Winner - Meridian Editors’ Prize In Prose 2023
Finalist - Rigel 2022 Fiction Prize
Meridian Issue 47 Fall 2023
I do not have a donut. If I had a donut, I would give it to you, but I do not. Sad. It is sad to think, in a world filled with donuts, that I do not have a donut. We. We do not have a donut. Other people have donuts. Look at them with their donuts, these people. We hate these people not because they have a donut and we do not, but because — it’s hard to say. There is something about them. The swagger. The spring. Them ears of theirs, on the side of their head like that, out there in the open for all to see. That thing they do with the breath, the in and the out of it, like it was free or something, their own personal property, this breath of theirs.
Potato Boy
Winner - Orison 2022 Best Spiritual Literature Award in Fiction
Upcoming Fall 2023 - Best Spiritual Literature anthology
Every year, Orison Books publishes Best Spiritual Literature (formerly The Orison Anthology), a collection of the finest spiritually engaged writing that appeared in periodicals the preceding year. The anthology also includes previously unpublished work by the winners of The Best Spiritual Literature Awards.
Potato Boy rocks. Forward and back he rocks. Alert is what he is. Inside of that skin of his, sits. Of no consequence to him the clamor of flesh in the city below, the trawlers out to sea, the blast of the comet out the belly of the sun. Without a pedigree is the way I picture it. Picture him. Served up out the heart of the earth.
Roger Babson
Shortlisted - The Florida Review 2023 Editor’s Award In Fiction
Honorable Mention - 2022 Dillydoun Short Story Prize
Upcoming The Florida Review Winter 2024
Not many people have a street named after them, so when we hear that Roger Babson will, within the week, be arriving, presumably to eat pie, and to make a speech, and (who knows?) cut a ribbon, we gather in twos and threes. On the curb at the mailbox we gather, and over the back fence, and in the bright of the breeze with the sheet on the line and the wash in the hamper heavy. On porches we gather, and in the shade of the oak, and with the yo-yo in the holster, and the fist in the pocket, and the ribs in a swivel at the hinge of the hip. Such a fine figure, we say. Fine figure of a man.
The Winners
Finalist - New Ohio Review 2023 Fiction Contest
Shortlisted - DISQUIET Literary Prize 2023
Finalist - Cutbank Literary Journal Montana Prize in Fiction
Upcoming New Ohio Review Winter 2024
And get this. Winners may be invited to an awards ceremony. A gathering of persons. Chocolate. And punch. And puppies a possibility. Should they appear – red ribbon round the collar and powdered with talc and spritzed with Aqua Velva and the zest of the lime – greet them with a hearty aloha. Take a knee. Unlimber the limbs. Up over the bone of the ankle they paddle to lick the back of the hand.
Winner - Lazuli Literary Group Summer 2022 Writing Contest
Winner - 2019 Texas Observer Short Story Contest
Upcoming Volume 6, Issue 2 of AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought
Dear Mr. Fred Biedeblieck,
Congratulations. Your reputation precedes you. Your life-long effort to make an impression upon those more fortunate than yourself has not gone unnoticed.
When word of your existence reached our international headquarters on the outskirts of Monte Carlo, we knew then that our search for a subscriber to this most exclusive of all magazines was at an end.
Years of inbred reticence seemed to fall away as we turned our eyes upon the 100% linen-bond double-weave rolodex card and in elite pica gold-embossed type the single name printed there:
Mr. Fred Biedeblieck.
You, Fred, are that irrepressible raconteur who has wooed us at last into print, that civilized rogue who broke into our dreams (see illustration) to torment us with standards of excellence far beyond our capacity to imagine.
Winner - 2022 Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize
Pulp Literature Issue 37, Winter 2023
Short List - 2021 Able Muse Write Prize
Finalist - The 2022 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction
Finalist - The Waking Flash Prose Prize 2021
Finalist - George Dila Memorial Flash Fiction Contest 2020
This book is not what you think it is. It does not begin with you sitting in the hollow of a tree, eating crackers and scratching your elbow as you look out across the forest in the morning. Ignore that picture over there. That was a mistake.
Fuse
Runner-Up - CutBank 2023-2024 Big Sky, Small Prose Contest
Finalist - 2023 Grist ProForma Contest
Short List - Masters Review 2023 Spring Small Fiction Awards
Upcoming Cutback Issue 100 Winter/Spring 2024
“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.”
Contest Judge Micah Fields, author of We Hold Our Breath: A Journey to Texas Between Storms
Storyteller Journal - December 2023
Sugar — Mend — The Hawaiian Club — Bob Sanders
Interview with the Author
How do you feel the future of writing will be affected by AI?
It’s a bit like the question they asked painters at the advent of photography, or photographers in the era of the cell phone. If you’re out there selling a copy of what already exists, there’s no way that you can compete with a machine. Nor would you want to.
Which is why, when the machines arrived, the folks who’d been crafting faithful copies of functional items – the potters and the weavers and the smithies – either moved on to other endeavors, or clamored onto higher ground to lay claim to the mantel artist. Which makes a lot of sense. We have no heroic John Henry stories of a scrivener in a head-to-head battle with a xerox machine. Why? Because a scrivener is little more than an automaton. An artist, on the other hand – a literary artist – pours the whole of himself into every page he writes. If you think of a work of art as a re-creation of the cosmos as seen through the eyes of a fellow participant – a window into and through the mind of another – then art is, by definition, personal…
Winner - 2022 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize
Upcoming The Thomas Wolfe Review Fall 2022
“This story 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.”
Contest Judge Crystal Wilkinson, author of The Birds of Opulence, Water Street, and Blackberries, Blackberries.
Winner - 2021 Rash Award in Fiction
The Broad River Review 2021 Volume 53
It’s not for the roof above your head, said we, that you buy a house, no, but for the ground beneath your feet. That’s what you count on — the bedrock, the rebar, the brick of the earth itself. Last thing you want to hear, in the middle of the night, is the crackle of the floorboards as the terra firma swallows you whole, as you and the house that holds you, it all of it – bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchen -- banjo with the calf-skin fret, bust of Caesar, little yippy dog – slithers down that creamy funnel and into the belly of the Kracken.
Tin Can Literary Review Volume One June 2021
(Haunted Waters Press)
Finalist - New Ohio Review Editor’s Prize
New Ohio Review Online Summer Exclusive 2019
Finalist 2019 New Millennium Writing Awards
Maggie meet Joe. Joe—new in town. Regular enough, the features, but more an approximation of handsome than the thing itself, stencil of a stencil, carnival swag, paraffin bust of a Barrymore or a Valentino.
Joe meet Maggie. Maggie—the hubby dead or run off with another woman (she’d never say, we’d never ask) but she keeps the ring alright, and not in a box either, but right up there over the fist as a kind of a—what do you call it?—visual aid for the occasional moron foolish enough to try to sweeten, not the coffee, but the server. You don’t mess with Maggie.
The Piney Vista
First Runner Up
The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2021
Finalist - 2020 Orison Anthology Award In Fiction
Short Listed - 2020 Bridport Short Story Prize
One night only! The Human Torpedo! Captain Jimmie Jameson!
The truck tinkled as it wheeled left and then right to clear the surge of the gutters and the muddy bubble of the manholes, a carillon of ice cream, ice cream, ice cream cast up and then erased with every random gust.
From a ten-story tower he jumps – no parachute, no hooks, no wires – he jumps!
The trumpet shook as the truck rammed a broken deck chair and splintered up over the shingles and the rafters and the crackly wire that clogged the square. Talk about balls. You could even hear, up under the garglish warble of the busking – Ten stories! Ten stories! Into a puddle of water no bigger than a bathtub! – the tremor in his voice, the thrill of – what would be the word for it? -- death. Even the oldsters – and by now we were the oldsters – felt, in the wake of the storm, the frisson, the sting of doom in the air, the roof jarred and the tree toppled and the midnight pitch of the shutter upward, up over the clouds, ascended into heaven.
The Ark
Flash Fiction
Burningword Literary Journal October 2019
All through the night the cold wind scoured the porch, sledge-hammered the rafters, shook the floor to where the candles quivered and the wax in a zig-zag ran.
Flash Fiction
From The Depths Fall 2020
(Haunted Waters Press)
A person of no account is what she was, and proud of it. She cared not a whit for what the talkers made of her, not the small talkers in a huddle above a bowl of punch or a mailbox or a bunting of undies in the sun, not the big talkers at the bar and the pier and the poker table, not even the silent talker who, with a tilt of the head at the sight of her, a sideward glance, a shade of a smile, obliterates her in the eyes of the others…
Runner Up
The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2023
Short-Listed - 2022 Chester B. Himes Memorial Short Fiction Prize
Jan/Feb 2023 Saturday Evening Post Online
Upcoming
Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2023
What with that daddy of his already a dead letter in a box or a bar or a field aways off over the horizon, Sparrow took to sleeping in the storeroom GB’d occupied back in the day. Sixteen he was. Ripe. Ready. And the girl? A barefoot jobber on the overland path, back and forth every day between a shack in the woods and a grove in the season of harvest. From out a family of scrappers she come, seven children and she in the middle somewhere, the whole enterprise a tumbleweed of tinder and chaff. Not what you’d call a pretty girl, but then again Sparrow not the face on the box of Wheaties or the mug on the cover of True Romance. Serviceable is what they were. He come across her in the spring, at the side of the trail they run up the bed of the old rail line from Brooksville to Ocoee, pitching rocks at a couple boys been ragging her bout the lack of shoes. A good arm. Threw like a man.
We Could Fix You
Runner-Up - 2023 Grist ProForma Contest
Finalist - 2022 Box Fiction Contest
Upcoming Grist Winter 2023
Contest Judge Julie Marie Wade, author of Wishbone, Small Fires, and Postage Due.
You pose for the picture but the picture-taker’s a purist. She hates the camera. Churns her own butter. Hews her own wood. She makes it her mission to paint you. Flat black the color. A statement. She is making a statement. She lowers you into the vat. Creamy the blend, like butter. A baptism you say. You dog-paddle to tug at the hem of her skirt. Gentle, like you touch the part in the hair with a tap of the brush, she presses down with the paddle. Now take a deep breath.
Winner - Pulp Literature 2021 Bumblebee Flash Fiction Award
Pulp Literature Issue 31, Summer 2021
Short Listed - New Flash Fiction Review Anton Chekhov Award
Semi-Finalist American Short Fiction “Short(Er) Fiction” Contest
The other hand — hammer hand — she folded into a fist. Held it. Trembled it there. There, she said. Take that. She made as if to thump the graven surface of the tray. The biscotti cowered. The fly buzzed, landed, buzzed again. She closed her eyes, tipped into the wind, listened for the fly to land. You don’t mess, no, you don’t mess with Maggie.
Winner - Vincent Brothers Review 2020 Short Story Contest
Issue #24 Spring 2021
When Jack woke his father was carrying him up the ladder to the roof of the house where the whole neighborhood was already waiting, already scattered out across the flat gray surface with their goods in tow and their flashlights drawn and their heads outlined against the broad dark sky like candles on a cake, or like a stand of trees on a small square island, or like a crowd on a pier at the launching of a ship when the ropes unravel and the ship breaks away and the crowd cuts itself loose, is cut loose, as the crowd is cut adrift to make its own separate journey.
Winner - Prism Review 2020 Short Story Contest
Runner-Up - G.B. Crump Prize In Experimental Fiction 2019 (Pleiades Press)
Long List - Fish Short Story Prize
Prism Review Issue 22 Summer 2020
Granted, this was Porter’s own doing and he has no one but himself to blame, and please don’t mention this to Porter when you see him, and we’d never bring it up were it not for the crack in the egg, the twinge in the knee, the recent tilt of the galaxy in a darkward direction, but Porter is not what he has made himself out to be. Porter is a fake. He has been toying with our emotions for too long now and the time has come for us to put an end to it. Porter must be stopped.
Winner - American Writer’s Review 2020 Short Story Contest
American Writers Review 2020 (San Fedele Press) Paperback – June 17, 2020
The purpose of this story is to make you want to be friends with the author. Is it good enough yet? Has he succeeded? His name is Bob Sanders and he lives at…
Winner - The Westchester Review 2020 Flash Fiction Contest
The Westchester Review Spring 2020 issue
The cantaloupes dangle in the sack. How strong the man must be to hold it so. His knuckles waver with the weight, but the strain he feels (he waits with his shoulders back, like a soldier) he feels because he loves the woman. The love is like the earth that pulls at him, waking or sleeping, sitting or standing, at a walk or at a run or even now, as it were, at ease.
Winner - Driftwood Press 2019 Adrift Short Story Contest
Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020
Nominated 2020 Best of the Net
Driftwood Press Winter 2020 Issue 7.1
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.
[Dale Ray Phillips (Judge), author of My People’s Waltz]
Winner - 2019 Texas Observer Short Story Contest
Texas Observer November/December 2019 Issue
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.
[Rose Cahalan, Texas Observer]
Finalist - 50th New Millennium Writing Awards 2020
Pushcart Prize Nominee 2018
New Ohio Review Fall 2018
The .45. Strange to see it here, here in his hand. He checked the safety. Slipped it into the outside pocket of the leather jacket, just under the flap. Only once before had I ever seen him hold it. Couple years ago he’d run us out to the sandpit for the demo and the speech (this is not a toy). Taught us how to load and unload, to blast a bottle off a fence—the basics, right? Like the sex talk, you know—you get the one lesson (this is not a toy) and then, that’s it, go ye forth and multiply.
Winner - 2014 Knickerbocker Prize (Novella)
Big Fiction Magazine #6
Alan Sincic’s incantatory “The Babe” is voice-driven and manic and funny and dark and loud. It’s fantastical.
[David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals (Simon & Schuster)]
“He dies. That’s the first line, so I’m not spoiling anything: Babe Ruth dies. What happens in the next 61 pages takes us only to the end of the day, but it takes us everywhere in baseball, in competition, in love, in language, the most fluid flowing catch and pitch of wordage and outage (or not) you can imagine. Two sentences, just to reel you in:
So much for the bubble that held the game. But then he looked back at the break in the fence and saw that it was perfect: a breach in the boundary of the game just big enough to contain not only the Babe but also the ball there bounding down the cobbled streets of the Bronx, the ball spinning into and out of the broken sunlight to spank the hood of the roadster, to rainbow up over the boaters and the derbies and the bonnets, to nip the tip of the stogie and ping the arm of the hydrant and hop the stoop and shatter the window and clatter the spoons and splatter the pans in a rebound, in a ricochet, in a bank shot to the bedroom where the widow would be waiting, all crispy and frisky and fried . . .
You get the idea, right? What happens to the ball if the Babe dies? This is what happens—Alan Sincic takes you from the windup to the final call on Home Run 715, and you can hardly stop to breathe. It’s terrific.”
Julie J. Nichols [New Pages]
Winner - Gateway Review Flash Fiction Contest
Featured in The Gateway Review Winter 2019
Online reprint at Fresh.ink Literary
Like a portable cathedral is what the famous people are, buoyant is what they are, the famous people, and lighter than air and – look -- into the blue cavern of a cloud they float, bingo, tally-ho, cowabunga, yes, but beware.
Fold-Out Chapbook
Speeding along the highway of mania and delusion, Alan Sincic's My New Car is a thrilling and entirely original glimpse into the mind of a man in love with his car. Illustrations by Andrew Torrens.
Printed on 170gsm Silk paper and 350gsm card in England.
Live Audience/Radio/Podcast/Chapbook Publication in partnership with Big Fiction, Bremelo Press, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture (August 2015)
“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 performance will feature an original soundscape created by Seattle filmmaker Stephen Anunson”
[Anca Szilagyi, author of Daughters of the Air (Lanternfish Press)]
Finalist - 51st New Millennium Writing Awards 2021
The Greensboro Review Number 98 Fall 2015
“Sand” is a strange one, perhaps the most experimental offering, full of non sequiturs and a perverse energy. It starts with a grieving husband drying his socks in a toaster oven and only gets weirder from there. It reminded of some of Barry Hannah’s wilder moments, always welcome.
[Shane Moritz, Arts and Letters]
Finalist - 2013 Cobalt Writing Prize
Featured in Cobalt Review (Volume Two) 2014
Fresh Ink Reprints May 14, 2020
Fresh.ink Online Literary Magazine
Note from the Author:
Over the years I've performed on stage a version of this story, the hapless wannabe athlete who scrambles to follow the commands of a mysterious booming voice from out the darkness. From the playbill: "Obey the baseball instructional tape that bullies its silent listener—a lone Chaplinesque figure—into bizarre new displays of affection."
"How To Catch The Ball" emerged (originally) as a theater piece in New York City and elsewhere. Later, for the Orlando International Fringe Festival, I managed to stir it into an ensemble theater piece, "American Obsessions," a comic/satirical look at the more surreal aspects of the world we live in today.
Third Place - 2019 2nd Biennial Short Fiction Contest
Typehouse Literary Magazine Issue #18
This is one of the most audacious works I’ve seen in a while, delightfully reckless and unhinged.
[Venita Blackburn (Judge), author of Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (University of Nebraska Press)]
Flash Fiction
Finalist - Mid-American Review 2020 Fineline Competition
Mid-American Review Issue 41 Fall 2022
Flash Fiction
Runner-Up - A to Zoetic 2022 Writing Contest
Winter 2022 - Heathentide Orphans Anthology
Contest Judge Grant Faulkner, author of All The Comfort Sin Can Provide and Fissures.
The public is the reason that the famous people are famous, the public is what has made them what they are today. Sometimes, at night, when the public is asleep, the famous people sneak outside without their disguises on and sneak into the homes of the public and tip-toe into the bedroom and give the public a big kiss on the side of the cheek to thank the public for making them all that they are today. On the way back out sometimes the famous people stop at the refrigerator to have a glass of milk maybe and some cookies.
Edward Is Only A Fish
Children’s Chapter Book
Kindle Edition, Henry Holt (Amazon.com)
If you let yourself believe that Mr. Billingsly's bathtub overflowed, allowing Edward the fish a chance to be a hero, here's a funny, easy-to-read story about a fish rescuing 14 cats. It has a very happy ending and, for an implausible tale, plausible illustrations.
[New York Times]
Playwright Sincic makes an uproarious debut as a children's author in a piece touched with comic timing and understatement. The adventure begins when Mr. Billingsly leaves the bathwater running while he steps outside to fetch a tangerine. He locks himself out, and as the water rises, Edward, a goldfish confined to a small bowl, begins the vacation he has longed for. Free to swim throughout the flooded house, Edward feasts on ice cream, bosses the toy train characters, and in a magnanimous gesture, rescues the hilariously duplicitous cats trapped on a hat rack. But after a close call with one of the cats, and realizing how much Mr. Billingsly misses him, Edward pulls the bathtub plug. He is rewarded with a huge aquarium named Lake Edward. The situation itself is funny, but it's Sincic's masterful turns of phrase and sly characterizations that give the tale the extra bite that adults can appreciate during a family read. The black-and-white illustrations have flashes of the same wry humor but overall seem a bit tame for Sincic's inventive text.
[Julie Yates Walton (Booklist)]
Edward Is Only A fish
German Version
Ein Goldfisch macht Ferien, Ars Edition
Full Color Illustrations by Sophie Schmid