This year’s Brooklyn Review editorial team is thrilled to announce the winner’s the 2023 Short Story Contest: This Time It’s Personal, judged by novelist Ernesto Mestre. We were truly inspired by the amount and quality of submissions we received — big congratulations to this year’s winners!

Stay tuned for the Poetry winners coming soon!

First-Place Prize

A Good Impression by Daniel Barrios

Judge Ernesto Metre writes, “There is an extraordinary sense of realness established in the particular workplace of the two central characters in “A Good Impression,” a dental lab in which false teeth are crafted. At first, the reader becomes immersed in the common anxieties and terrors of failure and meaninglessness that literary fiction generally assigns to such settings. But soon enough, the story’s themes lift from the precise descriptions of the craft to the art that any task becomes when pursued with enough devotion and an insouciant disregard for those who make judgments about significance and value. When the narrator experiences the nearness to such magic with a co-worker, he tries to offer something in return by judging him through the scales of the other world. The story then becomes a powerful lament about the transcendence we miss out on when judging ourselves with the metrics of others.”

Daniel Barrios (he/him) is a Dominican/Puerto Rican writer living in New York City. He received a 2024 fellowship from the Periplus Collective. He is a recent MFA graduate from Southern New Hampshire University’s low residency Mountainview program, and he has been awarded residencies through Under the Volcano in Tepoztlan, Mexico, Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. You can find his words in Querencia Press, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and Assignment Magazine Online. You can find him on IG and Twitter (X) @pastelesaregood.

Runners Up

My Generation by Eugene Stein

Of Eugene Stein’s story, Ernesto writes, “There are thorns in all our sides about the lives that we have somehow failed to live, particularly when we should be grateful for the blessings of the one we have, a very human situation adroitly captured in “My Generation.” A tale about a wistful and somewhat self-deluded husband and his longing for a younger man, the story artfully simmers between near-disaster and an acceptance of lost pasts and of that metaphysical thorn on our side that may just kill us if we try pulling it out.”

Eugene Stein lives in Los Angeles with his husband and children. His short stories have been published in Iowa Review, North American Review, Colorado Review, Witness, Catamaran, and Michigan Quarterly Review. His story in Iowa Review won a Pushcart Prize, and his story in Michigan Quarterly Review was reprinted in Harper’s. He is currently working on a novel.

Heartwood by Torsa Ghosal

For Heartwood, Ernesto writes, “What do we do with those voices that we know are speaking to us but that we can’t quite hear? In “Heartwood,” Bhumi becomes enamored of a professor who thinks he can transpose the voices of the majestic sequoias. In Bhumi’s search for the meaning of their eventual breakup, the story majestically shifts into the speculative, and Bhumi becomes an Ariel-like figure trapped forever in the core of one of those trees, the ending evocatively capturing the dangers and allure of condemning ourselves to relive perennially the wrongs of our pasts.”

Torsa Ghosal is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press, US), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction, non-fiction, and translation have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Literary Hub, Bustle, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. A writer and professor of English based in California, Torsa grew up in Bengal, India. You can follow her on Twitter @TorsaG and Instagram @torsa_ghosal