Winner of the 2020 Chapbook Contest

Nick Almeida

The characters who appear in Nick Almeida’s Masterplans, winner of the inaugural Chapbook Contest from The Masters Review are your neighbors, your friends, your parents, your (ex-) lovers. They grieve in their own strange and quiet ways, but they persevere, because this is what it means to be human, Almeida argues: not only understanding our mortality, but facing it head on.

Read Steve Almond’s introduction here.

Read the title story, “Masterplans,” in New Voices.

You can purchase a copy of Masterplans through Red Mare Press.

About the author

NICK ALMEIDA’s writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Pleiades, American Literary Review, The Southeast Review, Waxwing, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. He is a PhD candidate at University of Houston and holds an MFA from The Michener Center for Writers. His chapbook, Masterplans, is the grand prize winner of The Masters Review’s inaugural Chapbook Contest in Fiction, selected by judge Steve Almond.

Praise for Masterplans

“In this debut, Nick Almeida offers prose both precise and startling, stories that provide surprise upon surprise. Masterplans is a hilarious and original collection. This is the work of a bold and sure new writer.”

—Toni Jensen, author of Carry and From the Hilltop 

“There’s more of the stuff of life packed into this little chapbook than you’re going to find in pretty much any novel you might  read this year. The title story is nothing less than a masterpiece, and every story here pulses and thrums with humor, heartbreak, terror, charm, and wry, hard-won wisdom. Nick Almeida has written a stunner of a debut, and I can’t wait to see what this lavishly gifted young writer delivers next.”

—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Beautiful Country Burn Again