Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry Ins and Outs (what I implore you to embrace and what I beg you to reject) In ● abandoning excessive shame ● seeking warmth and tenderness anywhere you can ● dragging it out in the open and making yourself look at it ● finding salvation in the … Read more
“I’m Anne Tolstoi Foster’s daughter. I think you worked together.” The man squinted and looked up over his glasses. Then he pushed the thinning hair back from his forehead and cleared his throat, a slow gurgling sound, and returned to the paper he was reading.“Well, lucky you,” he mumbled, but loud enough I could hear … Read more
In London, I moved slower – I spent long afternoons walking aimlessly, thinking deeply, dreaming in quiet. Now in New York, I move with purpose, urgency, chasing things before they slip away. Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction A Tale of Two Benches Some places are not meant to be destinations but pauses, … Read more
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry Ol’ Nanner Vampire In the Old Country, there’s a big banana farm.One thousand and one banana trees, and a yellow banana barn.Bananas over here. Bananas over there.Bananas literally everywhere!In the farm’s yellow barn, it is much of the same.Bananas come and go everyday.Some may get eaten, or … Read more
Gladys didn’t want wealth. She didn’t want status. She didn’t even want a slightly nicer apartment in the living districts, with windows that weren’t reinforced steel. No. What she wanted—what she insisted upon—was a position as lunch lady at one of the Human Containment Facilities. Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction The … Read more
There’s some things you don’t quite understand until you’re older. If you’re young, and you think you do, you don’t. But then there’s some other things, that you also don’t understand, that you assume at some point you will. Tragedy. Calamity. Miracle. If you think you understand these, you still don’t, no matter how gray … Read more
There was a slight pause and then he said, ‘Were you best friends?’ ‘Spoken like a true only child. We were sisters.’ ‘Aren’t sisters supposed to be best friends?’ Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Books We Were Having Such a Good Time It was probably about a month after we met that Ben … Read more
It’s always such an astonishing joy to publish the winning entries of The Letter Review Prize: We spend months with these works before we are able to experience the thrill of sharing them with our community. Today, we release these pieces, and hope they bring to you just as much wonderment as they did to … Read more
The EM systems could run for decades, but in time, after the ship left the solar system, they would have to be shut down. The Freeman would coast along on any final inertial vector, forever. The captain’s voice, with urgency. “STAN?” STAN made an instant decision, logged an internal note accessible only to itself: “Is … Read more
On the outside, I may seem dormant, but beneath it all, I am transforming. Like the fungi working on decay, I am breaking down what’s left of a former season into something fertile. The place I once called home has grown too tight, like an exoskeleton I have outgrown. I feel the pressure of it, … Read more