“Dinner With Osama,” a collection of short stories by Marilyn Krysl, has been published by the University of Notre Dame Press.
Krysl’s eight-story collection was awarded the Notre Dame Creative Writing Program’s 2008 Richard Sullivan Prize for short fiction, a biennial award which includes a $1,000 cash prize and publication by the press.
According to a review by the novelist Jay Neugeboren, “Marilyn Krysl is one of our most gifted, quirky, and delightful storytellers—unpredictable, funny, and wildly inventive in wondrous ways. Her new collection shows her at the top of her form as she details the ordinary, the absurd, and the apocalyptic in outrageous and deeply affecting ways.”
Krysl has published three other collections of stories and seven of poetry. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Short Stories 2000, O. Henry Prize Stories, Sudden Fiction and Sudden Stories. A former director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado, she has taught English as a second language in the People’s Republic of China, worked as a volunteer for Peace Brigade International in Sri Lanka, and volunteered at the Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying administered by the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, India.
The Sullivan Prize memorializes Richard T. Sullivan, who was graduated from Notre Dame in 1930 and joined the University’s faculty as a writing instructor in 1936. In addition to writing numerous book reviews for the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, he published several short story collections and novels, including “The World of Idella May,” “The Three Kings,” “Summer After Summer,” “The Dark Continent,” and"First Citizen." A popular undergraduate teacher, he is remembered for his description of writing as “hard work requiring patience and idiotic perseverance.” He died in 1981.
Originally published by at newsinfo.nd.edu on February 21, 2008.