‘New Yorker’ fiction parody contest award winners, at last

Six weeks back we unleashed a spate of literary creativity by announcing a New Yorker Parody Fiction contest whose main rule was, Tell your tale with empathy for a historical villain, and blame for the victim. The contest was inspired by Shani Boianjiu’s Israeli army story in the New Yorker, Means of Suppressing Demonstrations. Then we published the 25 entries in mid-July and said we’d have our winners soon. Well many of you have noted, we’ve dropped the ball. Our excuse is that the entries were all so good, or so many of them were so very good, that we didn’t feel right about playing judge to pick winners. Under the circumstances, it only felt fair to announce that all 25 entrants get a prize, a copy of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. Please forward me your address, at weissphilip@yahoo.com, and I’ll get you your prize. And if you already have Sacco’s book, let me know, we could send you Anna Baltzer’s Witness in Palestine, Moshe Machover’s Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution or Deepa Kumar’s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire.