Posts Tagged: Fierce Pretty Things

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Announcing the 2018 Blue Light Books Prize Winner

We are thrilled to share that prize judge Samrat Upadhyay has selected Fierce Pretty Things by Tom Howard as the winner of the 2018 Blue Light Books Prize! We received a record number of submissions to this year’s prize and are honored to have read so many powerful story collections. Fierce Pretty Things will be published by Indiana University Press in 2018 as part of the Blue Light Books Series, which includes previous prize-winning collections What My Last Man Did by Andrea Lewis and Girl with Death Mask by Jenn Givhan.

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Announcing the 2017 Fiction Prize Winner!

Congratulations to Tom Howard, who has won the 2017 Fiction Prize for his short story “Fierce Pretty Things.” Thank you to all who submitted their work and made this year’s selection process so (delightfully) difficult. “Fierce Pretty Things” will appear next winter in IR 40.2.

2017 Fiction Prize Winner:

“Fierce Pretty Things” by Tom Howard

On the winning story, prize judge Caitlin Horrocks says: “Everyone around the narrator, Vardy, thinks they’ve got him figured out: he’s a bad apple, a loose cannon, a violent weirdo to be avoided in the school hallways. Vardy worries they may be right. His unforgettable, alternately hilarious and agonizing first-person narration, pulls the reader into his life and doesn’t let us out. When he starts wondering if there’s a way things could be different—if he could be different—he struggles to even guess what that might look like, let alone how to get there. Surrounded by enemies of his own making, and few allies, Vardy is a blazingly memorable character, his story one that will stick with me.”

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