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    The Prize: Short Story
    The Prize: Short Story
    The Prize: Short Story
    Ebook50 pages46 minutes

    The Prize: Short Story

    By Sharon Butala

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    About this ebook

    After winning a literary prize, George Barrett is pulled from obscurity and into the spotlight. When the attention impedes his ability to write, George buys an old house that once belonged to a writer he admires, intending to shut himself away and write in peace. Instead, he finds himself part of a small community, never quite alone, and writing a novel that is drastically unlike what he had once thought it would be.

    Fever is a collection of sixteen short stories that reveal the secret inner lives of women and men, skilfully peeling back their defenses to expose crystallizing moments of joy, pain, fear, and guiltless pleasure. Sharon Butala infuses Fever with an intensity of emotion that often catches readers off guard, making for a reading experience that is always honest and powerful.

    HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 30, 2013
    ISBN9781443421577
    The Prize: Short Story
    Author

    Sharon Butala

    SHARON BUTALA is an award-winning and bestselling author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her classic book The Perfection of the Morning was a #1 bestseller and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Fever, a short story collection, won the 1992 Authors’ Award for Paperback Fiction and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book (Canada and Caribbean region). Butala is a recipient of the Marian Engel Award, the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, and the 2012 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. In 2002 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada. She lives in Calgary, Alberta.

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      Book preview

      The Prize - Sharon Butala

      Book Cover

      The Prize

      Sharon Butala

      Contents

      Cover

      Title Page

      The Prize

      About the Author

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      The Prize

      I can’t look through the window behind my desk to those hills to the west without thinking of the dinosaur skeleton that I know lies buried, a few bones exposed by the icy spring runoff, at the bottom of a decaying coulee, its grave a secret all the incomprehensible length of sixty-five million years. To see it I have only to walk a half-mile out onto the prairie, up a sage and cactus strewn slope, around a thinly-grassed hill or two, retreating further and further from civilization into that gorge where only coyotes, deer and rabbits come, till I reach the place below an abandoned eagle’s nest where the pieces of bone protrude from the yellowish clay.

      When I was an obscure, barely-published writer filled with dreams of glory, I had made a solitary pilgrimage around the prairie provinces to the few small towns and farms where writers of talent had once lived: to the homestead of the Icelandic poet, Stephan Stephansson in Alberta, to Margaret Laurence’s family home in Manitoba, and in Saskatchewan I had searched for what had been the farm where Sinclair Ross was raised.

      For a month I spoke to almost no one; I remember the feel of the steering wheel under my palms, day after day, the green countryside passing by the open car windows, the heat, the perpetual prairie wind, the undercurrent of loneliness that I could never quite shut off, and my determination that never wavered in spite of it. I felt propelled by some compulsion over which I had neither control nor desire for control. Was it only that I wanted to be close to the intimate, personal lives of writers who had achieved what I only aspired to? Not exactly that—I was searching for something I hadn’t been able to name even to myself. Although I don’t know why this happened, nor any reason for it, the truth is, I was in the grip of the conviction that I had been chosen for greatness.

      In southern Saskatchewan I had found the village written about by an American writer who had lived there during his childhood. It was small, not more than seven hundred people lived there, but it was a pretty town, and the shallow river with its steep, grassy banks that wound its way through it, added to its charm. Rows of cottonwoods grew down the streets, probably planted by the first settlers at the beginning of the century, and they had grown so tall that their boughs met overhead to provide welcome shade in what I could see were summers so hot and dry they were barely endurable.

      I remember I had no trouble finding the house. Knowledge of who its original owners were seemed to be part of the local folklore, and when I asked where it was, it was pointed out to me with a sort of casual pride that obviously didn’t extend itself to concern about the house’s preservation. It was in a sorry state of disrepair, but I could see that with its gables and its meticulously crafted wooden trim around the eaves, it had once been handsome. I remember that after I had seen its exterior—nobody answered when I knocked—I stopped to eat lunch in the town’s only café, and then I drove on into Alberta.

      Not long after that journey my first novel won the top literary prize in the country, and I was abruptly thrust from my impatient obscurity into a measure of fame. Where I had been ignored, I was suddenly in demand, the object of endless interest, of affection and jealousy. I was invited to give readings, lectures and workshops

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