“Porter Must Be Stopped could not be stopped. The language tumbles and collides and crests and takes a breath and rolls in again, and somehow all the world is poised and spinning on the fingertip of a storyteller for our pleasure. The story relies on and is in service to beauty—it conjures beauty out of thin air.”
“Told in crackling prose, Sugar is the story of a hobo of a guard dog, a veritable dynamo of decay whose escape pulls her human companions from motel and factory floor to film drive-in and steamed up Coupe Deville windows–to contemplations of love.”
“The Smile Contest is a fresh and quirky love story in which the usual crush on the teacher is submerged under a more adult crush/courtship between Ms. Connor and Mr. Sammy. I admired this quite professional doubling-down on plot lines and the effortless use of a retrospective third person omniscient voice. Also, I loved the multiple hand references in the story—especially the line “the hand is not a magnet”; these interconnections create theme. Ultimately, “The Smile Contest” seems an impressionistic story about the mysteries of sex and things not yet known; it beautifully shows how hard it is to grip slippery feelings.”
“Alan Sincic’s incantatory “The Babe” is voice-driven and manic and funny and dark and loud. It’s fantastical.”
“The winning entry in our ninth annual short story contest is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Alan Sincic’s Dear Mr. Gottlieb is written in an absurdist, stream-of-consciousness style that has shades of Hunter S. Thompson and James Joyce—but a voice all its own. Based extremely loosely on the format of a job application, the piece is a funny, nonsensical satire of corporate life.”
“Described by one judge as ‘Faulkner on acid’, ‘The Postcard from Nowheresville’ is as brightly coloured as the screen of the homemade cinema it describes. Throughout, the language is ebullient to the point of incandescence, the images pile up almost-but-not-quite willy-nilly and the tangents veer off without impeding the only-just-controlled velocity of the central narrative. Tremendous fun to read, it calms itself down sufficiently to deliver a conclusion of slightly sardonic pathos, entirely in keeping with the well-sustained narrative voice.”
“[On ‘Congratulations’] This is one of the most audacious works I’ve seen in a while, delightfully reckless and unhinged.”
“The stylized bravura of Alan Sincic’s ‘The Piney Vista’ knocked my socks off, not only for its authoritative voice but for the sheer ambition and originality of this magical-realism-meets-southern-gothic picaresque about carny chicanery in rural America.”
“What separated this story from the others was that the writing felt like something I hadn’t encountered before. From the opening line, there was a very distinct voice with a tight grip on the wheel. Driven by that voice and a distinctive turn of phrase, ‘The Sinkhole’ accomplishes much of what the short story form excels at when done well — a narrative swept toward one final turn, a question half raised but left unanswered, and a reader’s mind left to wonder. This is short fiction that lingers and echoes of something bigger.”
“This story [God Of The Gator] is beautifully written and filled with sensory details that draw into both the physical and emotional landscapes of the story right away. It certainly reminds me of what Faulkner said about Wolfe putting the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin in its intense use of language.”
“‘Eva,’ a Terrain.org Fiction Contest finalist by Alan Sincic, is a terrific story of passion, pain, and sideways desire.”
“[Not What You Think] Daring and evocative. I found the piece, quite frankly, uncomfortably absorbing.”
“Fuse is a thrilling and crafty little sentence of an essay. It’s a piece of art about art, which is to say it’s about everything, and the writer handles the scope of this task with a deft hand. The work is playful and profound. Not only did I love reading it, but it reminded me why I love reading.”
A native of Florida, my fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Greensboro Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Hunger Mountain, Prime Number, Big Fiction Magazine, Cobalt, Burningword, A-3 Press and elsewhere.
Short stories of mine have won contests sponsored by The Texas Observer, Driftwood Press, The Prism Review, Westchester Review, American Writer’s Review, The Vincent Brothers Review, The Broad River Review, and Pulp Literature. Recently the opening chapter of my novel The Slapjack won the 2021 First Pages Prize (Judge – Lan Samantha Chang, Director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop).
After an MA in Lit at the University of Florida and a poetry fellowship at Columbia, I earned my MFA at Western New England University. I spent over a dozen years in NYC as a writer and performer—comic/satirical pieces that eventually became a pair of full-length plays (American Obsessions and Breaking Glass) at the Orlando International Fringe Festival. Back in the day, I published a children’s chapter book, Edward Is Only A Fish (Henry Holt) that was reviewed in the New York Times, translated into German, and recently issued in a Kindle edition. Today I sit in coffee houses, stare out the window, mumble to myself, and write.
Awards
The Vistarama (Novel)
Finalist - Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence
The Slapjack (Novel)
Winner - 2021 First Pages Prize
Judge: Lan Samantha Chang, Director of The Iowa Writer’s Workshop
[Entrants are judged on the first 2,250 words of a book-length manuscript]
Peripheral Vision (short story collection)
Finalist - The St. Lawrence Book Award – Fiction
Finalist - 2019 Autumn House Fiction Contest
Finalist – 2019 The Robert C. Jones Short Prose Book Contest (Pleiades Press)
Finalist – 2021 EastOver Prize For Fiction (EastOver Press)
Finalist - 2022 Acacia Fiction Prize (Kallisto Gaia Press)
The Deluge
Pushcart Prize Nominee New Ohio Review Fall 2018 Issue
Finalist - Sequestrum Editor’s Reprint Award
Finalist - 50th New Millennium Writing Awards 2020
Random Sample
Finalist - Glimmer Train June 2013 Fiction Open
Finalist - Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize 2015
Bacon
Finalist - The New Ohio Review Editors' Prize in Prose
Finalist - 49th New Millennium Writing Awards 2019
The Piney Vista
First Runner Up - The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2021
Finalist - 2020 Orison Anthology Award in Fiction
Short List - 2020 Bridport Short Story Prize
Dear Mr. Gottlieb
Winner - 2019 Texas Observer Short Story Contest
God Of The Gator
Winner - 2022 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize
The Smile Contest
Winner - Driftwood Press 2019 Adrift Short Story Contest
Pushcart Prize Nominee Driftwood Press January 2020
Nominee - 2020 Best of the Net
The Babe
Winner - The 2014 Knickerbocker Prize (Big Fiction Magazine)
Porter Must Be Stopped
Winner – 2020 Prism Review Short Story Contest
Runner-up - G.B. Crump Prize in Experimental Fiction 2019 (Pleiades Press)
Long list - Fish Short Story Prize
The End Of The World
Winner - Vincent Brothers Review 2020 Short Story Contest
Bob Sanders
Winner - American Writer’s Review 2020 Fiction Contest
The Hunting Of The Famous People
Winner - The Gateway Review Flash Fiction Contest
Go Figure
Winner - The Westchester Review 2020 Flash Fiction Contest
Cooper
Winner - Press 53 The Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Contest
Blind Maggie
Winner - Pulp Literature 2021 bumblebee flash Fiction Award
Short List - New Flash Fiction Review Anton Chekhov Award for Very Short Fiction
Semi-Finalist American Short Fiction “Short(er) Fiction” Contest
The Sinkhole
Winner - 2021 Rash Award in Fiction
The Hawaiian Club
Winner — Sterling Clack Clack Fiction Contest April 2021
Finalist – 2019 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction Yalobusha Review
Short List — 2020 Gulf Stream Summer Fiction Contest
Not What You Think
Winner - 2022 Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize
Short List - 2021 Able Muse Write Prize
Finalist - The Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction 2022
Finalist - The Waking Flash Prose Prize 2021
Finalist - George Dila Memorial Flash Fiction Contest 2020
Count-Down
Winner - 2022 PNM Flash Fiction Prize [Press 53]
Finalist - Indiana Review 2020 1/2 K PRIZE
Finalist - Cutbank Literary Journal — Big Sky, Small Prose Contest
Finalist - Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction 2022
Congratulations
Winner - Lazuli Literary Group Summer 2022 Writing Contest
Third Place - Typehouse 2019 2nd Biennial Short Fiction Contest
The Postcard From Nowheresville
Runner-Up -- Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize
The Claim
Runner-Up - 2021 Tusculum Review Fiction Prize
Short List — DISQUIET Literary Prize 2022
Honorable Mention - Ninth Letter 2021 Literary Award in Fiction
The Ripening
Runner-Up - The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2023
Short Listed - 2022 Chester B. Himes Memorial Short Fiction Prize
Mend
Finalist - Terrain.org’s 12th Annual Fiction Contest 2021
Eva
Finalist - Sunspot Lit Rigel Contest
Finalist - Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction 2022
Short List - Fish Short Story Prize 2021/2022
How To Catch The Ball
Finalist - 2013 Cobalt Writing Prize
The Harvest
Finalist - Nowhere Magazine Fall 2019 Travel Writing Contest
Long List – Fish Short Story Prize
Just The Way I Like It
Finalist - The Puritan 2020 Thomas Morton Memorial Prize
What I Want From The Old Men
Finalist - Mid-American Review 2020 Fineline Competition (Flash Fiction)
The Book Of Naps
Finalist - Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction 2022
Short List - 2021 Able Muse Write Prize
Sand
Finalist - 51st New Millennium Writing Awards 2021
Breakers
Finalist - Arkansas Emerging Writers Award 2021
Long List - Fish Short Story Prize 2021/2022
Donut
Finalist - Rigel 2022 Fiction Prize
The Painting
Finalist - 2022 Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize
Short List - 2022 Able Muse Write Prize
Short List - LitMag’s Anton Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction 2020
The Older Man