I recently had the pleasure of judging the Press 53 novella contest, and they've now posted the results. The editors there, Sheryl Monks and Kevin Watson, narrowed my pool down to ten finalists, which they then forwarded on to me. I read them blind, which added a useful frisson and a necessary ignorance to the exercise, but it's fun, now, to see the names of actual people attached to the manuscripts I read.
And I'm here to report that the wonderful thing happened as I worked through those manuscripts, the thing you always hope for but know not to count on: the group of finalists was very solid, with a clean sub-group of Honorable Mentions rising above, and one novella in particular that was absolutely transcendent--so good that I couldn't believe it wasn't already a book. Congratulations, then, to everyone involved in the contest, and most especially to the winner, Joan Corwin of Evanston, Illinois, whose "Safe Shall Be My Going" is a beautiful novella, and whose name, I suspect, we will be seeing often in the future.
May 12, 2008, 10:13 a.m.Category: Novellas
