"I love getting to know new work and new writers through a contest, and I love getting to see novels before they go out into the world, so judging The Masters Review Novel Excerpt Contest provides both of those things at once. I have waited years for a book based on an excerpt I read, and it is the best kind of waiting, and I am someone impatient in life. As a judge, I'm looking for an excerpt that will give me that kind of anticipation, a book that I will want to wait for. I want an excerpt that gives me a sense of the novel as a whole, rather than an excerpt that can stand alone/separate. I like novels that are difficult to excerpt, novels that contain elements of the whole in any part." –Matthew Salesses, Guest Judge
The Masters Review Novel Excerpt Contest is open through November 12, 2023. Prizes include $3,000 for first place, $300 for second place, and $200 for third place. Maximum words for submission is 6,000. The Masters Review requires a $20 fee for submissions.
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About the Judge:
MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of eight books, most recently The Sense of Wonder (Little, Brown, 2023), the national bestseller Craft in the Real World (a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others), and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He also wrote The Hundred-Year Flood; I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; The Last Repatriate; and Our Island of Epidemics (out of print). Forthcoming is a memoir, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time (Little, Brown).
Matthew was adopted from Korea. In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. His essays can be found in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, The New York Times Motherlode, The Guardian, Time, VICE.com, and other venues. His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, PEN/Guernica, Witness, and elsewhere. He has received awards and fellowships from, among others, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Dublin Literary Award, Bread Loaf, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, and [PANK] Books.
Matthew is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University. He earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial boards of Green Mountains Review and Machete (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press), and has held editorial positions at Pleiades, The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast, and Redivider. He has read and lectured widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs, and the Tin House, Kundiman, and One Story writing conferences.
