Three-Minute Fiction: The Round 8 Winner Is…

The end of Round 8 of our Three-Minute Fiction contest has finally arrived. With help from our readers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, New York University, the University of Oregon and the University of Texas, at Austin, we’ve read through more than 6,000 stories.

Submissions had to be original works of short fiction — no more than 600 words. They also had to begin with this sentence: “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.”

Our judge for this round is the novelist Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Queen of America. He helped sift through some of the submissions before picking his favorite.