The Story Prize [2] has announced the 2009 shortlist for its annual twenty-thousand-dollar award. In the running for the honor, given for a short story collection published in the previous year, are National Book Award finalist Daniyal Mueenuddin [3] for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton), Victoria Patterson [4] for Drift (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Wells Tower for Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The shortlisted books, all of them debut collections, were selected from seventy-eight titles submitted by fifty-three presses. The winner will be announced on March 3 at the New School in New York City after a reading by all three finalists, and two runners up will then be awarded a five thousand dollar prize.

Past winners of the prize, given since 2004, are Edwidge Danticat [5] for The Dew Breaker (Knopf), Patrick O'Keeffe for The Hill Road (Viking), Mary Gordon [6] for The Stories of Mary Gordon (Pantheon), Jim Shepard [7] for Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf), and Tobias Wolff [8] for Our Story Begins (Knopf).

In the video below, the title story of Tower's collection—a tale of Viking plunderers—is excerpted in an animated short.