Chez Robert Giron

Gival Press is pleased to announce that Tim Johnston of Iowa City, Iowa, has won the 2008 Gival Press Short Story Award, which has a purse of $1,000.00, for his short story entitled Water.

The top short stories were read anonymously and the winner was chosen by last year's winner Mark Wisniewski.


Praise from the judge:


"Water was much the best of the ten entries I read, and it is one of the most developed and loaded short stories I have read period. There is complexity here—of character, emotion, plot, history, and overall vision—and, yes, such complexity might challenge some readers, but in this story it pays off with that grand sense of having experienced the upshot of a stranger’s fully lived life. Motherhood, guilt, sweetness, crime, marital love, denial, friendship, hope, brotherhood, death, rejuvenation, legality, and the claustrophobia many folks must suffer after dogged endurance in a small town: how can all of this fit into a single piece of short fiction? Yet all of it does, threatening to sweep even the cynical reader into this victorious narrative, which by turns flows as tenderly and powerfully—and as naturally toward tragedy—as can water itself."
—Mark Wisniewski

Biography:
Tim Johnston is the author of the novel Never So Green (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002). His fiction has appeared in New England Review, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Confrontation, Colorado Review, DoubleTake, and other publications. Johnston is an O. Henry Prize winner, the 2008 fiction winner of the New Letters Awards for Writers, and the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. He currently lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

To read the story, click here: Water by Tim Johnston


Finalists:

Henry's Fall
by Rosalia Scalia of Baltimore, Maryland.

Eye of the Goat
by Rachel Gallagher Brooklyn, New York.

Civilization
by Mark Connelly of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

A Blue Chandelier
by the late Greg Torso represented by David Groff of New York, New York.