Next week, our call for chapbooks will open and will remain open through the end of year. We’re very much looking forward to reading your manuscripts for the third year. Today, we’re excited to announce that Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, will serve as our final judge. The full details for the reading period can be found below and on the submission page. Stay tuned for more information on last year’s winner, Lindy Biller’s Love at the End of the World!
Submissions open September 1st!
Each fall, The Masters Review holds an open call for chapbooks. We want to publish your collections of flash, your mini novellas, your 40 page short stories. We want to publish your braided essays, your eclectic brainchildren, your experiments. However you want to tell your story, we want to read it. (As long as it’s between 25-45 double-spaced pages.) The submission window will be open for the final four months of the year, and The Masters Review staff will select a small shortlist of our favorites to pass along to a Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, who will select the winning manuscript.
The winning writer will be awarded $3000, manuscript publication, and 75 contributor copies. We’re seeking to celebrate bold, original voices within a single, cohesive manuscript of 25 to 45 pages. We’re interested in collections of short fiction, essays, flash fiction, novellas/novelettes, longform fiction or essays, and any combination thereof, provided the manuscripts are complete (no excerpts, chapters, works-in-progress, or other incomplete work). We are NOT interested in poetry. (We’re sure your poetry is fantastic, but we’re not qualified to judge its merit!)
The Masters Review staff will select a shortlist of 5-10 chapbooks to pass along to our guest judge, who will select the winning manuscript. Our judge will provide a brief introduction for the manuscript upon publication. The published manuscript will be available for sale as a physical copy and distributed digitally through our newsletter. Last year’s winning book, Love at the End of the World by Lindy Biller, selected by Matt Bell, will be published next spring. Digital and print copies will be available.
Guidelines:
- Winner receives $3000, manuscript publication, and 75 contributor copies
- Second and third place finalists will be acknowledged on our website
- Manuscripts should be between 25-45 pages (not including front/back matter) with each story beginning on a new page
- Manuscripts should be double-spaced and paginated
- Manuscripts should include a Table of Contents (if necessary) and an acknowledgements page listing any previously published material within the manuscript
- Manuscripts may contain some previously published work, but the published work cannot have appeared in any other chapbook or full-length collections
- Self-published chapbooks are previously published and therefore ineligible
- No poetry chapbooks, please (we will consider chapbooks which contain some prose poetry)
- Electronic submissions only
- Single author manuscripts only
- International English submissions allowed (No translations)
- Simultaneous and multiple submissions allowed (Please withdraw submissions if they are accepted elsewhere.)
- Emerging writers only; writers with book-length work published or under contract with a major press are ineligible. (We are interested in offering a larger platform to new writers. Authors with short story collections are free to submit unpublished work, as are writers with books published by indie presses.)
- Entry fee: $25
- Deadline: December 31, 2022
- Individual stories or essays within the manuscript may be considered for publication in our New Voices series
- We are not requiring blind submissions for this contest
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Editorial letters for up to 3 individual pieces within the manuscript may be requested
- A significant portion of the editorial letter fees go to our feedback editor, according to the rates established by the EFA
- Friends, family and associates of the final judge are not eligible for this award
- Please e-mail contact at mastersreview2.wpengine.com with questions
We don’t have any preferences topically or in terms of style. We’re simply looking for the best. We don’t define, nor are we interested in, stories identified by their genre. We do, however, consider ourselves a publication that focuses on literary fiction. Dazzle us, take chances, and be bold.
Kim Fu is the author of, most recently, the story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, which received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Foreword, Booklist, Shelf Awareness, and Quill & Quire. Fu’s first novel, For Today I Am a Boy, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. Fu’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Hazlitt, and the TLS. She lives in Seattle.