Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction Zurich in the 1930s was a city of contrasts, a juxtaposition of old-world charm and new-world progress. Cobbled streets wound their way between stately buildings with centuries-old architecture, while trams clanged their arrival at bustling stops filled with men in their tailored suits and women … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction On a lazy Sunday afternoon, after the church doors closed and the pews filed empty, Robyn and I were side by side in my Honda Accord’s brown interior. I was going through the motions listlessly, but on the inside my restless heart was stirring, weary … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Manuscripts & Unpublished Books A Difference of Nothing That September after she spent a month in Tokyo with my ex-husband, Kyoko stood at the kitchen counter digging a fingernail into a gutted vanilla bean. “You’ve joined a circus,” I said. I had just come upstairs from my … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Manuscripts & Unpublished Books Jim Perry has published two novels under the pen name Wilson Whitlow: Mystery of the Khar Chuluu (2020), a middle grade fantasy, and Consent, Vol. 1: Erdos (2021), a speculative novel set 800 years in the future. Jim studied literature at Carnegie Mellon … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Manuscripts & Unpublished Books Lori White’s essays and stories have appeared in Brevity, Hobart, The Nervous Breakdown, Mud Season Review, and The Kenyon Review anthology, Readings for Writers. She lives with her partner and three dogs in Ventura, CA, and teaches English composition at Los Angeles Pierce … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction I. Sholay means flames. Or, it is what remains once flames consume: embers, small and glowing, wink and die. The line between embers and flames fades, in my mind, because the words, as referents in Hindi, operate within a script I do not comprehend and whose … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction IThe marina, with its flamboyant yachts and high rise buildings, is quiet at this hour. The hundreds of cranes are immobile. The night shift has ended and will soon be replaced with the day shift. I start my walk before dawn now because the heat in … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction In a dim-lit corner of a restaurant, in a neighborhood where the wine was too expensive and the clatter of cutlery felt too intrusive, Tabitha settled in. Her dress draped gracefully over her promising belly. The air was filled with murmurs of conversations, a sporadic clinking … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry Her shriek is raw, snapping all the world’s quietAs dreams, unborn, tumble into the abyss of almost.I don’t know this sound; an anguish that pierces my soul.With what little strength I have, I grab her hand,Weaving through the grooves of her sorrow,Though my grip is frail.The … Read more
Joint Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry. CW for biblical imagery and sacrilege. I waited all Tuesday [October 22] and dear Jesus did not come; I waited all the forenoon of Wednesday, and was well in body as I ever was, but after 12 o’clock I began to feel faint, and before dark … Read more