Boundless Deep

The winner of the 2022 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction is Gen Del Raye for his manuscript “Boundless Deep and Other Stores,” chosen by Dawes and guest judges, Cristina García and Cate Kennedy. He will receive a $3,000 award and publication by the University of Nebraska Press.

García describes “Boundless Deep and Other Stories” as, “a multi-faceted collection of stories set both in the U.S. and Japan that explore bi-culturality through a wide range of exquisitely detailed experiences.” And, Kennedy praised Del Raye’s “deep connections and undercurrents, rendered with delicacy and precision.”

Del Raye is a writer and translator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan, and received a Master of Fine Arts from Hamline University. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Best Small Fictions, and Best New Poets. He has been the winner of the Force Majeure Flash Contest, Up North Poetry Prize, and Great Midwest Poetry Contest, and is the recipient of a Loft Mentor Series Fellowship.

About the Book

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Boundless Deep, and Other Stories is a portrait of a family that holds together despite everything. By turns introspective, surreal, and bitingly funny, this collection of linked short stories spans seven decades across Japan and the United States and shows the tenacity of relationships fractured by language and distance.

At the funeral of her old boss, a grandmother confronts the legacy of the draft letters she delivered as a girl during World War II. Facing the loss of his job, a father becomes the caricature strangers have always believed him to be. A graduate student living far from home is worn down by the reality of what it takes to save even a small piece of the world. Along the way, we meet communist revolutionary Shigenobu Fusako hiding out in a Tokyo hotel, submariner and war criminal Nishina Sekio in his tortured dreams, and Edwin, a half-dolphin friend, wreaking havoc in a public pool. Written in the compressed style of Amy Hempel and Lucia Berlin, these stories examine characters whose struggles submerge them, weighing them down from every angle, until they can finally float free.

Praise

“Gen Del Raye’s Boundless Deep, and Other Stories is a moving, shape-shifting collection that examines life at the margins of belonging. Haunted by war, ghosts, sea creatures, and existence itself, Del Raye’s characters are straddling worlds, wedging themselves into whatever space they can fit. With the emotional precision and imagery of a poet, and the nimble ear of a translator, Del Raye’s prose is charming, surprising, and abundant in empathy.”—Cecily Wong, author of Diamond Head and Kaleidoscope