Customer Reviews

WATCHING TIME: Anthology of Prizewinng Essays & Short Stories

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Selecting short stories and essays for this anthology was pretty easy. I had before me a large number of prizewinning entries from three of the annual Tom Howard Short Story, Essay and Prose Contests. This contest usually attracts well over a thousand entries each year, so the quality of prose that reaches even a Commended status is extremely high. Therefore, starting at the top, the First Prize entries -- all three of them -- were must-have inclusions: "Watching Time" by Fred McGavran, "Chocolate Covered Crickets" by Jennifer Antonacci, and "Geraldine Fitzgerald & St Patrick's Day in Pittsburgh" by Jan Breen. The Second Prize winners were "The Guernsey Doll" by Rebecca Marshall-Courtois, "Cell Block" by Ned Condini, and "Naxos Nights" by Laurie Gough. Third Prizes were won by Lissa Byers for "Phantom Feelings" and Kay Beth Avery for "Homesteaders".
"Salesman of the Decade" by Vicki Conte won a richly deserved Fourth Prize, while B. Lynch Black's cleverly plotted "Sitting at the Gate of the Temple" won Fifth. Among the Most Highly Commended entries represented are "The Dead Zone" by Craig Rondinone, "My Mother's Table" by Noreen Braman, "Out of Darkness" by Melissa Lassor, and "The Meal" by Debbie Camelin. A bonus essay, "Fan-Fan", which won First Prize in the prestigious Southern Cross Literary Competition 2002, is also included in this first-rate anthology of both fiction and true-life encounters.

The title story of this anthology of prize-winning essays and short stories from the Tom Howard Contest is a beautifully evocative monologue of a man who loses contact with reality when his watch breaks. Instead of despair, dementia leads the narrator to the farthest reaches of time and space. Other pieces range from Jennifer Antonnaci's reminiscence of 9/11 to Jan Breen's story of a musician who can make the deaf hear her sing. I highly recommend this fine collection.

You know the stories in this collection are the best of the best because they are all award-winning, and the collection does not disappoint. I enjoyed all of the stories, some more than others, but none were below-average.

We just house them away because they were "bad" and never think about who is in those cages. Vicki Conte shows there is more in the cage than the criminal. How much of our popultaion is in prison and how many more are affected,