Matthew Ryan Frankel Wins the Stella Kupferberg Story Prize
The Story
Matthew Ryan Frankel's short story Carapace won the 2023 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, with novelist Anthony Doerr selecting it as the winner for Selected Shorts.
The prize is awarded annually by the stage and radio series, and the winning story is performed by an actor and released on the Selected Shorts podcast.
The narrative follows a family gathered at a dock in Carolina to scatter the ashes of the narrator's grandfather, a strict and poetic man born in Malaysia who had been diminished by age, stroke, and aphasia.
Three Atlantic blue crabs caught in a milk crate trap become the unexpected focal point of the improvised funeral, and hours before dying the grandfather had proved his sharpness by catching the narrator's deliberate error in reciting Yeats.
At the story's climax the narrator attempts a spiritual connection by imagining a transformation into a crab with exoskeleton and multiple eyes, while the family sees only a figure bowing and whispering to shellfish before the crabs are butchered and eaten.
Frankel, who lives in Baltimore, dedicates the story to his grandfather, Khye Weng Ng.
The prize is awarded annually by the stage and radio series, and the winning story is performed by an actor and released on the Selected Shorts podcast.
The narrative follows a family gathered at a dock in Carolina to scatter the ashes of the narrator's grandfather, a strict and poetic man born in Malaysia who had been diminished by age, stroke, and aphasia.
Three Atlantic blue crabs caught in a milk crate trap become the unexpected focal point of the improvised funeral, and hours before dying the grandfather had proved his sharpness by catching the narrator's deliberate error in reciting Yeats.
At the story's climax the narrator attempts a spiritual connection by imagining a transformation into a crab with exoskeleton and multiple eyes, while the family sees only a figure bowing and whispering to shellfish before the crabs are butchered and eaten.
Frankel, who lives in Baltimore, dedicates the story to his grandfather, Khye Weng Ng.
Why It Matters
A 750 word ceiling and a $1,000 purse give the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize small stakes with unusual reach: winners are performed and recorded for national public radio Symphony Space. Anthony Doerr chose Matthew Ryan Frankel's Carapace, a Carolina funeral where three Atlantic blue crabs upstage a tub of ashes, as its 2023 winner, and Philip Estrera performed it for an episode released November 23, 2023 SoundCloud. Frankel, a Baltimore writer, dedicated the story to his grandfather, Khye Weng Ng; until his next byline arrives, the recording is where Carapace lives.
Go Deeper
Read the original reporting at Electric Literature.
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