That’s right: not one, but two judge announcements in one week. This announcement comes with a second announcement, which is that this year’s Novel Excerpt Contest will be opening one month earlier than in past years. The dates for this year’s contest are September 1 through November 12. No more worrying about getting your manuscripts together when you should be sitting down with your family enjoying your time off over Thanksgiving weekend! Salesses, author of The Sense of Wonder, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, and The Hundred-Year Flood will select the finalists for the 2023 Novel Excerpt Contest from a shortlist provided by our editorial team. The winner receives a $3,000 cash prize, online publication, and an hour-long agency consultation with a literary agent! Find all the details below or on our contest page.

Submissions Open September 1!

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About the Judge

MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of eight books, most recently The Sense of Wonder (Little, Brown, 2023), the national bestseller Craft in the Real World (a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others), and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He also wrote The Hundred-Year Flood; I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; The Last Repatriate; and Our Island of Epidemics (out of print). Forthcoming is a memoir, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time (Little, Brown).

Matthew was adopted from Korea. In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. His essays can be found in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, The New York Times Motherlode, The Guardian, Time, VICE.com, and other venues. His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, PEN/Guernica, Witness, and elsewhere. He has received awards and fellowships from, among others, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Dublin Literary Award, Bread Loaf, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, and [PANK] Books.

Matthew is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University. He earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial boards of Green Mountains Review and Machete (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press), and has held editorial positions at Pleiades, The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast, and Redivider. He has read and lectured widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs, and the Tin House, Kundiman, and One Story writing conferences.

Each fall, The Masters Review hosts a call for novel excerpts! Writing a novel can be an arduous and lonely process, but we’re here to champion the great work being produced. Whether your book is not quite finished or ready to pitch, we want to read your words. For this contest, we’re looking for self-contained excerpts that display a strong voice, compelling characters, and carefully constructed narrative arcs. You may submit an excerpt from any section of your completed or in-progress novel, but choose wisely: a synopsis should not be required for understanding the excerpt. As always, we have no limitations on genre, though we are primarily interested in literary fiction.

Submission Guidelines:

• Submitted excerpts must be under 6,000 words.
• Submitted work must be previously unpublished. This includes personal blogs, social media accounts, and other websites. Previously published excerpts will be immediately disqualified.
• The entry fee is $20.
• Simultaneous and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a $20 entry fee.
• The winner receives $3,000; online publication; and a consultation with Halley Dunne Perry, a literary agent with The Hamilburg Agency.
• The second- and third-place finalists receive cash prizes ($300/$200), online publication, and agent feedback.
• If your submission is accepted or contracted elsewhere, please withdraw your submission on Submittable, or contact us otherwise to let us know the piece is no longer available.
• We do not require anonymous submissions for this contest, but the judge will review the shortlist anonymously.
• This contest is for emerging writers only. Writers with single-author book-length work published or under contract with a major press are ineligible. We are interested in providing a platform to new writers; authors with books published by indie presses and self-published authors are welcome to submit unpublished work.
• International submissions are allowed, provided the work is written primarily in English.
• All submissions must be double-spaced with one-inch page margins and use Times New Roman or Garamond 12 (or larger, if necessary).
• Excerpts from novels under contract for 2023 or 2024 are ineligible, but novels under contract from 2025 and beyond are eligible.
• The contest’s deadline is 11:59 p.m. PST on Sunday, November 12, 2023.
• All entries will be considered for publication in New Voices.
• Every submission will receive a response by the end of March 2024. The winners will be announced by the end of April 2024.
• Friends, family, and associates of the guest judge are not eligible for this award, nor are past winners of the Novel Excerpt Contest.
• A significant portion of the editorial letter fees go to our feedback editor.

While you’re anxiously awaiting the release of Naomi Telushkin’s Coats, the 2022 Chapbook Open winner, wrap your head around this bit of news: Michael Martone will serve as the guest judge for the 2023 Chapbook Open! Submissions this year will be open from September 1 through December 17. One winner will receive a $3,000 cash prize along with the print publication of their manuscript and 75 contributor copies. Find out all the details below or on our contest page.

Submissions Open September 1!

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About the Judge

MICHAEL MARTONE’s recent books include Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana; The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone; The Moon Over Wapakoneta; Brooding; and Memoranda. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, Story, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Shenandoah, Bomb, StoryQuarterly, American Short Fiction, and many other magazines.

Martone has won two fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His stories and essays have won numerous awards and have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories, and The Best American Essays anthologies. In 2013 he received the national Indiana Authors Award; in 2016, the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to Midwestern Literature; and in 2023, the Truman Capote Prize for Distinguished Work in the Short Story or Literary Non-Fiction.

For the fourth year, The Masters Review is open for submissions of literary prose chapbooks! We’re interested in collections of flash fiction, creative nonfiction essays, short stories, and anything in-between. We encourage you to be bold, to experiment with style and form, as long as you stay under 45 pages. One chapbook will be selected as our winner by our guest judge, Michael Martone! The winner receives a $3,000 cash prize, along with manuscript publication and 75 contributor copies. Our chapbooks are distributed internationally and are available through Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. A digital version of the chapbook will be made available to our newsletter subscribers six months to a year after the print publication.

Submissions will be accepted between September 1 and December 17, 2023. The Masters Review staff will select a shortlist of five to ten chapbooks to pass along to Michael Martone, who will pick the winner and write an introduction for the manuscript. The winning chapbook will be published in Spring 2025. Last year’s winner, Coats by Naomi Telushkin, selected by Kim Fu, will be published next spring. Masterplans by Nick Almeida, our inaugural winner, was chosen by Steve Almond, and Matt Bell selected Love at the End of the World by Lindy Biller as the winner of our second contest.

All submissions must be single-author prose manuscripts of 25 to 45 pages. We are not interested in poetry. All manuscripts must be complete: no excerpts, no chapters of a novel, no works-in-progress, or any other incomplete work. Individual pieces may be previously published, but submitted manuscripts should contain some unpublished material. If you have questions or concerns about whether your manuscript would qualify, please email us at contact [at] mastersreview [dot] com.

Submission Guidelines:

• Manuscripts should include a Table of Contents (if necessary) and an acknowledgements page listing any previously published material within the manuscript.
• Submitted manuscripts must be between 25-45 double-spaced pages, at 12-point font (not including front/back matter, i.e., title page, dedication, table of contents, etc.). For collections, each piece should begin on a new page.
• Manuscripts must contain some unpublished material. Previously published material cannot have been published in any other chapbook or full-length collection. (Work that was included in a multiauthor anthology is permissible.)
• Self-published chapbooks are previously published and are therefore ineligible.
• We are not interested in poetry chapbooks. (We will consider chapbooks that contain some prose poetry.)
• Only single-author manuscripts will be considered.
• Simultaneous and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a $25 entry fee.
• The winner receives $3,000, manuscript publication, and 75 contributor copies.
• The second- and third-place finalists will be acknowledged on our website, alongside any honorable mentions.
• If your submission is accepted elsewhere, please withdraw your submission on Submittable, or contact us otherwise to let us know the piece is no longer available.
• We do not require anonymous submissions for this contest.
• This contest is for emerging writers only. Writers with single-author book-length work published or under contract with a major press are ineligible. We are interested in providing a platform to new writers; authors with books published by indie presses and self-published authors are welcome to submit unpublished work.
• International submissions are allowed, provided the work is written primarily in English.
• Submissions are accepted through Submittable only.
• The contest’s deadline is 11:59pm PST on December 17, 2023.
• Individual stories or essays within the manuscript may be considered for publication in our New Voices series.
• Every submission will receive a response by the end of April 2024. The winners will be announced by the end of May 2024.
• Friends, family, and associates of the guest judge are not eligible for this award, nor are past Chapbook Open winners.
• Editorial letters for up to three individual pieces within the manuscript may be requested. A significant portion of the editorial letter fee goes directly to your feedback editor. Scaling fees are in place to appropriately compensate your feedback editor.
• Please email us at contact [at] mastersreview [dot] com with any questions, or if you need to edit your manuscript after submission.

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.

It is a bit of a broad question. It’s hard to single out one element. Fiction is one of those unforgiving mediums where for it to truly work well all the pieces have to be there: the style, the sense of place, the sense of character, the narrative flow, and whatever else. You don’t get to choose. You have to check all the boxes.

But if I had to pick one element that means the most to me, personally, it’s structure: the flow and the rhythm of the narrative. I want to — have to — feel that the story is a whole, that all the pieces work together,  that every piece of the story is in that place for a reason, each one passes you on to the next, until at the end it all narrows to a sharp point — that pierces you, right through.

I’ll mention one mistake that I know well, because I’ve made it myself, plenty of times. “Write what you know” is a cliché because it’s true, but the tricky party of it, the unstated part, is that it can be very difficult to identify exactly what it is that you do know. By default a lot of emerging writers write about themselves, which makes sense. But it takes a long time to know yourself well. Not a lot of people can do it at 23. As an emerging writer one more often has insight into other things and other people.

It’s hard to pick a favorite, comparisons being invidious that way. But I’ll mention Joyce’s “The Dead,” Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Munro’s “Runaway” (really anything by Munro), Barthelme’s “Paraguay,” Borges’ “The Secret Miracle,” Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” and Kelly Link’s “The Faery Handbag.” If they have something in common it’s that they’re bursting with intelligence, and they’re by people who not only write brilliantly but who read brilliantly, and who’ve learned from what they read, and who have read everything.

And these are stories that work hard for their readers. They earn their crust. They’re stories written to please the reader, not the writer.

In terms of essays, John Jeremiah Sullivan strikes me as just about the state of the art these days. Check out “Upon This Rock,” his essay about going to a Christian music festival.

It doesn’t differ at all. When I’m reading critically I take notes, that’s the difference. I want to read like a reader, not like a critic, whatever that is.

And after that it just has to read like a story. Even if it’s not a story, even if it’s just a chain of abstract logical reasoning, it needs to read like one, to flow and tense and begin and end like a story. And the writer needs to know how to tell a story, and her or she needs to know what the story they’re telling is about.

Photo credit: Sophie Gee

Get to know our judge a little better. In March of this year Lev participated in Reddit’s first books subreddit AMA. He spoke about his beginnings as a writer, his novels, and how success in fiction has affected him as a journalist. Check out some of the highlights below or pop on over to the full feed and really indulge yourself. It’s wonderful. You will want to hug him.

But don’t.

How his success as a novelist has affected his other work:

The Masters Review is thrilled to announce this year’s guest judge, Time magazine book critic and New York Times bestselling author, Lev Grossman. Submissions for our printed anthology open on January 1, 2014 and remain open until the end of March. We are looking for the best fiction and narrative nonfiction written by students in graduate-level creative writing programs. Our collection represents the best among emerging writers and showcases the programs and schools cultivating this talent. We cannot wait to see what this year in stories will bring us and warmly welcome Mr. Grossman to our growing list of established writers and judges.

Incredible news for Masters Review judge, AM Homes, who was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction this week for her novel, “May We Be Forgiven.” We are  honored to have worked with her this year and to have our newest edition — publishing later this year — include an introduction written by the award-winning author.

Congratulations to AM Homes.

The Women’s Prize was originally known as The Orange Prize for Fiction until 2012 . The award celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing throughout the world.