The Big League

Best Short Story

He had read the newspaper stories and watched the newscasts documenting the war in Iraq. But Benjamin Percy realized he had not seen a short story about the war that has occupied the hearts and minds of Americans for four years. He filled that void writing “Refresh, Refresh,” a short story that imagines the shrapnel of war when it hits home. He based his story on a news report about an ambushed battalion of U.S. reservists from a small midwestern town.

Native to a small town, Percy imagined the profound devastation to that community with 15 fathers killed in one moment of war. He tells his fictional story through Gordon and Josh, two boys waiting for e-mail from fathers who have been deployed to Kirkuk: “Our fathers — our coaches, our teachers, our barbers, our cooks, our gas station attendants and UPS deliverymen and deputies and firemen and mechanics — our fathers, so many of them, climbed into the olive-green school buses and pressed their palms to the windows and gave us the bravest, most hopeful smiles you can imagine and vanished. Just like that.”

To Percy’s astonishment, The Paris Review, a literary magazine founded in 1953 with a mission of “introducing the important writers of the day,” included “Refresh, Refresh” in its fall/winter 2005 issue. The story was selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, an anthology by Houghton Mifflin of the top 20 stories out of the thousands published in any American magazine or journal during the year. He also was awarded a Pushcart Prize.

Percy is amazed and grateful — that the story came to him and that he was able to put it to paper. “I didn’t want my story to be political so I focused on the human condition out of respect for their grief. I could imagine the cavity opening up. I could hear the pain; it haunted me,” he says.

With the recognition, Percy joins William Faulkner, John Updike and a cadre of best-known writers whose short stories have been featured in The Paris Review.

Percy is a visiting professor in the Department of English. His book of short stories, The Language of Elk, was published this year by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Visit Percy's Web site to learn more.