My Prisoner and Other Stories (The Journal Non/Fiction Prize)

Set largely in the Rust Belt of the 1990s and early 2000s, My Prisoner and Other Stories gives us protagonists who repeatedly confront helplessness in the face of others' suffering. A teenage girl tries to help an elderly woman who has locked herself out of her house only to be shaken by the trauma and loneliness that the woman--a Holocaust survivor and recent widow--eventually shares with her. A schoolteacher writes letters to his cousin, who has schizophrenia and is serving a life sentence for the murder of three of their relatives. A middle school student makes a complicated gesture of charity after befriending the poor kid at his lunch table. Siblings seed the ground for an eccentric treasure hunter only to find that their prank leads them into unexpected emotional peril. The structural forces that stain life in late-capitalist America--the prison system, economic desperation--lurk throughout these muscular and empathetic tales, but in the face of endemic adversity, shrewd and loving characters strive for and sometimes achieve hope and tenderness. Tyler McAndrew shows us an unadorned America that can still tap its capacity for human kindness.