Fuentes

Review by Daphne Kalotay

Each year, among the new fiction collections fighting for attention are a handful published neither through mainstream houses nor the usual small press alternatives but via a third avenue: book prize contests.

Some of these competitions, such as the AWP Grace Paley Prize, have been around for 40-plus years and rely on coordination with university and indie presses. Others, such as the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, are held by the press itself. Monetary awards can range from $1,000 to $15,000, but what all winners share is the challenge, once their collections launch, of being noticed by the public. With that in mind, here are 10 notable prizewinning collections published in 2022.

Rich with dreams and ghosts, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes’s “Are We Ever Our Own” (BOA Short Fiction Prize) follows descendants of a Cuban family to America and beyond. Yet its true subject is female artists overshadowed by their male counterparts.

“You say my work is disappearing,” one character writes in a letter. “Turning in on itself — getting smaller and smaller. You say ‘domestic, tidy, craft.’ You don’t mean ‘craft’ in that nice way the boys upstate with their forged steel boxes do.”

In other stories, Fuentes adopts elegant expository summary that can create emotional distance, but immediacy returns whenever we hear these women’s voices directly. “Palm Chess” alternates between a screenplay and journal entries by a female filmmaker who has left her artist husband — movingly connecting the private and creative selves.

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