Submit! Selected Shorts: Apartments and Neighbors

I so enjoyed the PRI program Selected Shorts when the radio station KCRW ran it a few years back. It's still on air and you can download its shows - but here's an a rare opportunity to contribute.



Check it out:

The 2010 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize
with guest judge Nathan Englander

The winning submission, selected by Nathan Englander, will be read as part of the Selected Shorts performance at Symphony Space on April 7, 2010. The story will be recorded for possible later broadcast as part of the public radio series. The winner will receive $1000.

Story requirements

Submit a single short story that addresses the theme, Apartments and Neighbors.

Your story must have a title.

Make sure your name and contact information appear on the first page of your story. If you are submitting by online, this information needs to appear on the first page of the attached Word document. Include page numbers.

Your story must be no more than 3 double-spaced typed pages in length (Times New Roman, 12pt font) and no more than 750 words.

Deadline
All submissions must be received by January 29, 2010. To be specific, online submissions must be submitted by 5pm Eastern Standard Time. Mailed submissions must arrive with the day's mail. (Entries postmarked on January 29 will NOT be accepted.)

For more information about submissions and the $25.00 fee, click here.

The Prize
$1000 and two tickets to the April 7th Selected Shorts at Symphony Space, when the prizewinning story will be read.

About this year's guest judge
Nathan Englander is the author of the PEN/Malamud Award and American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize-winning short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases, winner of The Harold U. Ribalow Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic Monthly, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Englander has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and was selected as one of "20 Writers for the 21st Century" by The New Yorker.

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I must say, I like the topic, Apartments and Neighbors.



I grew up in a series of apartments, the ubiquitous Southern California design called dingbats. Dreary two story buildings, sometimes with romantic names (Lucy! Mary Ann!) or themes (Tiki! Spanish Mission!). Often, a sad blue pool was sunk in its central cement courtyard where latchkey kids like myself tried to drown themselves and each other in the days before safety fences and Children's Services and cable TV and the virtual computer life. Neighbors - their laundry, their cars, their late night arguments reverberating through thin walls and sliding glass doors - were inescapable. I expect my own loud and loutish family was often the most obvious. Apartment life, it seems to me, living as I do now in a house in a rural canyon, is a kind of public performance art.
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