10 award-winning short story collections worth reading

Each year, among the new fiction collections fighting for attention are a handful published neither through mainstream houses nor the usual small press alternatives but via a third avenue: book prize contests.

Some of these competitions, such as the AWP Grace Paley Prize, have been around for 40-plus years and rely on coordination with university and indie presses. Others, such as the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, are held by the press itself. Monetary awards can range from $1,000 to $15,000, but what all winners share is the challenge, once their collections launch, of being noticed by the public.