The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017 contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The winning stories evoke lives both near and distant: a Californian teenager in rehab, a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka, young female factory workers in Bangladesh, a retired couple in Nova Scotia. Anchored by situations as varied and fraught as a car crash in the Italian mountains, a domestic deception unmasked in post-war Germany and an eerie backyard confrontation between a dog and a cobra, the stories here are uniformly breath-taking. They are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them and an extensive resource list of magazines.