnight “The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas”
Bruce Fleming “The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein”
Devon Jersild “In Which John Imagines His Mind as a Pond”
Janice Eidus “Vito Loves Geraldine”
“One of the most welcome signs of the literary spring is the appearance of the annual O. Henry Awards collection.”—
Los Angeles Times