Genre: Fiction

Prizes in Poetry and Prose

Bellevue Literary Review
Entry Fee: 
$20
Deadline: 
July 1, 2025
Three prizes of $1,000 each and publication in Bellevue Literary Review are given annually for a poem, a short story, and an essay about health, healing, illness, the body, or the mind. Patricia Spears Jones will judge in poetry, Joan Silber will judge in fiction, and Nicole Chung will judge in creative nonfiction. Using only the online submission system, submit up to three poems totaling no more than five pages or up to 5,000 words of prose with a $20 entry fee by July 1. All entries are considered for publication. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

The Story Prize

The Story Prize
Entry Fee: 
$75
Deadline: 
July 1, 2025
A prize of $20,000 is given annually for a story or novella collection written in English and published in the United States in the current year. Two runners-up receive $5,000 each. The $1,000 Story Prize Spotlight Award is also given for an additional “outstanding…collection that merits further attention.” Members of the Story Prize board will select the three finalists and the Spotlight Award winner; three independent judges will choose the Story Prize winner. Publishers, authors, or agents may submit two copies of a book published between January 1, 2025, and June 30, 2025, with a $75 entry fee by July 1. The deadline for books published during the second half of the year is November 15. Visit the website for the required entry form and complete guidelines.

Literary Awards

Los Angeles Review
Entry Fee: 
$20
Deadline: 
July 31, 2025
Four prizes of $1,000 each and publication in Los Angeles Review are given annually for a poem, a short story, a work of flash fiction, and an essay. Using only the online submission system, submit up to three poems of no more than 50 lines each, a short story or an essay of up to 2,500 words, or a work of flash fiction of no more than 1,000 words with a $20 entry fee by June 30. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Caption: 

“The only counsel that is acceptable is to work! To work very hard until you discover the kind of writer that you want to be.” Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dispenses advice to emerging writers in this Louisiana Channel interview with Christian Lund. Vargas Llosa died at the age of eighty-nine on April 13, 2025.

Genre: 
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
Mario Vargas Llosa
Louisiana Channel
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
interview
2019
in memoriam

The Great Gatsby at 100

Caption: 

In this video from the University of South Carolina Irvin Department of Rare Books & Special Collections, scholars talk about their special exhibit celebrating 100 years since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published with items ranging from first editions of the novel, editions owned by writers like Sylvia Plath, and ephemera from the author’s life.

Genre: 
Fiction
Tags: 
The Great Gatsby
novel
F. Scott Fitzgerald
University of South Carolina
library
archive
2025

The Thread Interview: Viet Thanh Nguyen

Caption: 

In this interview for The Thread documentary series, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about his childhood experiences as a refugee and overcoming trauma, his parents’ complicated reaction to his writing career, and how storytelling and writing changed his life from an early age. Read about Nguyen’s essay collection To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other (Belknap Press, 2025) in our Best Books series.

Genre: 
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Thread
documentary
interview
writing process
2025

Mystery Meetup

The Time Is Now
4.9.25

A mysterious lunch meeting at a restaurant in the financial district between a middle-aged actress and a handsome, much younger man opens the story of Katie Kitamura’s novel Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025). The reader is momentarily left in the dark as the unnamed first-person narrator recounts this lunchtime assignation and it’s not until the third chapter of the book that the details and reasons for their initial meeting come to light. Start a new short story in which two characters meet and the nature of their connection is kept ambiguous. Are they friends, lovers, family, colleagues, or something else? How can you use shifting points of view and dialogue to maintain an atmosphere of suspense and inscrutability?

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