Announcing the Finalists for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Fiction!

We’re excited to announce the finalists for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. The winner will be announced at the 2023 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony, which will be aired virtually (date and time to be announced).

Without further ado, here are the finalists for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Fiction:

Jeffery Renard Allen’s Fat Time and Other Stories (Graywolf Press)

Leah Angstman’s Shoot the Horses First (Kernpunkt Press)

William M. Brandon III’s Eternity (Spaceboy Books)

Peter Cherches’s Things (Bamboo Dart Press)

Paola Ferrante’s Her Body Among Animals (Book*hug Press)

Adam Greenfield’s Mountain Lion Blues (Pelekinesis)

Stacy Hardy’s An Archaeology of Holes (Bridge Art)

Norman Lock’s The Ice Harp (Bellevue Literary Press)

Ted Morrissey’s Delta of Cassiopeia (Twelve Winters)

Jefferson Navicky’s Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (AC Books)

Lance Olsen’s Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie (FC2)

Aimee Parkison and Meg Pokrass’s Disappearing Debutantes (Outpost19)

Dawn Raffel’s Boundless as the Sky (Sagging Meniscus Press)

Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture (Black Cat/Grove Press)

Wil Weitzel’s Nights from This Galaxy (Sarabande Books)

(Image: John McNamara’s “This Can’t be Happening; It’s not Real.” (2021))

John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024) and Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming in 2026). His fiction is also published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, Hobart, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His poetry is also published in elimae, Sixth Finch, Contrapuntos, and elsewhere. His criticism is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

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