WINNER OF THE 2008 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE
Selected by Scott Turow

Feeling distanced from her friends and family, middle-aged divorcee Caitlin Drury is encouraged by her daughter to express her feelings in a diary, but she is hesitant: "I feel lonely she wrote, then crossed it out. She didn't like the idea of someone coming along later to read her journal, finding out she felt lonely." "Like That," and other stories from Anthony Varallo's new collection Out Loud give voice to the disconnections of family and relationships, and the silent emotions that often speak...

The characters in "Think of Me and I ll Know, " Anthony Varallo s probing new collection of stories, face moments in which insight comes too late, or proves insufficient, often to humorous effect. The characters approach the edge of learning something about themselves or about their relationships with other people, only to be left with knowledge that is not particularly useful.

Varallo ably captures the often confused and heartrending perspective of adolescents discovering the world, such as in "No One at All," in which an eleven-year-old boy comes to see that another boy, two years...