• 2009 John C. Zacharis First Book Award
• 2009 O. Henry Award
• Best American Short Stories 2006

• "Once the Shore", One Story Issue #58, June 20, 2005 (PEN / O. Henry)
• "Postcards from My Brother", Memorious 7, February 2007

• Once the Shore, Sarabande Books, 2009, ISBN 9781932511703

Anthologies

• "Once the Shore", The Best American Short Stories 2006, Editors Ann Patchett, Katrina Kenison, PHoughton Mifflin, 2006, ISBN 9780618543526
• "And We Will Be Here", The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, Editor Laura Furman, Anchor Books, 2009, ISBN 9780307280350

Islands have often proved fertile ground for fiction. From Prospero's conjured dreamscape to the allegoric atoll of "Lord of the Flies," remote shores can be ideal test sites for the vagaries of human behavior. Utopian, dystopian, fantastic or mundane, they rise from the sea less as landmasses than as literary metaphors. Yet the island in Paul Yoon's "Once the Shore" manages to be both: a rich, fully realized place and a common thread that links its residents through history and time.

When I first encountered Paul Yoon’s story, “Once the Shore,” the opening piece in Best American Short Stories 2006, I felt the rush of a new discovery. In the first paragraph, a woman tells a waiter how her husband parted his hair. “There was a time,” the woman said, “when he bathed for me and me alone.”