2013 Willow Springs Fiction Prize

The winner of the 2013 Willow Springs Fiction Prize, featured in the Fall 2013 issue of the magazine, is Robert Long Foreman with his piece “The Man with the Nightmare Gun.” Here is a small excerpt:

I am not a serious man. I thought Carol understood this about me by our fifth date. I thought it was something I’d established the night of our third date, after we had sex the first time. We lay together for an hour afterward, discussing the vast range of bra sizes and the prehistoric giant sloth, extinct now for thousands of years. It stood twenty feet tall and had massive claws, Carol said.When she added that people who lived when the sloths roamed the earth didn’t wear bras, I said, “They were the Greatest Generation.”
She laughed.

The rest of the issue features poetry by Kim Addonizio, Warren Bromley-Vogel, Denver Butson, Nicole Cooley, Sara Henning, Nora Hickey, Kate Lebo, Cate Marvin, Mark Neely, Keith Ratzlaff, and Ginny Wiehardt; fiction by Maxim Loskutoff and Aurelie Sheehan; and interviews with Steve Almond and Susan Orlean.