Chez Robert Giron

Mark Wisniewski of Peekskill, New York won the 2007 Gival Press Short Story Award for his story entitled Better Terms.

In addition to being published online at the Gival Press website Wisniewski received a cash prize of $1,000.00.

(Photo by Elizabeth Rendleisch.)


Click here for the link to Mark Wisniewski's story at Gival Press:
Mark Wisniewski

The short stories were read anonymously and the winner was chosen by last year's winner Marie Holmes.

"Better Terms is propelled by the strength of its narrator's voice: contradictory, confused, and entirely believable. With a poignant and compelling mix of self-pity, disillusionment, self-deprecation and disbelief, the narrator takes the reader through what begins as a seemingly regular day in his life. The story earns the emotional impact of its final, kaleidoscopic scenes through a series of interactions between characters who refuse to deny their complexities. In the end, it is not the eccentricity of these characters that keeps the reader invested in their story—it is their beautifully depicted and very human struggle to connect with one another."
—Marie Holmes

Biography:
Mark Wisniewski is the author of the novel Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, the story collection All Weekend with the Lights On, and the book of narrative poems One of Us One Night. His fiction is published or forthcoming in more than 100 magazines including The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Yale Review, and The Missouri Review. He’s won a Pushcart Prize, the 2006 Tobias Wolff Award, the TIL Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story for 2006, an Isherwood Foundation Fellowship in Fiction, and two Regents’ Fellowships from the University of California, Davis.



Finalists:

The Adventure of the Tainted Canister
by Thomas A. Turley of Montgomery, Alabama.

No Brochure
by Marilyn Greenberg of New York, New York.

Some Other Sort of Hunger
by Nicole Louise Reid of Evansville, Indiana.

This Filthy City
by Iraj Isaac Rahmin of Houston, Texas.