Presented to: Walter Kirn
For: My Hard Bargain
The citation for this award states, "In Walter Kirn's debut collection, My Hard Bargain, his stories come of age in ways that are unique in Mormon literature--they simply sail boldly toward the edge of the know world and refuse to drop off. Because of this daring, they cannot be ignored. They are stories about falling away and falling toward--about the adolescent whose sexual sins marked out on his bishop's chart shine radiantly like the stars in a planetarium (they resist the object of the object lesson); they are stories about conversion, where the violence of domestic life is suddenly mellowed by the gospel beyond all the gospel clichs; and they are stories about the healing maternal touch of Vicks VapoRub.
"Neither moralizing or 'de'moralizing, each story transcends conventional expectation because Kirn carefully fashions detail, but always relinquishes authorship to the reader at just the right moment. Indeed, it is the story that matters, not Kirn's long-standing personal view, pet peeves, or convictions. He gives himself up to whim, the moment of story, the telling. One time he is a bankrupt farmer, preparing his bankrupt farmer speech. At another, he is the keeper of deadman's curve, waiting for wrecks so that he can make his living on the salvaging of used parts. Walter Kirn's stories are about being alive in a world where 'being human' is neither an excuse or a revelation, but a wonderful fact. He is a master of the modern short story where fiction is multi-textured, variegated, and hard to pin down. He is someone the rest of us will have to deal with, literarily speaking, for some time."