Fire Year (Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction)

Jason K. Friedman investigates art, sexuality, love, and religion in seven unconventional and engrossing short stories. A gay man attends his high school reunion in Savannah, where he's pursued by the now-married former football star. An awkward teenager grapples with notions of God and girls at his bar mitzvah. A curator's assistant struggles to understand a five hundred-year-old Italian painter's body of work, until his boyfriend (whom he's previously written off as frivolous), makes an accidental discovery that challenges decades of art criticism. A moving picture of the trials religious, cultural, and sexual minorities experience in Georgia and the Deep South.