Our shortest stories of the year are down to the shortlist! It wasn’t easy (and it never is), but we’re excited for these writers! We’ll be back shortly with the winners!

This doesn’t get any easier, narrowing down a large pool of good novel excerpts to a longlist of pieces we wanted to keep reading, with characters we grew to care about in 5,000 words or less. Congratulations to the 31 writers on this list!

So many of our writers and editors love flash fiction, so this is always one of our favorite contests each year. It’s so fun to see these genres played out in stories of so few words! Compression is a great way to increase not only the resonance, but also the creativity in what to leave […]

This contest is quickly becoming one of our favorites! There’s just something immediate about a short story that creates its world through cinematic craft moves and detail-rich writing! Judge Rachel Harrison chose three winners, and we decided to publish two others that we couldn’t let go! And congratulations to everyone on the shortlist. We read […]

Congratulations to our three co-winners chosen by Judge Laird Barron! See below for the reveal of the shortlisted authors. We hope these manuscripts find great homes in the future! The Co-Winners: The Sailor by K. Wallace King “Redolent of Ellroy and Chandler, but stripped down. Lean, mean, and to the point. I loved the sense […]

It’s always a delight to open up to a new genre and see how our submitters respond to an exciting challenge! Comedy of any kind is hard to pull off, but it’s especially difficult when it’s solely on the page. We’re excited to add these 19 title to our longlist, while we continue to review […]

We did it! We finally found our shortlist for this contest. They have been submitted to Laird Barron for his judging, and we can’t wait to find out which excerpts are the winners! Congrats to the writers of these 20 shortlisted excerpts!

This has been one of our most entertaining and well-written batches of submissions for a Novel Excerpt Prize since we started in 2021. We have finally narrowed the longlist down to 45 thrilling excerpts! We’re still discussing which stories will make the longlist, so we apologize for the delay! The better the submissions, the harder […]