https://www.alansincic.com/home daily 1.0 2026-03-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1570468497863-L0YZBDHKWIZ9UECAZZS1/featured+online+%281%29.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1570468865697-B6D6JNR3DO998KXOF0HR/print+publication+alan+sincic+%283%29.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1570469084135-DTFMDB064O9U545UOAB5/interview+alan+sincic.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1570469359328-C2ZHDG8PXP9IFQX178W2/theater+alan+sincic+%281%29.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1570469471918-UKIYU6GV5U0CA8JELPXY/purchase+alan+sincic.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1570469699615-BPWU0WDAWNARO6B09REO/contact+alan+sincic.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1571159560142-NARAPUL4NN1C929R54GI/about+alan+sincic.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1568301229912-1009IW3NYBG7GBKX6RRX/Screen+Shot+2019-09-12+at+11.13.40+AM.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/50854403-e028-4568-b496-30eee838e4fd/Screenshot+2023-05-27+at+1.38.47+PM.jpg Home - The Greyhound Winner - 2023 Plentitudes Prize in Nonfiction Finalist - 2023 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Contest Long-listed - 2023 Fish Short Memoir Prize Long-listed - 2023 CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award Judge: Nigel Collett, author of The Butcher of Amritsar, Firelight of a Different Colour, and A Death In Hong Kong. Special Awards Issue Spring 2023 We all of us like to believe, now and again, when the body blooms with the vigor of the earth, that the whole of who we are is an ex nihilo creation, that we sprout up like mushrooms after rain, fresh from out the mind of the Almighty. But then you stub the toe or crack the knuckle or rub the palm of the hand up over the brass marker atop a grave and wham, there you go again, back into the skin you got from all the kin that come before, the flesh and the blood at the start of it all. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/5793cb14-d62d-4be4-a7d9-b6e3ea46358f/COVER-Cherry-Tree-FINAL-768x481.jpg Home - One Shot Beetle Winner - 2022 Hunger Mountain Short Fiction Prize Pushcart Prize Nominee Hunger Mountain Review Issue #27 Judge: Adam McOmber, author of Fantasy Kit, Jesus & John, and The Ghost Finders. So into the trap, the honeytrap, the cathedral we tumbled. In my pocket I carried a stick of gum. You chew till it’s soft, then slap the wad onto any exposed surface of the robot skin. Ibid says it’s got the power to kill the hunger, obliterate the algorithm that gives it a will. That little masterful trick it plays -- surfing out over an ocean of code to hijack a robo-mower, welder-bot, paramedical droid – is the very thing that makes it vulnerable to a counterattack. To live in a world of stones and bones and flesh and blood, you gotta touch and taste and smell, you gotta gather up the flavor of the day. Hidden in the flavor of the gum? The killer code. [Link to Announcement] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661742153447-4VOBTCTH8BB1ETU4LMKZ/Screen+Shot+2022-08-28+at+11.02.09+PM.png Home - Novel: The Slapjack Winner - 2021 First Pages Prize Judge: Lan Samantha Chang, Director of The Iowa Writer’s Workshop, author of The Family Chao, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Entrants are judged on the first 2,250 words of a book-length manuscript An abandoned boy with a brutal past hobos south to partner with a bitter beauty, Maggie, who loves to fight everyone everywhere and for every reason, but has yet to find the answer to this simple question: how do a pair of loners learn the ways of love? A stripling is all he was, but it took two to hold him. Squirrely kid. Took a blast of birdshot to bring him down. Square in the back. A punch enough to bloody him up is all, ventilate that shirt of his. The bearded fella hooked a finger in a hole, gave it a yank and, in a single stroke, tore the fabric aside. “Hold him down.” “He’s just a boy.” “Hold him.” [About the prize] [Link to Announcement Video] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661789265063-BSV3HQIJSI17CEGCEUEZ/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+12.07.25+PM.png Home - Novel: The Slapjack Third Place - Masters Review 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest Judge: Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk, Ill Will, Await Your Reply, and Stay Awake Fall 2022 Master’s Review Online Chapter Five: A Citizen True Chapter Six: The Hammer Of God Chapter Seven: A Person Of No Account “This excerpt is something of a wild card since it starts at chapter 5… yet the voice won me over—the unique and surprising vernacular, the grinning energy of the prose, the enthusiastic sense of scene and detail. I don’t know whether I yet know what this book is about, but based on these pages I’m willing to keep reading!” [Contest Judge Dan Chaon] [Link to Announcement] [Link to Interview] [Read The Excerpt] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/0042fb02-46b0-4513-bb05-b14270d74167/Screen+Shot+2022-12-22+at+1.42.18+AM.png Home - The Ripening Runner Up The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2023 Short-Listed - 2022 Chester B. Himes Memorial Short Fiction Prize Jan/Feb 2023 Saturday Evening Post Online What with that daddy of his already a dead letter in a box or a bar or a field aways off over the horizon, Sparrow took to sleeping in the storeroom GB’d occupied back in the day. Sixteen he was. Ripe. Ready. And the girl? A barefoot jobber on the overland path, back and forth every day between a shack in the woods and a grove in the season of harvest. From out a family of scrappers she come, seven children and she in the middle somewhere, the whole enterprise a tumbleweed of tinder and chaff. Not what you’d call a pretty girl, but then again Sparrow not the face on the box of Wheaties or the mug on the cover of True Romance. Serviceable is what they were. He come across her in the spring, at the side of the trail they run up the bed of the old rail line from Brooksville to Ocoee, pitching rocks at a couple boys been ragging her bout the lack of shoes. A good arm. Threw like a man. [Contest Announcement] [To Buy The Anthology] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/85b02f0b-fe06-461c-8ba7-fe5343c88dda/Screen+Shot+2022-12-22+at+3.01.11+AM.png Home - Eva Finalist - Terrain.org’s 13th Annual Fiction Contest Finalist - Sunspot Lit Rigel Contest Finalist - Tobias Wolff Award For Fiction 2022 Short List - Fish Short Story Prize 2021/2022 February 2023 Terrain.org online The steeple glowed at the fringe of the wood. The moonlight struck the bell as they neared the chapel. Eva bid them wait. So not to make a scene, that was the plan, so not to, as it were, catch them in the act, no, but to capture the act and, in the afterwards, in the telling, multiply the moment over and over again. And who better than Eva to bear witness? Eva the one to see – as in a vision – the sin. Eva the one to hear, from miles away, the thump-thump-thump of the flesh. [Contest Announcement] [Read It Now or Listen To Narration] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661655388444-M09V0CVXIINFOYU4V4TB/Screen+Shot+2022-08-27+at+10.56.03+PM.png Home - The Piney Vista First Runner Up The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2021 Finalist - 2020 Orison Anthology Award In Fiction Short Listed - 2020 Bridport Short Story Prize One night only! The Human Torpedo! Captain Jimmie Jameson! The truck tinkled as it wheeled left and then right to clear the surge of the gutters and the muddy bubble of the manholes, a carillon of ice cream, ice cream, ice cream cast up and then erased with every random gust. From a ten-story tower he jumps – no parachute, no hooks, no wires – he jumps! The trumpet shook as the truck rammed a broken deck chair and splintered up over the shingles and the rafters and the crackly wire that clogged the square. Talk about balls. You could even hear, up under the garglish warble of the busking – Ten stories! Ten stories! Into a puddle of water no bigger than a bathtub! – the tremor in his voice, the thrill of – what would be the word for it? -- death. Even the oldsters – and by now we were the oldsters – felt, in the wake of the storm, the frisson, the sting of doom in the air, the roof jarred and the tree toppled and the midnight pitch of the shutter upward, up over the clouds, ascended into heaven. [Read It Now] [Contest Announcement] [To purchase anthology - Kindle] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661666854140-HHL9ISPRG4AT29WKLTGM/Screen+Shot+2022-08-28+at+2.06.52+AM.png Home - Bacon Finalist - New Ohio Review Editor’s Prize - Short Story New Ohio Review Online Summer Exclusive 2019 Fiction Finalist 2019 New Millennium Writing Awards Maggie meet Joe. Joe—new in town. Regular enough, the features, but more an approximation of handsome than the thing itself, stencil of a stencil, carnival swag, paraffin bust of a Barrymore or a Valentino. Joe meet Maggie. Maggie—the hubby dead or run off with another woman (she’d never say, we’d never ask) but she keeps the ring alright, and not in a box either, but right up there over the fist as a kind of a—what do you call it?—visual aid for the occasional moron foolish enough to try to sweeten, not the coffee, but the server. You don’t mess with Maggie. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661667612468-DD5G9RZBEV4BVOMO6HJY/Screen+Shot+2022-08-28+at+2.19.33+AM.png Home - The Postcard From Nowheresville Runner-Up - 2019 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize Overland Magazine Online Autumn 2020 A hunk of junk? No, says he. A canvas. The canvas upon which the pictures appear, the sine qua non of the whole shebang, a vasty slab of nothing the prisoners – to consecrate them, said Barnett, to a higher calling – painted with barrels of (courtesy Florida Department of Transportation and a cousin with a set of keys) dotted-line-down-the-center-of-the-highway white. Barbasol white. Pepsodent white. Not merely an erasure of what came before but a fearsome white that blazes back at the onlooker, that simmers in the blue of the day and phosphors out into the chill of the night. The Postcard From Nowheres-ville we called it. Barnett smiled and spread his arms wide, as if to absorb through the pores of his shirt the smell of the luminous paint. This was the bank shot he’d set into motion months – no, centuries – no, eons ago. [Read It Now] [Judge’s Comments] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661668597677-EI3SKN8T2FTHTRE8X21E/Screen+Shot+2022-08-28+at+2.35.56+AM.png Home - The Harvest Finalist - Fall 2019 Travel Writing Contest (Fiction) Nowhere Magazine Online Barnett that son of a bitch. He saw an opportunity and he took it, shook it, vacuumed up every divot of property from Sop-Choppy to Clermont not already fuzzed over with cattle and oranges. We could’ve stopped him if we’d of only known back at the beginning, back when he was a boy. But how do you look out for a nothing, for a puff of air? Up from out of an anthill he’d come, that day he arrived among us, up from out a province no bigger than the print of a shoe, and nothing to recommend him, as if nothing were a thing of its own, a propulsive force, a bubble in the deep of the sea. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661669776757-CUJCH1OPY3A9LW5OSM02/Screen+Shot+2022-08-28+at+2.55.30+AM.png Home - Mend Finalist - Terrain.org’s 12th Annual Fiction Contest Pushcart Prize Nominee 2022 Terrain.org online February 2022 On the plank in the crown of the cypress, under the tarp that splits the wind and parries the sun, lies a man all beat to hell. Beat but on the mend. Green again. Grateful, and like any other man who ever lived, a cosmos in the making. So it seemed to GB. Awake or asleep, ragged or spruce, horny or hale or all beat to hell and back again, it don’t matter he figured, it’s all the same: every day you wake, and poke your nose up out the bedcovers, and discover you ain’t dead yet, that day’s the day God said Let there be light. The first day of creation. [Read It Now or Listen To Narration] [Announcement - Pushcart Prize Nominee] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661671158515-DJ5CBULPUKF83MF22TM7/Screen+Shot+2022-08-28+at+3.18.42+AM.png Home - Cooper Winner - Fall 2019 PNM Flash Fiction Contest [Press 53] Prime Number Magazine Issue 173, Apr-Jun 2020 The perfect parcel, and there for the picking, and Cooper there ripe in the saddle, not but a breeze away from that final, stiff-of-the-finger topple into the plowable turf. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661672631959-9I8ZQ5TDZQN2WSDS4227/Screen+Shot+2022-08-28+at+3.43.00+AM.png Home - God Of The Gator Winner - 2022 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize Upcoming The Thomas Wolfe Review Fall 2022 “This story is beautifully written and filled with sensory details that draw into both the physical and emotional landscapes of the story right away. It certainly reminds me of what Faulkner said about Wolfe putting the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin in its intense use of language.” Judge: Crystal Wilkinson, author of The Birds of Opulence, Water Street, and Blackberries, Blackberries. [Link to Contest Announcement] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1664597779739-1T21Q3VM4BGGT6MG5JX1/Screen+Shot+2022-10-01+at+12.15.54+AM.png Home - Count-Down Winner - 2022 PNM Flash Fiction Prize [Press 53] Finalist - Indiana Review 2020 1/2 K PRIZE Finalist - Cutbank Literary Journal — Big Sky, Small Prose Contest Finalist - Tobias Wolff Award For Fiction 2022 Prime Number Magazine Issue 229, Oct-Dec 2022 T-Minus 300,000 years. A hundred million years of coral bakes in the sun. The condor wheels out over the sandstone cliff to strike at the hide of the mammoth. The beast bellows. The sinkhole blossoms. The earth feeds. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661792121034-MUQ7MT51OCV412AKFCKY/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+12.54.44+PM.png Home - The Smile Contest Winner - Driftwood Press 2019 Adrift Short Story Contest Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020 Nominated 2020 Best of the Net Judge: Dale Ray Phillips, author of Pulitzer Prize Nominee My People’s Waltz Driftwood Press Winter 2020 Issue 7.1 Farrel marched himself up the aisle and into the dock. Farrel-land the children called it, the patch of the flooring at the far corner of her desk where he stood to attention day after day, two, three times a day to once again—as Miss Connor called it—explain himself. A haven. A land of milk and honey. He’d rest his chin on the wooden edge of the desk while he waited for her to rule, smell the varnish and the Pinesol and the coffee, rock his head from side to side, sticky up onto his cheeks the pencil shavings and the diblets of rubber eraser as he watched and as he waited. It was all of it familiar, homey even, the spot on the floor. His spot. Here. Where the bad children stand to await the day of judgement, where the soles of their feet sand the tile down to a tar the width of a cookie. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661789906932-SPFJVAA0XSAAY2URXYP7/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+12.17.56+PM.png Home - Dear Mr. Gottlieb Winner - 2019 Texas Observer Short Story Contest Judge: Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig Texas Observer November/December 2019 Issue Outstanding Features With an opposable thumb, eight pounds of cortical tissue (fully loaded), and a 357 eight-cylinder fuel-injected engine, I come fully equipped for either work or play. Pressed for time? I cut overhead by downsizing hourly, doubling my memory even as I pack more of myself into a smaller and smaller space. Zap. I am the size of a grapefruit, and fit quite nicely tucked into the corner of your attaché case or anchoring that stack of invoices on your credenza. Zap. I am the size of a bumblebee and perch inside your left ear whispering sweet nothings as day gives way to night. Zap-zap. I’m an ICBM sprouting up through an Iowa cornfield, a million pounds of thrust sucked into a bright red button quivering beneath the manly but well-manicured thumb of Robert H. Gottlieb. Zappitty-zap. A plate of linguini Alfredo in a white clam sauce. A—zap—hand-tooled leather sombrero. Zap—a kitten—zap—a samurai sword—zap—a candy-red Maserati convertible. Do you like breasts? I can grow breasts. I am all that you have ever wanted and more. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1626759851712-EGQONP9B6OEX3JMH5DTQ/img_1892.jpg Home - The Deluge Pushcart Prize Nominee 2018 New Ohio Review Fall 2018 Finalist - 51st New Millennium Writing Awards 2021 The .45. Strange to see it here, here in his hand. He checked the safety. Slipped it into the outside pocket of the leather jacket, just under the flap. Only once before had I ever seen him hold it. Couple years ago he’d run us out to the sandpit for the demo and the speech (this is not a toy). Taught us how to load and unload, to blast a bottle off a fence—the basics, right? Like the sex talk, you know—you get the one lesson (this is not a toy) and then, that’s it, go ye forth and multiply. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661828461055-IRNYA4M7RX3S48U7SX8H/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+11.00.27+PM.png Home - The Hawaiian Club Winner — Sterling Clack Clack Fiction Contest April 2021 Finalist – 2019 Barry Hannah Prize In Fiction Yalobusha Review Short Listed — 2020 Gulf Stream Summer Fiction Contest The Hawaiian Club will be arriving at 6 pm and it is already 5:55 pm. I hurry back to the bedroom to strip off my clothes and to cover my body with coconut oil and even though when I put my clothes back on again they will not know what I have done, I feel pleased for myself that I have done it and that in a sense there is a part of this island of Hawaii that I carry with me on the secret island of my own individual skin. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661827481789-K30RFEFXY464LKLOC57Y/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+2.25.13+PM.png Home - Go Figure Winner - The Westchester Review 2020 Flash Fiction Contest Featured in Westchester Review Volume 11, Issue 1 May 2020 The cantaloupes dangle in the sack. How strong the man must be to hold it so. His knuckles waver with the weight, but the strain he feels (he waits with his shoulders back, like a soldier) he feels because he loves the woman. The love is like the earth that pulls at him, waking or sleeping, sitting or standing, at a walk or at a run or even now, as it were, at ease. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1590214044791-ZY3M2D4E4NA8D2JWP4HN/Hunger+Mountain+Journal+Logo.png Home - Random Sample Finalist - Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open June 2013 Finalist - 2015 Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize Featured in Hunger Mountain Journal Online I can’t seem to unstick myself from the shoulders of the people around me. Wildebeest stampeding up a riverbank, that’s what we are — I think as I break stride, as I fall back a step — meals on wheels. And that’s when the guy with the clipboard hooks me by the sleeve. You’ve seen the documentary. It’s always the infant, the aged, the injured the croc strikes first. Says he’s got tickets to a show — focus group screening, CBS sitcom, invitation only. Invitation? For me? Population of a whole village flits by in the second it takes me to scratch my nose. The earth skids on another thousand miles through the black. The odds are astronomical. That I should be the one grain of pollen plucked out of this avalanche and held aloft for all to see, that I should find myself a member of that most exclusive of all clubs, the Random Sample? [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1651028320285-1CO7D8XM4CBRZ8CWB5JG/Boulevard+Lightening.jpeg Home - Breakers Online Exclusive at Boulevard Magazine - Natural Bridge collection Finalist - Arkansas Emerging Writers Award 2021 Long List - Fish Short Story Prize 2021/2022 With a magazine and a strip of duct tape, the detective—the nice one, the one with the crisp in the collar and the delicate hands—dabs the cut on your brow with a Q-tip and rigs up a splint to cradle the break in your wrist. He stands behind you, at the ready, should you need a pat on the shoulder, a swig of water, a smoke. The other detective—the gruff one—kicks back in the corner with his feet up top a trashcan flipped, upside-down, to make a stool. With his teeth he tears the head off a packet of salted peanuts. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/e34f2d72-6387-4694-830c-ad64115e205a/Screenshot+2024-05-09+at+1.52.19+PM.png Home - Congratulations Winner - Lazuli Literary Group Summer 2022 Writing Contest Third Place - Typehouse 2019 2nd Biennial Short Fiction Contest Typehouse Literary Magazine Issue #18 “This is one of the most audacious works I’ve seen in a while, delightfully reckless and unhinged.” Contest Judge Venita Blackburn, author of Black Jesus and Other Superheroes Upcoming Volume 6, Issue 2 of AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought Dear Mr. Fred Biedeblieck, Congratulations. Your reputation precedes you. Your life-long effort to make an impression upon those more fortunate than yourself has not gone unnoticed. When word of your existence reached our international headquarters on the outskirts of Monte Carlo, we knew then that our search for a subscriber to this most exclusive of all magazines was at an end. [Link To Announcement] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/b046d99c-471b-435e-b24e-b1b308563ab7/Screen+Shot+2022-12-25+at+9.39.38+PM.png Home - The Hunting Of The Famous People Winner - Gateway Review Flash Fiction Contest Featured in The Gateway Review Winter 2019 Online reprint at Fresh.ink Literary Like a portable cathedral is what the famous people are, buoyant is what they are, the famous people, and lighter than air and – look -- into the blue cavern of a cloud they float, bingo, tally-ho, cowabunga, yes, but beware. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661828165943-77I392FTLTF43OUZXR3H/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+10.55.48+PM.png Home - My New Car Online at Sterling Clack Clack (J.New Books) Fold-Out Chapbook (A3 Press - Illustrations by Andrew Torrens) Printed on 170gsm Silk paper and 350gsm card in England. I will have the baco-burger combo special, one for me and one for my new car. No, no: do not roll the window down. Slide it in through the vent. We do not wish to break the exquisite aerodynamic profile of this, our recently purchased motoring vehicle. How extraordinarily handsome he is at the wheel of his handsome new car. He is a go-getter, he is a sexual object, he is a gigantical rumbling four-door erection. Hey, baby. Hubba-hubba. Yowsa-yowsa. She is dazzled by the fine flashy looks of my brand new car. "If I had a kind of a car like that," she says, "I would not have any need for a pair of legs." [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661793826022-LV145EQO1JB7GNORPG4Y/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+1.23.09+PM.png Home - The Babe Winner - 2014 Knickerbocker Prize (Novella) Featured in Big Fiction Magazine #6 Alan Sincic’s incantatory “The Babe” is voice-driven and manic and funny and dark and loud. It’s fantastical. David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals “He dies. That’s the first line, so I’m not spoiling anything: Babe Ruth dies. What happens in the next 61 pages takes us only to the end of the day, but it takes us everywhere in baseball, in competition, in love, in language, the most fluid flowing catch and pitch of wordage and outage (or not) you can imagine. Two sentences, just to reel you in: So much for the bubble that held the game. But then he looked back at the break in the fence and saw that it was perfect: a breach in the boundary of the game just big enough to contain not only the Babe but also the ball there bounding down the cobbled streets of the Bronx, the ball spinning into and out of the broken sunlight to spank the hood of the roadster, to rainbow up over the boaters and the derbies and the bonnets, to nip the tip of the stogie and ping the arm of the hydrant and hop the stoop and shatter the window and clatter the spoons and splatter the pans in a rebound, in a ricochet, in a bank shot to the bedroom where the widow would be waiting, all crispy and frisky and fried . . . You get the idea, right? What happens to the ball if the Babe dies? This is what happens—Alan Sincic takes you from the windup to the final call on Home Run 715, and you can hardly stop to breathe. It’s terrific.” Julie J. Nichols, New Pages [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1590211838997-UZG7WZ187FII0VXRNNWA/Logo-for-site-Cobalt.png Home - How To Catch The Ball Finalist - 2013 Cobalt Writing Prize Featured in Cobalt Review (Volume Two) 2014 Fresh Ink Reprints May 14, 2020 - Fresh.ink Online Storyteller Journal Reprint April 2024 In order to be attractive to the ball, it is important for you to look as much like a ball as possible. Since you are what you eat, we suggest as many sphere-icular foods as possible: cheese balls, gumballs, sourballs, crème-puffs, bon-bons, chocolate-covered ho-ho's. Be creative. Don’t be afraid to vary your training program by expanding beyond the six major food groups listed here. This is what is known as “having a good range.” [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1590364339383-UZR9RD5YXT5TJXYCXR0I/Screenshot_2020-05-24+Submit+a+Sentence.png Home - S for Sentence A terrific website that gathers commentary from writers about the “sentence-building” of writers they admire. Poets think in lines, prose writers in sentences; the best of both work from sound to sense, with an ear for the music in their compositions. S for Sentence celebrates lyricism in prose, the play and craft at work in the artful sentence. We post a sentence a month along with comments by a guest writer on the craft that shapes it, on what makes it great. In one or two sentences. —Pearl Abraham, Editor [For posting of the month on sforsentence.com] [My comments on Twain] [My comments on Austen] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/cba86cac-311a-46b7-8ffc-8d272d79ab91/Screenshot+2024-05-11+at+3.17.57+PM.png Home - The First Man To Fall Into The Sun Third Place - Action/Words Poetry Contest Judge: Ruth Awad, author of Outside the Joy and Set to Music a Wildfire Midway Journal Volume 18, Issue 2 The first man to fall into the sun radioed back temperatures and apologized for lost equipment… [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1568301804232-EJTLGMX4VHGJKPCQBZA1/Screen+Shot+2019-09-12+at+11.23.08+AM.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1651031323852-2TBABOAF23V4930A6R91/Alan+photo+black+backdrop.jpeg Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1568301954572-L0HMM06W1S3XMOBRC4NP/Screen+Shot+2019-09-12+at+11.25.05+AM.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565098871710-P17O7M02GT4ZNAHVZT2Z/Untitled+design.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565106577426-NEZV624XQ1K8ADG0I2V6/Untitled+design+%282%29.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1609397066540-9WI7M4G5IV9I83B6HKO0/41YipI16OJL.jpg Home - The Piney Vista First Runner Up The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2021 Finalist - 2020 Orison Anthology Award In Fiction Short Listed - 2020 Bridport Short Story Prize One night only! The Human Torpedo! Captain Jimmie Jameson! The truck tinkled as it wheeled left and then right to clear the surge of the gutters and the muddy bubble of the manholes, a carillon of ice cream, ice cream, ice cream cast up and then erased with every random gust. From a ten-story tower he jumps – no parachute, no hooks, no wires – he jumps! The trumpet shook as the truck rammed a broken deck chair and splintered up over the shingles and the rafters and the crackly wire that clogged the square. Talk about balls. You could even hear, up under the garglish warble of the busking – Ten stories! Ten stories! Into a puddle of water no bigger than a bathtub! – the tremor in his voice, the thrill of – what would be the word for it? -- death. Even the oldsters – and by now we were the oldsters – felt, in the wake of the storm, the frisson, the sting of doom in the air, the roof jarred and the tree toppled and the midnight pitch of the shutter upward, up over the clouds, ascended into heaven. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1610740349059-KLK2ZUDS5ZBE08AASRIA/2021-01-07-drive-in-theatre-shutterstock-2.jpg Home “The stylized bravura of Alan Sincic’s ‘The Piney Vista’ knocked my socks off, not only for its authoritative voice but for the sheer ambition and originality of this magical-realism-meets-southern-gothic picaresque about carny chicanery in rural America.” — Jon Gingerich, 2020 Great American Fiction Contest Winner https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1568301347836-DZNZUQO4NW3IJBDX7UAC/Screen+Shot+2019-09-12+at+11.15.34+AM.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1663987645747-9BV92XID7VKT05VAJIW4/TheSlapjack_TMRNovelExcerpt_3rdPlace.jpeg Home - Interview With The Winner On Monday, we published Alan Sincic’s “The Slapjack,” selected by Dan Chaon as the third place finalist in our inaugural Novel Excerpt Contest. Today, we’re pleased to share with you this interview with the winner, in which we discuss the remarkable voice of the excerpt, the writer’s background in drama, and more! Third Place - Masters Review 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest Judge: Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk, Ill Will, Await Your Reply, and Stay Awake “This excerpt is something of a wild card since it starts at chapter 5… yet the voice won me over—the unique and surprising vernacular, the grinning energy of the prose, the enthusiastic sense of scene and detail. I don’t know whether I yet know what this book is about, but based on these pages I’m willing to keep reading!” [Contest Judge Dan Chaon] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1580421557572-YY3XPN2RICHIM4KU8D2C/Screen+Shot+2020-01-30+at+4.32.09+PM.png Home - Trimming the Universe James McNulty (Editor): A Conversation with Alan Sincic Author of The Smile Contest Winner of Driftwood Press 2019 Adrift Short Story Contest https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1580421172623-E8QZDP7SAHHSWFBK8MBX/Screen+Shot+2020-01-30+at+4.40.22+PM.png Home - Short Story Contest Winner: Dear Mr. Gottlieb Editor Rose Cahalan comments: The winning entry in our ninth annual short story contest is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Alan Sincic’s “Dear Mr. Gottlieb” is written in an absurdist, stream-of-consciousness style that has shades of Hunter S. Thompson and James Joyce—but a voice all its own. Based extremely loosely on the format of a job application, the piece is a funny, nonsensical satire of corporate life. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1627921481901-ZCW2I3TKENVY84N4EZZV/Haunted+Waters+Interview+Image.jpg Home - Out of The Reverie An Interview with the editors of Haunted Waters Press. Welcome! Today we chat with HWP Contributor Alan Sincic. Alan's work of flash fiction Respect is featured in the 2020 issue of From the Depths. His short story Bacon is showcased in Tin Can Literary Review Volume One. Enjoy! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1566062056165-FOI8YXRXE9KHBXXKZZIN/442c300da5c99a7eef9e8d1011ae1b99.jpg Home - on the Intersection of Theater and Fiction Author, actor, and teacher Alan Sincic, The Furnace artist-in-residence and winner of Big Fiction’s 2014 Knickerbocker Prize, will be teaching a performance workshop at Scribes, Hugo House’s teen writing camp, on August 12. He’ll be performing “Sugar,” a new short story, at Hollow Earth Radio on August 13, with a soundscape designed by filmmaker Stephen Anunson. In anticipation of these two events, made by possible by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, we asked him about the mysterious shadow wall, which will be a part of his workshop, and about the intersections of theater and fiction. [Corinne Manning & Anca Szilágyi] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1664161927352-RC7URF3J45B67QIQHVKX/24PreSaleCoverTNP.png Home - The Writer Comments Winner - Vincent Brothers Review 2020 Short Story Contest Issue #24 Spring 2021 [Link To Story: The End Of The World] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/dab274fd-0217-4139-990f-0bf9a9309333/Screenshot+2023-12-31+at+6.52.30+PM.png Home - Storyteller Interview Storyteller Journal - December 2023 Alan Sincic Interview plus Reprints: Sugar — Mend — The Hawaiian Club — Bob Sanders Let me go way back here, long before I could even hold a pencil. I’m safe on my mother’s lap, her arms around me. The object in our hands – the big volume of Childcraft that comes with the set of World Book Encyclopedias on the shelf – seems to possess a power of its own that travels, like gravity or magnetism, through the invisible air. It sounds out – the words, they sound out -- not from the painting on the page, or the binding, or the red leather bookmark with the embossment of the bear claw in the foil of gold, but, as if by magic, from out the very center of my mother’s body. Nursery rhymes and stories all buzzing with danger – the witch in Hansel and Gretel, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, the Jabberwock. I can feel the hum – my little body a sounding board – even before the syllables all round up into shape. Once upon a time… [Read the full interview here] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1568301298465-KX1EL3DLHYWSHGVI5UO6/Screen+Shot+2019-09-12+at+11.14.39+AM.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/26a829ee-8969-45a4-9a33-599d341cd823/Screenshot+2025-06-24+at+2.01.12%E2%80%AFPM.png Home - Pride Of Place Winner - 2025 Rash Award in Fiction Contest Judge Jason Mott, author of The Returned, The Wonder of All Things, The Crossing, Hell Of A Book (winner of the National Book Award for Fiction). Long List - ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize 2025 Upcoming - The Broad River Review 2025 Volume 57 Easy to picture the scene, in the dark, the stations of the flesh – not so different than a billion other collisions that people the planet. But that ain’t the all of it. Easy enough to collide with the other, but not so easy to know what it means in the meeting, in the moment, when a particular of two become -- for not but a moment – a one. Picture a waterfall. Waterfall a thing unto itself. It ain’t the rock, or the water, but the fall of the water over the rock that burns in the bright of the day. Sings in the dark of the night. [Link to Announcement] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/f0db71f6-99c8-475c-9149-13380465f647/Screenshot+2025-03-24+at+2.35.30%E2%80%AFAM.png Home - Billy Dean Winner - Columbia Journal 2025 Winter Print Contest Upcoming Columbia Journal 2025 Contest Judge Nafkote Tamirat, New York Times Notable Book of the Year author of The Parking Lot Attendant "Each sentence in '"Billy Dean" rings with musical cadence... The author's descriptions flow with a sensory richness... I found the operatic conclusion reminiscent of the tragic crescendos that crowned the religious texts my family read." [Contest Judge Nafkote Tamirat] Not much of a behaver, Billy. Black the shoes, the socks, the suit he wears on the Sabbath and all the days between. Every damn day from the day he first appears. Even in the worst of the heat he works his way from shop to shop, steps out of the blaze, shuffles up a tract, gives it a shiver and then lays it, like you lay a flower, into the hand of whoever. A silent proffer. A holy aloha. On stationary size of a gum wrapper, and a single fold and -- aside from the cross he scrivens on the cover -- blank. You think what the hell is this? Flip it open. On the inside a message of a single word or two, or three, and lettered by hand, and off a pen with a nib delicate as the quill of a dove. Behold. Or Hearken. Or He cometh. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/0bea10ce-8597-48c5-bba9-02339eccb1b1/Screenshot+2025-04-01+at+12.00.10%E2%80%AFAM.png Home - The Claim Runner-Up - 2021 Tusculum Review Fiction Prize Honorable Mention - Ninth Letter 2021 Literary Award In Fiction Short List — DISQUIET Literary Prize 2022 Finalist - Pangyrus Fiction Contest 2022 Finalist - 2023 Montana Prize For Fiction Excerpt Magazine No. 3 Spring 2025 Identical, these two hats belonging to Joe, the difference being (as in all things human) the wear. No way around it. You wear a cap to impress, but the minute you wear it, it’s a wear on the cap. When the wind bullies and the rain volleys and the sun like a sledgehammer lands, you wear the weather cap, sure – shabby-genteel the word, like the Parthenon, elegant even on the road to ruin -- but when the sky clears? Ah. That’s the moment. Which is why he never wore the fair-weather hat. He would carry it (careful not to warp the brim) in his left hand, as a token of command, and he would always, at the end of the day, or at a change in the weather, return it to the box… [Link to Announcement] [Link to Buy] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/12285d3c-7bd0-4810-b814-3e05b9ea55b0/Screenshot+2024-10-27+at+10.03.51%E2%80%AFPM.png Home - Not For Maggie Second Place - The Plaza Sudden Fiction Prize 2024 The Plaza Prizes Anthology Two 2024 Contest Judge Angela Readman, author of Bunny Girls, The Girls Are Pretty Crocodiles, Something Like Breathing, and Don’t Try This At Home Thick as it ever was, Maggie’s hair, but scored by the years, oxidized into an alloy of pewter and steel. Never did she mellow, not Maggie, never softened in the glow of the local boys who wooed her. Not for Maggie the Easter bonnet and the Permalift girdle and the Maybelline iridescent eye shadow stick. Not for Maggie the nosegay pressed in the pages of the album, or the dance cards in the shoebox under the bed, or the white linen envelop sprinkled with rose water and sealed with a button of wax and whispered away in the morning post. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/c47020b1-b881-42b5-b931-13fe8b7fdfd5/Screenshot+2025-02-09+at+12.35.10%E2%80%AFPM.png Home - Just The Way I Like It Winner - The 2025 Plaza Short Story Prize - 2,500 Words Contest Judge Jamie Quatro, New York Times Notable author of the story collection I Want to Show You More Short-Listed - Thomas Merton Memorial Prize (The Puritan) Short-Listed The Raven Short Story Prize (Pulp Literature) Finalist - 2024 MayDay Short Fiction Prize Upcoming — The Plaza Prizes Anthology Three 2025 “An arrogant elderly narrator – The Writer, writ large – breaks the fourth wall to explain his superior position to the Reader. Entitled, fastidious, and wholly misanthropic, this Writer is drunk on his ability to wield words like weapons. He speaks as if from outside of time and space itself, in sentences that border on poetry. The irony, of course, is that while he looks down upon “you, dear reader, cast into outer darkness with the creaky bedsprings and the busted AC and the buzz-bomb mosquito ping-pinging at the ear,” we see his utter dependence upon those he derides. No words without readers and printers and book-binders; no life without the waiter there to “gather up all the flammables – my cap, my coat, my teeth, my hair” – and push his wheelchair into the sunlight. A voice reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, this is a strange and beautifully compressed piece of prose poetry.” [Contest Judge Jamie Quatro] [Link To Announcement] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/86b58d99-6be1-45b5-a0a4-10886a7bf83f/Meridian+Literary+Cover.jpeg Home - Donut Winner - Meridian Editors’ Prize In Prose 2023 Finalist - Rigel 2022 Fiction Prize Meridian Issue 47 Fall 2023 I do not have a donut. If I had a donut, I would give it to you, but I do not. Sad. It is sad to think, in a world filled with donuts, that I do not have a donut. We. We do not have a donut. Other people have donuts. Look at them with their donuts, these people. We hate these people not because they have a donut and we do not, but because — it’s hard to say. There is something about them. The swagger. The spring. Them ears of theirs, on the side of their head like that, out there in the open for all to see. That thing they do with the breath, the in and the out of it, like it was free or something, their own personal property, this breath of theirs. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/566c0f45-dde9-4ee9-8d65-1828b472d4a6/BSL+23+front+cover.jpg Home - Potato Boy Winner - Orison 2022 Best Spiritual Literature Award in Fiction Upcoming Fall 2023 - Best Spiritual Literature anthology Every year, Orison Books publishes Best Spiritual Literature (formerly The Orison Anthology), a collection of the finest spiritually engaged writing that appeared in periodicals the preceding year. The anthology also includes previously unpublished work by the winners of The Best Spiritual Literature Awards. Potato Boy rocks. Forward and back he rocks. Alert is what he is. Inside of that skin of his, sits. Of no consequence to him the clamor of flesh in the city below, the trawlers out to sea, the blast of the comet out the belly of the sun. Without a pedigree is the way I picture it. Picture him. Served up out the heart of the earth. [Link to Announcement] [Link to Buy] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/ac85dcfa-126a-4aca-b258-3988bd601bd4/Screenshot+2024-05-11+at+3.36.23+PM.png Home - Roger Babson Shortlisted - The Florida Review 2023 Editor’s Award In Fiction Honorable Mention - 2022 Dillydoun Short Story Prize Upcoming The Florida Review Winter 2024 Not many people have a street named after them, so when we hear that Roger Babson will, within the week, be arriving, presumably to eat pie, and to make a speech, and (who knows?) cut a ribbon, we gather in twos and threes. On the curb at the mailbox we gather, and over the back fence, and in the bright of the breeze with the sheet on the line and the wash in the hamper heavy. On porches we gather, and in the shade of the oak, and with the yo-yo in the holster, and the fist in the pocket, and the ribs in a swivel at the hinge of the hip. Such a fine figure, we say. Fine figure of a man. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/d4e992dc-d487-42af-ad7a-a9ba04b9e14c/New+Ohio+Review+Issue+34.png Home - The Winners Finalist - New Ohio Review 2023 Fiction Contest Shortlisted - DISQUIET Literary Prize 2023 Finalist - Cutbank Literary Journal Montana Prize in Fiction New Ohio Review Issue #34 Spring 2024 New Ohio Review Online Summer Exclusive And get this. Winners may be invited to an awards ceremony. A gathering of persons. Chocolate. And punch. And puppies a possibility. Should they appear – red ribbon round the collar and powdered with talc and spritzed with Aqua Velva and the zest of the lime – greet them with a hearty aloha. Take a knee. Unlimber the limbs. Up over the bone of the ankle they paddle to lick the back of the hand. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/d65f3406-1ca9-49b0-aae6-da8a845931f4/Screenshot+2024-05-04+at+2.51.01+PM.png Home - The Older Man Finalist - Sunspot Lit Rigel 2024 Contest Finalist - Grist ProForma Contest Finalist - The Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction Semi-finalist - American Short(er) Fiction Contest Semi-finalist - Ruminate The Waking Flash Prose Prize Sunspot Literary Journal Volume 6, Issue #1 Respect the older man. When he was a baby they gathered around him. Respect the older man. He ate his vegetables. There is a turn to his ankle where the polio missed him. The falling safe missed but he helped them count the money, the great war missed but he helped them stack the bodies respect the older man. The mad dog missed him and the trolley car swerving, the invisible contagion on the rim of the drinking glass and the assassin's dinner invitation and the suicide's masterful logic and the mad accidental excitement of the ten year binge. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/e25aa47d-dea4-4e7b-99d5-14f51b7125f2/Screenshot+2024-08-19+at+3.14.42+AM.png Home - The Scientific Method Winner - 2024 Bumblebee Flash Fiction Contest Pulp Literature Issue #43 Summer 2024 Final judge Bob Thurber praised this story for “its quirky aesthetic and obvious merit.” Long before I read the book about how the father and the mother collide – the diagram of the docking maneuver and the pics all prickly with arrows that point to the tumbler and the spring and the shank – I’d assembled a picture of my own. [Link to Announcement] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/33e74375-7cc7-4eaa-90dd-984761d55280/Screenshot+2024-05-09+at+1.52.19+PM.png Home - Congratulations Winner - Lazuli Literary Group Summer 2022 Writing Contest Third Place - Typehouse 2019 2nd Biennial Short Fiction Contest Typehouse Literary Magazine Issue #18 “This is one of the most audacious works I’ve seen in a while, delightfully reckless and unhinged.” Contest Judge Venita Blackburn, author of Black Jesus and Other Superheroes Upcoming Volume 6, Issue 2 of AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought Dear Mr. Fred Biedeblieck, Congratulations. Your reputation precedes you. Your life-long effort to make an impression upon those more fortunate than yourself has not gone unnoticed. When word of your existence reached our international headquarters on the outskirts of Monte Carlo, we knew then that our search for a subscriber to this most exclusive of all magazines was at an end. [Link to Announcement] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/3ce1648e-cad7-4559-82d6-9bbca805ff32/Pulp+Literature+Issue+37.jpeg Home - Not What You think Winner - 2022 Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize Short List - 2021 Able Muse Write Prize Finalist - The 2022 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction Finalist - The Waking Flash Prose Prize 2021 Finalist - George Dila Memorial Flash Fiction Contest 2020 Pulp Literature Issue 37, Winter 2023 Contest Judge Bob Thurber, author of Paperboy, In Fifty Words, Nickel Fictions. This book is not what you think it is. It does not begin with you sitting in the hollow of a tree, eating crackers and scratching your elbow as you look out across the forest in the morning. Ignore that picture over there. That was a mistake. [Link to Announcement] [Link to Buy] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/4f41c6cc-f0dc-4304-b7aa-a4ff012961ec/Screenshot+2024-05-18+at+2.05.28+PM.png Home - Fuse Runner-Up - CutBank 2023-2024 Big Sky, Small Prose Contest Finalist - 2023 Grist ProForma Contest Short List - Masters Review 2023 Spring Small Fiction Awards Cutbank Issue 100 Winter/Spring 2024 “Fuse is a thrilling and crafty little sentence of an essay. It's a piece of art about art, which is to say it's about everything, and the writer handles the scope of this task with a deft hand. The work is playful and profound. Not only did I love reading it, but it reminded me why I love reading.” Contest Judge Micah Fields, author of We Hold Our Breath: A Journey to Texas Between Storms [Link to Announcement] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/54a134e1-7de3-4e82-9bcb-b0e8f9dc131e/Storyteller+cover.jpg Home - Interview + Reprints Storyteller Journal - December 2023 Featured Reprints — all in one issue: Sugar — Mend — The Hawaiian Club — Bob Sanders Interview with the Author How do you feel the future of writing will be affected by AI? It’s a bit like the question they asked painters at the advent of photography, or photographers in the era of the cell phone. If you’re out there selling a copy of what already exists, there’s no way that you can compete with a machine. Nor would you want to. Which is why, when the machines arrived, the folks who’d been crafting faithful copies of functional items – the potters and the weavers and the smithies – either moved on to other endeavors, or clamored onto higher ground to lay claim to the mantel artist. Which makes a lot of sense. We have no heroic John Henry stories of a scrivener in a head-to-head battle with a xerox machine. Why? Because a scrivener is little more than an automaton. An artist, on the other hand – a literary artist – pours the whole of himself into every page he writes. If you think of a work of art as a re-creation of the cosmos as seen through the eyes of a fellow participant – a window into and through the mind of another – then art is, by definition, personal… [Link to Buy] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/8b797d3f-ec6b-446e-81f6-24e59fabdec2/Screenshot+2025-08-31+at+1.47.02%E2%80%AFPM.png Home - The God Of The Gator Winner - 2022 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize The Thomas Wolfe Review 2023 Volume 47 “This story is beautifully written and filled with sensory details that draw into both the physical and emotional landscapes of the story right away. It certainly reminds me of what Faulkner said about Wolfe putting the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin in its intense use of language.” Contest Judge Crystal Wilkinson, author of The Birds of Opulence, Water Street, and Blackberries, Blackberries. [Link to Announcement] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661651624792-J6QOK1MWC3N9U81TS3QE/Screen+Shot+2022-08-27+at+9.53.09+PM.png Home - The Sinkhole Winner - 2021 Rash Award in Fiction Contest Judge David Joy, author of Where All Light Tends to Go, The Weight Of This World, The Line That Held Us, and When These Mountains Burn. The Broad River Review 2021 Volume 53 It’s not for the roof above your head, said we, that you buy a house, no, but for the ground beneath your feet. That’s what you count on — the bedrock, the rebar, the brick of the earth itself. Last thing you want to hear, in the middle of the night, is the crackle of the floorboards as the terra firma swallows you whole, as you and the house that holds you, it all of it – bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchen -- banjo with the calf-skin fret, bust of Caesar, little yippy dog – slithers down that creamy funnel and into the belly of the Kracken. [Link to Announcement] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661652693848-6I3UW5FU6TU1L300HQEA/Screen+Shot+2022-08-27+at+10.10.46+PM.png Home - Bacon Tin Can Literary Review Volume One June 2021 (Haunted Waters Press) Finalist - New Ohio Review Editor’s Prize New Ohio Review Online Summer Exclusive 2019 Finalist 2019 New Millennium Writing Awards Maggie meet Joe. Joe—new in town. Regular enough, the features, but more an approximation of handsome than the thing itself, stencil of a stencil, carnival swag, paraffin bust of a Barrymore or a Valentino. Joe meet Maggie. Maggie—the hubby dead or run off with another woman (she’d never say, we’d never ask) but she keeps the ring alright, and not in a box either, but right up there over the fist as a kind of a—what do you call it?—visual aid for the occasional moron foolish enough to try to sweeten, not the coffee, but the server. You don’t mess with Maggie. [Link to Profile on Haunted Waters Website] [Link to Buy] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661651481168-6PYM38J1L4NEYD8T8RG8/Screen+Shot+2022-08-27+at+9.50.36+PM.png Home - The Piney Vista First Runner Up The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2021 Finalist - 2020 Orison Anthology Award In Fiction Short Listed - 2020 Bridport Short Story Prize One night only! The Human Torpedo! Captain Jimmie Jameson! The truck tinkled as it wheeled left and then right to clear the surge of the gutters and the muddy bubble of the manholes, a carillon of ice cream, ice cream, ice cream cast up and then erased with every random gust. From a ten-story tower he jumps – no parachute, no hooks, no wires – he jumps! The trumpet shook as the truck rammed a broken deck chair and splintered up over the shingles and the rafters and the crackly wire that clogged the square. Talk about balls. You could even hear, up under the garglish warble of the busking – Ten stories! Ten stories! Into a puddle of water no bigger than a bathtub! – the tremor in his voice, the thrill of – what would be the word for it? -- death. Even the oldsters – and by now we were the oldsters – felt, in the wake of the storm, the frisson, the sting of doom in the air, the roof jarred and the tree toppled and the midnight pitch of the shutter upward, up over the clouds, ascended into heaven. [Link to Buy Kindle] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661652872856-TEUIGDIV54C3OQLQXC9N/Screen+Shot+2022-08-27+at+10.14.03+PM.png Home - The Ark Flash Fiction Burningword Literary Journal October 2019 All through the night the cold wind scoured the porch, sledge-hammered the rafters, shook the floor to where the candles quivered and the wax in a zig-zag ran. [Read It Now] [About The Issue/Link to Buy Print or Digital] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661653040156-A3WYQ97YWDN0KD4UC062/Screen+Shot+2022-08-27+at+10.16.44+PM.png Home - Respect Flash Fiction From The Depths Fall 2020 (Haunted Waters Press) A person of no account is what she was, and proud of it. She cared not a whit for what the talkers made of her, not the small talkers in a huddle above a bowl of punch or a mailbox or a bunting of undies in the sun, not the big talkers at the bar and the pier and the poker table, not even the silent talker who, with a tilt of the head at the sight of her, a sideward glance, a shade of a smile, obliterates her in the eyes of the others… [Read It Now] [Link to Buy Print or Digital] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/efda4f86-006d-4402-b22f-d64bc8e00a3a/Screen+Shot+2023-02-02+at+11.05.33+PM.png Home - The Ripening Runner Up The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2023 Short-Listed - 2022 Chester B. Himes Memorial Short Fiction Prize Jan/Feb 2023 Saturday Evening Post Online Upcoming Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2023 What with that daddy of his already a dead letter in a box or a bar or a field aways off over the horizon, Sparrow took to sleeping in the storeroom GB’d occupied back in the day. Sixteen he was. Ripe. Ready. And the girl? A barefoot jobber on the overland path, back and forth every day between a shack in the woods and a grove in the season of harvest. From out a family of scrappers she come, seven children and she in the middle somewhere, the whole enterprise a tumbleweed of tinder and chaff. Not what you’d call a pretty girl, but then again Sparrow not the face on the box of Wheaties or the mug on the cover of True Romance. Serviceable is what they were. He come across her in the spring, at the side of the trail they run up the bed of the old rail line from Brooksville to Ocoee, pitching rocks at a couple boys been ragging her bout the lack of shoes. A good arm. Threw like a man. [Contest Announcement] [To Buy The Anthology] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/98ade785-c421-43a6-a94a-a418a9721ba8/Screenshot+2024-05-19+at+1.25.26+PM.png Home - We Could Fix You Runner-Up - 2023 Grist ProForma Contest Finalist - 2022 Box Fiction Contest Upcoming Grist Winter 2023 Contest Judge Julie Marie Wade, author of Wishbone, Small Fires, and Postage Due. You pose for the picture but the picture-taker’s a purist. She hates the camera. Churns her own butter. Hews her own wood. She makes it her mission to paint you. Flat black the color. A statement. She is making a statement. She lowers you into the vat. Creamy the blend, like butter. A baptism you say. You dog-paddle to tug at the hem of her skirt. Gentle, like you touch the part in the hair with a tap of the brush, she presses down with the paddle. Now take a deep breath. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/90df4c7c-7a6a-4f4b-b5e7-33f172325b78/Screenshot+2024-10-28+at+5.06.03%E2%80%AFPM.png Home - A Visitation Of Glory Short-Listed - The Plaza Short Story Prize 2024 The Plaza Prizes Anthology Two 2024 “A man of honor. That’s what you are.” The man laughed. Big laugh. Whiskey laugh. Rocked from side to side like he’d done at the bar. For the first time in his life he surprised himself with himself, with the thought himself as, well, other than himself. On the door-side under the seat, snug in a hand-tooled holster, the .45. “What makes you think you’re worth a killing?” “My point exactly. I ain’t the same as you, am I? A low-born, that’s what I am. It’d be beneath you.” “Then you’d be mistaken.” The man was quick. That was the first surprise of the night. How quick he was. Snap. With the one hand he steadied the tray. With the other he clamped hold of Barnett by the shirt collar. Twisted the collar into a noose. “It’d be an honor to kill you.” [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/3a7ffe58-5f1a-4a2d-b723-064db16af5da/Screenshot+2024-11-29+at+3.30.54%E2%80%AFPM.png Home Storyteller Journal - April 2024 Featured Reprints — all in one issue: How To Catch The Ball The End Of The World The Greyhound The Smile Contest [Link To Buy] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1626558405589-T9VA6N9L2LCJP0S3CAAO/Copy+of+PL31Cover+small.jpg Home - Blind Maggie Winner - Pulp Literature 2021 Bumblebee Flash Fiction Award Pulp Literature Issue 31, Summer 2021 Short Listed - New Flash Fiction Review Anton Chekhov Award Semi-Finalist American Short Fiction “Short(Er) Fiction” Contest The other hand — hammer hand — she folded into a fist. Held it. Trembled it there. There, she said. Take that. She made as if to thump the graven surface of the tray. The biscotti cowered. The fly buzzed, landed, buzzed again. She closed her eyes, tipped into the wind, listened for the fly to land. You don’t mess, no, you don’t mess with Maggie. [Link to Announcement] [Read It Now] [Link to Buy Print or Digital] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1632721651711-C05I9P0A1MK57JPQA2WF/24PreSaleCoverTNP.png Home - The End Of The World Winner - Vincent Brothers Review 2020 Short Story Contest Issue #24 Spring 2021 When Jack woke his father was carrying him up the ladder to the roof of the house where the whole neighborhood was already waiting, already scattered out across the flat gray surface with their goods in tow and their flashlights drawn and their heads outlined against the broad dark sky like candles on a cake, or like a stand of trees on a small square island, or like a crowd on a pier at the launching of a ship when the ropes unravel and the ship breaks away and the crowd cuts itself loose, is cut loose, as the crowd is cut adrift to make its own separate journey. [Link to Announcement] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1664657828524-VN8QCDCPQPZ7WR3KBSBH/Prism+Review+Cover+Square.jpeg Home - Porter Must Be Stopped Winner - Prism Review 2020 Short Story Contest Runner-Up - G.B. Crump Prize In Experimental Fiction 2019 (Pleiades Press) Long List - Fish Short Story Prize Prism Review Issue 22 Summer 2020 Granted, this was Porter’s own doing and he has no one but himself to blame, and please don’t mention this to Porter when you see him, and we’d never bring it up were it not for the crack in the egg, the twinge in the knee, the recent tilt of the galaxy in a darkward direction, but Porter is not what he has made himself out to be. Porter is a fake. He has been toying with our emotions for too long now and the time has come for us to put an end to it. Porter must be stopped. [Link To Buy] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1664660454263-9APLWLB9QFGFFC27HW7Q/American+Writers+Review+2019.jpeg Home - Bob Sanders Winner - American Writer’s Review 2020 Short Story Contest American Writers Review 2020 (San Fedele Press) Paperback – June 17, 2020 The purpose of this story is to make you want to be friends with the author. Is it good enough yet? Has he succeeded? His name is Bob Sanders and he lives at… [Link to Buy Kindle or Paperback] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661797565573-YNQA81JABKCUSJB20W4Y/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+2.25.13+PM.png Home - Go Figure Winner - The Westchester Review 2020 Flash Fiction Contest The Westchester Review Spring 2020 issue The cantaloupes dangle in the sack. How strong the man must be to hold it so. His knuckles waver with the weight, but the strain he feels (he waits with his shoulders back, like a soldier) he feels because he loves the woman. The love is like the earth that pulls at him, waking or sleeping, sitting or standing, at a walk or at a run or even now, as it were, at ease. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661795472373-4I8HYDNXZ1VMF42372AS/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+1.50.51+PM.png Home - The Smile Contest Winner - Driftwood Press 2019 Adrift Short Story Contest Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020 Nominated 2020 Best of the Net Driftwood Press Winter 2020 Issue 7.1 “The Smile Contest is a fresh and quirky love story in which the usual crush on the teacher is submerged under a more adult crush/courtship between Ms. Connor and Mr. Sammy. I admired this quite professional doubling-down on plot lines and the effortless use of a retrospective third person omniscient voice. Also, I loved the multiple hand references in the story—especially the line "the hand is not a magnet"; these interconnections create theme. Ultimately, “The Smile Contest” seems an impressionistic story about the mysteries of sex and things not yet known; it beautifully shows how hard it is to grip slippery feelings.” [Contest Judge Dale Ray Phillips, author of My People’s Waltz] [Read It Now - Scroll to Story and Interview] [About The Prize] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661827333553-V1U69GWWFS64QL2WR6B5/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+12.17.56+PM.png Home - Dear Mr. Gottlieb Winner - 2019 Texas Observer Short Story Contest Texas Observer November/December 2019 Issue The winning entry in our ninth annual short story contest is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Alan Sincic’s “Dear Mr. Gottlieb” is written in an absurdist, stream-of-consciousness style that has shades of Hunter S. Thompson and James Joyce—but a voice all its own. Based extremely loosely on the format of a job application, the piece is a funny, nonsensical satire of corporate life. [Rose Cahalan, Texas Observer] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1590212964088-1LJN0HGKK4XGUONUSV9T/nor24cover.jpg Home - The Deluge Finalist - 50th New Millennium Writing Awards 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominee 2018 New Ohio Review Fall 2018 The .45. Strange to see it here, here in his hand. He checked the safety. Slipped it into the outside pocket of the leather jacket, just under the flap. Only once before had I ever seen him hold it. Couple years ago he’d run us out to the sandpit for the demo and the speech (this is not a toy). Taught us how to load and unload, to blast a bottle off a fence—the basics, right? Like the sex talk, you know—you get the one lesson (this is not a toy) and then, that’s it, go ye forth and multiply. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661795592489-7B1PNOY0L4JGL2QAZN0G/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+1.23.09+PM.png Home - The Babe Winner - 2014 Knickerbocker Prize (Novella) Big Fiction Magazine #6 “Alan Sincic’s incantatory “The Babe” is voice-driven and manic and funny and dark and loud. It’s fantastical.” [Contest Judge David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals and Lake Life] “He dies. That’s the first line, so I’m not spoiling anything: Babe Ruth dies. What happens in the next 61 pages takes us only to the end of the day, but it takes us everywhere in baseball, in competition, in love, in language, the most fluid flowing catch and pitch of wordage and outage (or not) you can imagine. Two sentences, just to reel you in: So much for the bubble that held the game. But then he looked back at the break in the fence and saw that it was perfect: a breach in the boundary of the game just big enough to contain not only the Babe but also the ball there bounding down the cobbled streets of the Bronx, the ball spinning into and out of the broken sunlight to spank the hood of the roadster, to rainbow up over the boaters and the derbies and the bonnets, to nip the tip of the stogie and ping the arm of the hydrant and hop the stoop and shatter the window and clatter the spoons and splatter the pans in a rebound, in a ricochet, in a bank shot to the bedroom where the widow would be waiting, all crispy and frisky and fried . . . You get the idea, right? What happens to the ball if the Babe dies? This is what happens—Alan Sincic takes you from the windup to the final call on Home Run 715, and you can hardly stop to breathe. It’s terrific.” Julie J. Nichols [New Pages] [Read It Now] [About The Prize] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1590300041738-555NEQJK6WMLV6JS1A0Z/Gateway%2BReview%2BPhoto.jpg Home - The Hunting Of The Famous People Winner - Gateway Review Flash Fiction Contest Featured in The Gateway Review Winter 2019 Online reprint at Fresh.ink Literary Like a portable cathedral is what the famous people are, buoyant is what they are, the famous people, and lighter than air and – look -- into the blue cavern of a cloud they float, bingo, tally-ho, cowabunga, yes, but beware. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/4bb996f4-c117-4f80-bacf-4ac812999f10/Screenshot+2024-10-27+at+10.03.51%E2%80%AFPM.png Home - The Book Of Naps Short-Listed - The Plaza Sudden Fiction Prize 2024 The Plaza Prizes Anthology Two 2024 The ice cream man curls up in the back of his ice cream truck and closes his eyes. He is an iceberg steaming out across the North Atlantic. He passes a ship. On the deck of the ship stands the captain in his gold-braided trousers. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/70869e5e-d6d9-451b-8251-d681334e4401/Screenshot+2024-10-27+at+10.03.51%E2%80%AFPM.png Home - Johnny Short-Listed - The Plaza Short Story Prize 2024 The Plaza Prizes Anthology Two 2024 7/24/95 4:13pm. The bus from Melbeta to Arden is late. The passengers sit on folding chairs in the Trailways station, fanning themselves with back copies of the Melbeta Star and Ledger and counting the legs of an insect crawling up the face of a busted vending machine when suddenly Johnny Carson appears. He carries a Tupperware salad cozy laden with ham and cheese finger sandwiches that he has cut into tiny squares and rectangles (no crust) and skewered with red plastic toothpicks in the shape of a pirate sword. The passengers greet him cheerfully, inquire as to his health, entreat him to sign various portions of their exposed flesh with the tip of his Electroglide 4000, but Johnny — although pleasant enough in his Mylar hairnet and hygienic plastic gloves -- brushes them gently aside. It is as if he does not want to be noticed. He blushes as he passes out the sandwiches, the napkins, the jumbo Dixie Cups brimming with Tang and girded with photogravure likenesses of the Mercury Seven Astronauts. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1664817479830-UJ6T1B3KJDJDKGISKIV2/Screen+Shot+2022-10-03+at+1.16.49+PM.png Home - My New Car Fold-Out Chapbook Speeding along the highway of mania and delusion, Alan Sincic's My New Car is a thrilling and entirely original glimpse into the mind of a man in love with his car. Illustrations by Andrew Torrens. Printed on 170gsm Silk paper and 350gsm card in England. [Link to Buy] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1664781773318-3RBPH1LPDTPU0TY7RC2D/Screen+Shot+2022-10-03+at+3.17.25+AM.png Home - Sugar Live Audience/Radio/Podcast/Chapbook Publication in partnership with Big Fiction, Bremelo Press, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture (August 2015) “Told in crackling prose, Sugar is the story of a hobo of a guard dog, a veritable dynamo of decay whose escape pulls her human companions from motel and factory floor to film drive-in and steamed up Coupe Deville windows–to contemplations of love. The performance will feature an original soundscape created by Seattle filmmaker Stephen Anunson” [Anca Szilagyi, author of Daughters of the Air (Lanternfish Press)] [About The Chapbook] [About The Performance] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661796698715-99ZSVRZFI7BGHIP7NUHB/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+2.11.06+PM.png Home - Sand Finalist - 51st New Millennium Writing Awards 2021 The Greensboro Review Number 98 Fall 2015 “Sand” is a strange one, perhaps the most experimental offering, full of non sequiturs and a perverse energy. It starts with a grieving husband drying his socks in a toaster oven and only gets weirder from there. It reminded of some of Barry Hannah’s wilder moments, always welcome. [Shane Moritz, Arts and Letters] [About the Issue] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661796173771-9CATOL0TY5WUWT6UMK0H/Screen+Shot+2022-08-29+at+2.01.45+PM.png Home - How To Catch the Ball Finalist - 2013 Cobalt Writing Prize Featured in Cobalt Review (Volume Two) 2014 Fresh Ink Reprints May 14, 2020 Fresh.ink Online Literary Magazine Note from the Author: Over the years I've performed on stage a version of this story, the hapless wannabe athlete who scrambles to follow the commands of a mysterious booming voice from out the darkness. From the playbill: "Obey the baseball instructional tape that bullies its silent listener—a lone Chaplinesque figure—into bizarre new displays of affection." "How To Catch The Ball" emerged (originally) as a theater piece in New York City and elsewhere. Later, for the Orlando International Fringe Festival, I managed to stir it into an ensemble theater piece, "American Obsessions," a comic/satirical look at the more surreal aspects of the world we live in today. [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/e6a81f91-c3e9-4120-b51c-9514b36c0464/Screen+Shot+2022-12-03+at+12.23.24+AM.png Home - Famous People Flash Fiction Runner-Up - A to Zoetic 2022 Writing Contest Winter 2022 - Heathentide Orphans Anthology Contest Judge Grant Faulkner, author of All The Comfort Sin Can Provide and Fissures. The public is the reason that the famous people are famous, the public is what has made them what they are today. Sometimes, at night, when the public is asleep, the famous people sneak outside without their disguises on and sneak into the homes of the public and tip-toe into the bedroom and give the public a big kiss on the side of the cheek to thank the public for making them all that they are today. On the way back out sometimes the famous people stop at the refrigerator to have a glass of milk maybe and some cookies. [To Buy] [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1665959842571-W3OCR6JYZ0UV1FJBPOQM/Mid+American+Review+Cover.jpeg Home - What I Want From The Old Men Flash Fiction Finalist - Mid-American Review 2020 Fineline Competition Mid-American Review Issue 41 Fall 2022 [Read It Now] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565273923757-QJLXXW00BHTUYDX73NEH/Untitled+design.png Home - Edward Is Only A Fish Children’s Chapter Book Kindle Edition, Henry Holt (Amazon.com) “If you let yourself believe that Mr. Billingsly's bathtub overflowed, allowing Edward the fish a chance to be a hero, here's a funny, easy-to-read story about a fish rescuing 14 cats. It has a very happy ending and, for an implausible tale, plausible illustrations.” [New York Times] “Playwright Sincic makes an uproarious debut as a children's author in a piece touched with comic timing and understatement. The adventure begins when Mr. Billingsly leaves the bathwater running while he steps outside to fetch a tangerine. He locks himself out, and as the water rises, Edward, a goldfish confined to a small bowl, begins the vacation he has longed for. Free to swim throughout the flooded house, Edward feasts on ice cream, bosses the toy train characters, and in a magnanimous gesture, rescues the hilariously duplicitous cats trapped on a hat rack. But after a close call with one of the cats, and realizing how much Mr. Billingsly misses him, Edward pulls the bathtub plug. He is rewarded with a huge aquarium named Lake Edward. The situation itself is funny, but it's Sincic's masterful turns of phrase and sly characterizations that give the tale the extra bite that adults can appreciate during a family read. The black-and-white illustrations have flashes of the same wry humor but overall seem a bit tame for Sincic's inventive text.” [Julie Yates Walton (Booklist)] [Link To Kirkus Review] [To Buy A Kindle Copy] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1590339472871-121UYKZFF22S2YZP7OBR/Edward%2BGerman%2BVersion%2BPictures.jpg Home - Edward Is Only A fish German Version Ein Goldfisch macht Ferien, Ars Edition Full Color Illustrations by Sophie Schmid https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1568301702010-Z4R8IM2MILVKVK1RNCTR/Screen+Shot+2019-09-12+at+11.21.22+AM.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1568303897497-H2RQ8P9LC3M8G2PBJFQE/american+obsessions+alan+sincic Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1571159756757-JVCG81F4XBKODJ1R5DLH/image.png Home https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1566063203005-HH6G62WWJA50KUO6U9TK/breaking+glass+alan+sincic.png Home https://www.alansincic.com/reviews daily 0.75 2019-07-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564587105377-GO6PY6XIYB0MNK0FZ0ZC/Screen+Shot+2019-07-31+at+11.31.28+AM.png Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564587577678-EJQQXEZ5J2IJAVWU4LRG/61ooGS3Q9vL._SX258_BO1%2C204%2C203%2C200_.jpg Reviews https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564587878019-9F5JTJXAOBKITUYJ4IAD/Greensboro-Number-98-Fall-2015.png Reviews https://www.alansincic.com/all-saved daily 0.75 2019-08-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564586027923-41SSKDHVAKLK71BBS884/Screen+Shot+2019-07-31+at+11.13.29+AM.png ALL SAVED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564582447963-Y67G6ZPULMYZR9LP2RM6/Bacon+New+Ohio+Review+by+Alan+Sincic.png ALL SAVED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584234444-COAFWMWDY5Q2NEEGGYIB/How+To+Catch+The+Ball+Alan+Sincic+Cobalt+Review+%282%29.png ALL SAVED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584997600-UK046MWVX526B3FI4RHW/Random+Sample+The+Greensboro+Review+Alan+Sincic.png ALL SAVED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584912194-40Z11KWO3FGFYJ0IWZM3/Random+Sample+Hunger+Mountain+Journal+Online+Alan+Sincic.png ALL SAVED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584279808-OWYT2ZVNBZ6YERW3533P/The+Ark+Alan+Sincic+Burningword+Literary+Journal+October+2019.png ALL SAVED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564585390494-JX4X2OUEO5OUQE9Q169C/The+Deluge+Alan+Sincic+New+Ohio+Review.png ALL SAVED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565102877923-VQE9I1DLBNK9DNLMWQD3/The+Deluge+Alan+Sincic+New+Ohio+Review+%281%29.png ALL SAVED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564583124118-DZUAY6SARJC16UNP9R50/The+Babe+Big+Fiction+Magazine++Alan+Sincic.png ALL SAVED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584610555-C955CL345QM75EEEDAAH/The+Hunting+Of+The+Famous+People+Alan+Sincic+The+Gateway+Review.png ALL SAVED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565103263737-GNXPROEQPF5WBZSK542Q/breaking+glass.png ALL SAVED https://www.alansincic.com/theater-2 daily 0.75 2022-08-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564586027923-41SSKDHVAKLK71BBS884/Screen+Shot+2019-07-31+at+11.13.29+AM.png Copy of Theater https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1661575872877-I9ARPILBOAP7NXJ5W4IB/Screen+Shot+2022-08-27+at+12.49.36+AM.png Copy of Theater - From The Slapjack From The Slapjack https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564582447963-Y67G6ZPULMYZR9LP2RM6/Bacon+New+Ohio+Review+by+Alan+Sincic.png Copy of Theater https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584234444-COAFWMWDY5Q2NEEGGYIB/How+To+Catch+The+Ball+Alan+Sincic+Cobalt+Review+%282%29.png Copy of Theater https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584997600-UK046MWVX526B3FI4RHW/Random+Sample+The+Greensboro+Review+Alan+Sincic.png Copy of Theater https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584912194-40Z11KWO3FGFYJ0IWZM3/Random+Sample+Hunger+Mountain+Journal+Online+Alan+Sincic.png Copy of Theater https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584279808-OWYT2ZVNBZ6YERW3533P/The+Ark+Alan+Sincic+Burningword+Literary+Journal+October+2019.png Copy of Theater https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564585390494-JX4X2OUEO5OUQE9Q169C/The+Deluge+Alan+Sincic+New+Ohio+Review.png Copy of Theater https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565102877923-VQE9I1DLBNK9DNLMWQD3/The+Deluge+Alan+Sincic+New+Ohio+Review+%281%29.png Copy of Theater https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564583124118-DZUAY6SARJC16UNP9R50/The+Babe+Big+Fiction+Magazine++Alan+Sincic.png Copy of Theater https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584610555-C955CL345QM75EEEDAAH/The+Hunting+Of+The+Famous+People+Alan+Sincic+The+Gateway+Review.png Copy of Theater https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565103263737-GNXPROEQPF5WBZSK542Q/breaking+glass.png Copy of Theater https://www.alansincic.com/print-publications-1 daily 0.75 2019-08-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564586027923-41SSKDHVAKLK71BBS884/Screen+Shot+2019-07-31+at+11.13.29+AM.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565272507603-TAS7D9NT240UFGMYNOGM/Screen+Shot+2019-08-08+at+9.50.36+AM.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565272959452-R6C0GCH38QP8RCK4NK89/sand+alan+sincic Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564585390494-JX4X2OUEO5OUQE9Q169C/The+Deluge+Alan+Sincic+New+Ohio+Review.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584610555-C955CL345QM75EEEDAAH/The+Hunting+Of+The+Famous+People+Alan+Sincic+The+Gateway+Review.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584279808-OWYT2ZVNBZ6YERW3533P/The+Ark+Alan+Sincic+Burningword+Literary+Journal+October+2019.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564582447963-Y67G6ZPULMYZR9LP2RM6/Bacon+New+Ohio+Review+by+Alan+Sincic.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584234444-COAFWMWDY5Q2NEEGGYIB/How+To+Catch+The+Ball+Alan+Sincic+Cobalt+Review+%282%29.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584997600-UK046MWVX526B3FI4RHW/Random+Sample+The+Greensboro+Review+Alan+Sincic.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565273066707-IXFZATUKK4PHJQHINYG4/sand+alan+sincic Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564584912194-40Z11KWO3FGFYJ0IWZM3/Random+Sample+Hunger+Mountain+Journal+Online+Alan+Sincic.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1564583124118-DZUAY6SARJC16UNP9R50/The+Babe+Big+Fiction+Magazine++Alan+Sincic.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565102877923-VQE9I1DLBNK9DNLMWQD3/The+Deluge+Alan+Sincic+New+Ohio+Review+%281%29.png Copy of Print Publications https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1565103263737-GNXPROEQPF5WBZSK542Q/breaking+glass.png Copy of Print Publications https://www.alansincic.com/the-end-of-the-world daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/5d9ce41b-a685-4295-a2c6-151cbdd2b1e1/Screenshot+2024-05-11+at+7.52.47+PM.png The End Of The World - The End Of The World Winner - Vincent Brothers Review 2020 Short Story Contest Vincent Brothers Review Issue #24 Spring 2021 From Author’s Commentory: The other moment – again, when I was quite small – occurred in the aftermath of a hurricane. All night the storm blew. We slept and woke and slept again. Finally at dawn the wind stopped. This is the moment I remember. Not the storm or the damage or the reports on TV, but the strange choreography of that one event: all the neighbors stepping out of their houses at the same time, as if summoned by God or some invisible force to abandon their boxes and, with no particular purpose in mind, mingle. Nobody called a meeting. There was no barn to be raised or fire to fight or speaker to cheer. To look on together, to look on with wonder – that was the only charge. [Read The Commentary] https://www.alansincic.com/the-sinkhole daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/eb3f4933-9925-4370-b9ad-e63bb1ad0973/Screenshot+2024-05-15+at+12.19.43+PM.png The Sinkhole - The Sinkhole Winner - 2021 Rash Award in Fiction The Broad River Review Volume 53 2021 https://www.alansincic.com/porter-must-be-stopped daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/b47574c7-790a-41e6-8bd3-f5aa689a54e4/Screenshot+2024-05-11+at+8.49.33+PM.png Porter Must Be Stopped - Porter Must Be Stopped Winner - Prism Review 2020 Short Story Contest Runner-Up - G.B. Crump Prize In Experimental Fiction 2019 (Pleiades Press) Long List - Fish Short Story Prize Prism Review Issue 22 Summer 2020 “Porter Must Be Stopped could not be stopped. The language tumbles and collides and crests and takes a breath and rolls in again, and somehow all the world is poised and spinning on the fingertip of a storyteller for our pleasure. The story relies on and is in service to beauty—it conjures beauty out of thin air." Contest Judge Aurelie Sheehan, author of History Lesson for Girls and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects https://www.alansincic.com/bob-sanders daily 0.75 2024-06-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/338d921a-c9c1-4d5b-9094-5e9c7b66ffd9/Screenshot+2024-05-15+at+1.27.42+PM.png Bob Sanders - Bob Sanders Winner - American Writer’s Review 2020 Short Story Contest American Writers Review 2020 (San Fedele Press) Paperback – June 17, 2020 https://www.alansincic.com/sugar daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/706261a1-9b58-48dc-a636-de2cec792ac2/Screenshot+2024-05-18+at+2.18.40+PM.png Sugar - Sugar Live Audience/Radio/Podcast/Chapbook Publication in partnership with Big Fiction, Bremelo Press, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture (August 2015) “Told in crackling prose, Sugar is the story of a hobo of a guard dog, a veritable dynamo of decay whose escape pulls her human companions from motel and factory floor to film drive-in and steamed up Coupe Deville windows–to contemplations of love. The performance will feature an original soundscape created by Seattle filmmaker Stephen Anunson” [Anca Szilagyi, author of Daughters of the Air (Lanternfish Press)] https://www.alansincic.com/sand daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/2992fd0e-aab9-4955-8e79-56a026d04ff9/Screenshot+2024-05-16+at+12.34.45+AM.png Sand - Sand Finalist - 51st New Millennium Writing Awards 2021 The Greensboro Review Number 98 Fall 2015 “Sand” is a strange one, perhaps the most experimental offering, full of non sequiturs and a perverse energy. It starts with a grieving husband drying his socks in a toaster oven and only gets weirder from there. It reminded of some of Barry Hannah’s wilder moments, always welcome. [Shane Moritz, Arts and Letters] https://www.alansincic.com/my-new-car daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1664817574153-ERQGWMFJ96HOGHZR5UVV/Screen+Shot+2022-10-03+at+1.16.49+PM.png My New Car - My New Car Fold-Out Chapbook (A3 Press) Speeding along the highway of mania and delusion, Alan Sincic's My New Car is a thrilling and entirely original glimpse into the mind of a man in love with his car. Illustrations by Andrew Torrens. Printed on 170gsm Silk paper and 350gsm card in England. [Link to Buy] https://www.alansincic.com/new-page-1 daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/a8c0f159-acac-42ad-9d44-050f65965521/Screenshot+2024-05-11+at+9.58.11+PM.png What I Want From The Old Men - What I Want From The Old Men Flash Fiction Finalist - Mid-American Review 2020 Fineline Competition Mid-American Review Issue 41 Fall 2022 https://www.alansincic.com/end-of-the-world-comments daily 0.75 2022-10-16 https://www.alansincic.com/intersection-of-theatre daily 0.75 2022-10-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1665965372097-8G8WYIR51BP7TDVZ7XB9/Screen+Shot+2022-10-16+at+8.09.07+PM.png Intersection Of Theatre On The Intersection Of Theater And Fiction Author, actor, and teacher Alan Sincic, The Furnace artist-in-residence and winner of Big Fiction’s 2014 Knickerbocker Prize, will be teaching a performance workshop at Scribes, Hugo House’s teen writing camp, on August 12. He’ll be performing “Sugar,” a new short story, at Hollow Earth Radio on August 13, with a soundscape designed by filmmaker Stephen Anunson. In anticipation of these two events, made by possible by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, we asked him about the mysterious shadow wall, which will be a part of his workshop, and about the intersections of theater and fiction. [Corinne Manning & Anca Szilágyi] https://www.alansincic.com/breakers daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/1f5b5205-d385-4088-aaf1-310f879100fa/Pointalist+Eye+Color.jpg Breakers - Breakers Online Exclusive at Boulevard Magazine - Natural Bridge collection Finalist - Arkansas Emerging Writers Award 2021 Long List - Fish Short Story Prize 2021/2022 https://www.alansincic.com/the-hunting-of-the-famous-people daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/de2844e6-d56b-471c-9703-15f69836d877/Tibetan+Tiger.jpg The Hunting Of The Famous People - The Hunting Of The Famous People Winner - Gateway Review Flash Fiction Contest Featured in The Gateway Review Winter 2019 Online reprint at Fresh.ink Literary https://www.alansincic.com/how-to-catch-the-ball daily 0.75 2025-03-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/290adb86-fb99-4db8-8e9b-611f5c8e8600/Baseball+Blurred.jpg How To Catch The Ball - How To Catch The Ball Finalist - 2013 Cobalt Writing Prize Featured in Cobalt Review (Volume Two) 2014 Fresh Ink Reprints May 14, 2020 - Fresh.ink Online Storyteller Journal Reprint April 2024 https://www.alansincic.com/the-hawaiian-club daily 0.75 2022-12-26 https://www.alansincic.com/not-what-you-think daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/f78de4d4-a1f5-4e8c-87b6-8ac206c04055/Screenshot+2023-02-13+at+4.20.31+PM.png Not What You Think - Not What You Think Winner - 2022 Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize Pulp Literature Issue 37, Winter 2023 Short List - 2021 Able Muse Write Prize Finalist - The 2022 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction Finalist - The Waking Flash Prose Prize 2021 Finalist - George Dila Memorial Flash Fiction Contest 2020 https://www.alansincic.com/random-sample daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/052c3479-0a30-4b9a-8403-f5094ab1aee8/cbs.jpg Random Sample - Random Sample Finalist - Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open June 2013 Finalist - 2015 Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize Featured in Hunger Mountain Journal Online 2015 https://www.alansincic.com/donut daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/a388940c-17de-49b7-abc5-88bc6bbd39f7/donut+abstract+art.jpeg Donut - Donut Winner - Meridian Editors’ Prize In Prose 2023 Finalist - Rigel 2022 Fiction Prize Meridian Issue 47 Fall 2023 https://www.alansincic.com/storyteller-interview daily 0.75 2024-04-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/54a134e1-7de3-4e82-9bcb-b0e8f9dc131e/Storyteller+cover.jpg Storyteller Interview - featured Interview Storyteller Journal December 2023 “Alan and Cole” Interview by Joshua Mahn Storyteller Journal exists to not only serve the writer as an individual, but also to honor the invaluable community found between writers as they share their stories, experiences, ideas, struggles, and aspirations. This issue’s Author Focus celebrates Alan Sincic and Nicholas Michael Reeves (known as “Cole” to everyone he meets), two writers whose paths crossed at a local coffee shop. From this meeting, a wonderful bond of friendship and camaraderie has formed over the years. Alan and Cole, at different stages of their respective writing careers, together exemplify what the writing community is at its best. Recently, we had the opportunity to catch up with each of them individually to gain some insight into their writing experiences as well as the friendship the two have forged over the years.Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/4bd3187e-7d3e-402a-bb5c-d73369d59380/Screenshot+2023-12-31+at+7.21.38+PM.png Storyteller Interview - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/3206cebf-c778-489e-9401-b833566c6e88/Screenshot+2023-12-31+at+7.37.26+PM.png Storyteller Interview - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/e368b2f3-600a-4f58-8931-adcb4004b399/Screenshot+2023-12-31+at+7.34.32+PM.png Storyteller Interview - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/61e913cf-babb-4b7d-916d-1a62578202e3/Screenshot+2023-12-31+at+7.42.01+PM.png Storyteller Interview - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.alansincic.com/the-older-man daily 0.75 2024-05-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/a05a623e-5c27-4c43-b4a2-021bc7b1d4f8/Screenshot+2024-05-04+at+3.04.19+PM.png The Older Man - The Older Man Finalist - Sunspot Lit Rigel 2024 Contest Finalist - Grist ProForma Contest Finalist - The Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction Semi-finalist - American Short(er) Fiction Contest Semi-finalist - Ruminate The Waking Flash Prose Prize Sunspot Literary Journal Volume 6, Issue #1 https://www.alansincic.com/famous-people daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/cd502a07-57d6-4e01-9ffb-ad6be1b7c48c/Screenshot+2024-05-11+at+9.05.39+PM.png Famous People - Famous People Runner-Up - A to Zoetic 2022 Writing Contest Winter 2022 - Heathentide Orphans Anthology Contest Judge Grant Faulkner, author of All The Comfort Sin Can Provide and Fissures. https://www.alansincic.com/potato-boy-1 daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/0a71eff5-5c7d-4c26-8855-8e64ed652653/Screenshot+2024-05-09+at+2.30.51+PM.png Potato Boy - Potato Boy Winner - Orison 2022 Best Spiritual Literature Award in Fiction Fall 2023 - Best Spiritual Literature anthology https://www.alansincic.com/the-ark daily 0.75 2024-05-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/31c6301b-797b-4d17-9e9b-c9c7c5619557/Screenshot+2024-05-10+at+2.29.38+PM.jpg The Ark - The Ark In the old wood burner at the back of the kitchen she did the baking. As across the tin roof the sky broke, she gutted the fridge of all the perishables -- the milk and the eggs and the butter. By candlelight she rolled and cut the dough, and as the wind sandpapered away at the clapboard siding, fifteen perfect circles she pressed, with the heel and the palm of the hand, into each of the pie-tins, fifteen perfect circles, tin after tin down the length of the counter. The scent of the split pine stirred her. This was the moment she savored the most: the kindling. The slow burn of the oak, that was the secret to the baking, sure, the reason a stack of quarter-cut always climbed the brick beside the iron maw, but the kindling. That was the treat. The orangey whorl of the sap, the splinters of pitch that stick to the whorls at the tip of the fingers, and honey their way into the crack of the palm, as if the hands were the kindling, as if her own fingers were to suddenly ignite. All through the night the cold wind scoured the porch, sledge-hammered the rafters, shook the floor to where the candles quivered and the wax in a zig-zag ran. She browned the shells -- a blind bake -- and as they cooled, she spatula-ed in the last of the peach and the apple preserves. She laid the ribbons of dough in a crosshatch to cover the fillings, sprinkled the quilted surface with a dusting of cinnamon and then, ever so gently (masterful is what it was, in the storm to so pilot the ark), she pressed, one two three four, into the damp crust at the center of every pie, the diamond that rode her fist. A fleur-de-lis. A signature. And all the while, the skyline bristled. On the far side of the pasture, the crown of an oak wavered and snapped. Down the flank of the Econ a Frigidaire tumbled, clipped the fin of a derelict Harley, gurgled its way into the muddy. Off the coast of Jamaica a freighter capsized, a cloud of birds abandoned the peninsula, up yonder overhead the burst of a solar flare bumpered off the moon to – bullseye – smack the planet, the clouds, the squall, the sky, but all through the night she fed the oven, and the oven baked the pies, and the pies baked the kitchen, and the kitchen held the storm at bay. Majestic. Yes. Majestic. Come the dawn she filled the cavernous hold of her junkyard De Soto with a (years ago the backseat crow-barred away) stack of empty blueberry crates into which she slid the pies, two to a crate and swaddled in wax paper and muslin, and set out on the open road, all or nothing, a dollar a pie, highway robbery were the highway not already bulbous with broken oak and scuttles of canvas ripped from the shop awnings. https://www.alansincic.com/respect daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/4b7fb766-81f9-4cd9-8b46-f2ebe224f6cd/Screenshot+2024-05-10+at+3.00.25+PM.png Respect - Respect Flash Fiction From The Depths Fall 2020 (Haunted Waters Press) https://www.alansincic.com/new-page daily 0.75 2024-05-10 https://www.alansincic.com/blind-maggie daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/5f348fa5-eb65-41b3-a46f-0bac3b4dc260/Screenshot+2024-05-10+at+3.30.02+PM.png Blind Maggie - Blind Maggie Winner - Pulp Literature 2021 Bumblebee Flash Fiction Award Pulp Literature Issue 31, Summer 2021 Short Listed - New Flash Fiction Review Anton Chekhov Award Semi-Finalist American Short Fiction “Short(Er) Fiction” Contest https://www.alansincic.com/roger-babson daily 0.75 2024-06-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/2c68a68d-b8eb-497f-be4c-093a727f1d9c/Screenshot+2024-05-11+at+7.03.33+PM.jpg Roger Babson - Roger Babson Shortlisted - The Florida Review 2023 Editor’s Award In Fiction Honorable Mention - 2022 Dillydoun Short Story Prize The Florida Review Spring 2024 https://www.alansincic.com/one-shot-beetle daily 0.75 2024-05-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/d1327135-260a-4e1b-838e-63fcb8d2c24a/Screenshot+2024-05-12+at+6.17.46+PM.png One Shot Beetle - One Shot Beetle Winner - 2022 Hunger Mountain Short Fiction Prize Pushcart Prize Nominee Hunger Mountain Review Issue #27 Judge: Adam McOmber, author of Fantasy Kit, Jesus & John, and The Ghost Finders. https://www.alansincic.com/the-harvest daily 0.75 2024-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/3875024e-076f-4bee-9d13-4a40bfb805bf/Screenshot+2024-05-18+at+3.16.02+PM.png The Harvest - The Harvest Finalist - Fall 2019 Travel Writing Contest (Fiction) Nowhere Magazine Online An earlier version of The Harvest (The Postcard From Nowheresville) was the runner-up for the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, and appeared in Overland Magazine Online Autumn 2020. https://www.alansincic.com/fuse daily 0.75 2024-05-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/104c40da-a3ba-44bc-aa0c-025aa1d51275/Screenshot+2024-05-26+at+7.59.40+PM.png Fuse - Fuse Runner-Up - CutBank 2023-2024 Big Sky, Small Prose Contest Finalist - 2023 Grist ProForma Contest Short List - Masters Review 2023 Spring Small Fiction Awards Cutbank Issue 100 Winter/Spring 2024 “Fuse is a thrilling and crafty little sentence of an essay. It's a piece of art about art, which is to say it's about everything, and the writer handles the scope of this task with a deft hand. The work is playful and profound. Not only did I love reading it, but it reminded me why I love reading.” Contest Judge Micah Fields, author of We Hold Our Breath: A Journey to Texas Between Storms https://www.alansincic.com/the-scientific-method daily 0.75 2024-08-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/f7aa0c32-0631-4803-9fa2-9c9da4d412c8/Screenshot+2024-08-29+at+1.47.04+PM.png The Scientific Method - The Scientific Method Winner - 2024 Bumblebee Flash Fiction Contest Pulp Literature Issue #43 Summer 2024 Final judge Bob Thurber praised this story for “its quirky aesthetic and obvious merit.” https://www.alansincic.com/johnny daily 0.75 2024-10-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/c90e3124-0f3b-418b-8692-3b75a3f61d04/Screenshot+2024-10-27+at+9.33.32%E2%80%AFPM.png Johnny - Johnny Short-Listed - The Plaza Prizes Short Story 2024 The Plaza Prizes Anthology 2024 https://www.alansincic.com/the-drivein daily 0.75 2024-10-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/39cdaa87-9689-4b47-aa80-d87f4ddf346b/Screenshot+2024-10-28+at+1.38.13%E2%80%AFAM.png The Drive-In - The Drive-In Highly Commended - The Plaza Memoir: First Chapters Prize The Plaza Prizes Anthology Two 2024 Contest Judge Nicole Treska, author of Wonderland The Plaza Prizes Anthology Two 2024 https://www.alansincic.com/not-for-maggie daily 0.75 2024-10-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/d0c5a990-148f-42b1-becc-0ad36966e021/Screenshot+2024-10-28+at+4.12.15%E2%80%AFPM.png Not For Maggie - Not For Maggie Second Place - The Plaza Sudden Fiction Prize 2024 The Plaza Prizes Anthology Two 2024 Contest Judge Angela Readman, author of Bunny Girls, The Girls Are Pretty Crocodiles, Something Like Breathing, and Don’t Try This At Home https://www.alansincic.com/the-book-of-naps daily 0.75 2024-10-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/e9b52228-1ccd-4fe6-acf7-7e627522185d/Screenshot+2024-10-29+at+2.25.04%E2%80%AFPM.png The Book Of Naps - The Book Of Naps Short-Listed - The Plaza Sudden Fiction Prize 2024 The Plaza Prizes Anthology Two 2024 https://www.alansincic.com/visitation-of-glory daily 0.75 2024-10-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/0f9bf979-9c8d-4d58-9886-61e014f6aad2/Screenshot+2024-10-28+at+5.12.19%E2%80%AFPM.png Visitation Of Glory - A Visitation Of Glory Short-Listed - The Plaza Short Story Prize 2024 The Plaza Prizes Anthology Two 2024 https://www.alansincic.com/the-painting daily 0.75 2024-10-28 https://www.alansincic.com/just-the-way-i-like-it daily 0.75 2025-02-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/0a100633-137e-43a3-9568-ea7ea33a3b04/Screenshot+2025-02-08+at+5.54.46%E2%80%AFPM.png Just The Way I Like It - Just The Way I Like It Winner - The 2025 Plaza Short Story Prize - 2,500 Words Contest Judge Jamie Quatro, New York Times Notable author of the story collection I Want to Show You More Short-Listed - Thomas Merton Memorial Prize (The Puritan) Short-Listed The Raven Short Story Prize (Pulp Literature) Finalist - 2024 MayDay Short Fiction Prize Upcoming — The Plaza Prizes Anthology Three 2025 https://www.alansincic.com/the-claim daily 0.75 2025-04-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/7e84c121-db9f-4484-b303-792087c0e39f/Screenshot+2025-04-21+at+5.16.58%E2%80%AFPM.png The Claim - The Claim Runner-Up - 2021 Tusculum Review Fiction Prize Honorable Mention - Ninth Letter 2021 Literary Award In Fiction Short List — DISQUIET Literary Prize 2022 Finalist - Pangyrus Fiction Contest 2022 Finalist - 2023 Montana Prize For Fiction Excerpt Magazine No. 3 Spring 2025 https://www.alansincic.com/pride-of-place daily 0.75 2025-06-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/88d2ccb4-bfb0-472e-9260-6aeeb13cfc18/Screenshot+2025-06-20+at+1.44.00%E2%80%AFPM.png Pride Of Place - Pride Of Place Winner - 2025 Rash Award in Fiction Contest Judge Jason Mott, author of The Returned, The Wonder of All Things, The Crossing, Hell Of A Book (winner of the National Book Award for Fiction). Long List - ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize 2025 The Broad River Review 2025 Volume 57 Easy to picture the scene, in the dark, the stations of the flesh – not so different than a billion other collisions that people the planet. But that ain’t the all of it. Easy enough to collide with the other, but not so easy to know what it means in the meeting, in the moment, when a particular of two become -- for not but a moment – a one. Picture a waterfall. Waterfall a thing unto itself. It ain’t the rock, or the water, but the fall of the water over the rock that burns in the bright of the day. Sings in the dark of the night. https://www.alansincic.com/godofthegator daily 0.75 2025-10-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/63361dca-b32d-43ef-b4a3-1a902b3f77cd/Screenshot+2025-10-24+at+11.50.14%E2%80%AFPM.png God Of The Gator - God Of The Gator Winner - 2022 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize The Thomas Wolfe Review 2023 Volume 47 “This story is beautifully written and filled with sensory details that draw into both the physical and emotional landscapes of the story right away. It certainly reminds me of what Faulkner said about Wolfe putting the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin in its intense use of language.” Contest Judge Crystal Wilkinson, author of The Birds of Opulence, Water Street, and Blackberries, Blackberries. https://www.alansincic.com/billy-dean daily 0.75 2026-03-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d228648f077a70001c0bcaa/f343c963-e18c-4395-97b3-3706d744ff69/abstract-melancholy-blending-art-decos-elegance-with-cubist-perspectives-motion-sad-ma_1250941-101.jpg Billy Dean - Billy Dean Winner - Columbia Journal 2025 Winter Print Contest Upcoming Columbia Journal 2025 Contest Judge Nafkote Tamirat, New York Times Notable Book of the Year author of The Parking Lot Attendant "Each sentence in '"Billy Dean" rings with musical cadence... The author's descriptions flow with a sensory richness... I found the operatic conclusion reminiscent of the tragic crescendos that crowned the religious texts my family read." [Contest Judge Nafkote Tamirat]