Neutrino Short-Short Prize winner and finalists announced!

Congratulations to May-lee Chai, the winner of this year’s Neutrino Short-Short Prize for her story, “Things That Cannot be Compared: Exile and Diaspora.”

Judge Stephen Fishbach on the winning story: In the span of a short-short, this breathtaking, formally daring story manages to capture a family’s generations in all their dignity, pathos, and messy humanity. A cane against a wall, hands perched like dragon claws over an organ’s keys –the small details accrue into an epic of love and loss. I particularly marveled at how a list of eras and cities, deployed like a small bomb toward the end, explodes out with devastating impact. The remorseless echoes of history shape all our lives. The story is a small miracle –only small because it’s fewer than 800 words. The miracle is limitlessly vast. 

May-lee Chai (翟梅莉 is the author of eleven books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her short story collections, Tomorrow in Shanghai, which was a New York Times’ Editors Choice and longlisted for The Story Prize, and Useful Phrases for Immigrants, recipient of a 2019 American Book Award. Her short prose has appeared widely including in the Paris Review Online, New England Review, Los Angeles Times, and Kenyon Review Online. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and recipient of an honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards. 

Congratulations as well to our Honorable Mentions:

“If I Were My Sister” by Noémi Scheiring-Oláh

“Karmic Chalk” by Jordon Wheeler

And to our finalists and their stories:

“Bread and Roses” by Emily Strasser
“Architecture” Cameron Vanderwerf
“Playing Ping Pong in the Karaoke Bar Next to the Prison Where They Kill People” by Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal
“something about champagne” by Julie Melfi
“The Hole” by Mirri Glasson-Darling
“Knocks at the Door” by William Musgrove
“Cake” by Tara Isabel Zambrano

Thanks to everybody who entered. Look for the winning stories in Issue 46 coming out in spring 2025!