Winners of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the John Simmons Short Fiction Award—Safe as Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino and Tell Everyone I Said Hi by Chad Simpson—will become available Oct. 1 from the University of Iowa Press.

Writing about Safe As Houses, Deb Olin Unferth wrote, "When have I last read such highly original stories? With a surreal edge and a brilliant dark humor, Safe as Houses’ tales of daughterhood and its mishaps mark a staggeringly good debut.”

Bret Anthony Johnston observed, "Nothing about Safe as Houses feels safe at all. From the first remarkable story to the last, the author takes risks that left me gasping and applauding. This is affecting and inventive work, work that breaks your heart with humor and mends it with compassion. Again and again, Marie-Helene Bertino reminds us of exactly how much the short story can do, of how much it must do. Hers are among the finest I’ve read in a long, long while.”

Simpson’s 18 stories roam the small-town playgrounds, blue-collar neighborhoods, and rural highways of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky to find people who’ve lost someone or something they love and have not yet found ways to move forward.

Recommending Tell Everyone I Said Hi, Jim Shepard wrote, “Chad Simpson writes with a piercing tenderness and sadness about loss and helplessness and the impossible decisions that we face every day, and the complexity of the compromises we offer the world, and ourselves, in response.”

And Justin Torres adds, “Chad Simpson is clever, compassionate, and refreshingly nuanced in his perceptions of the world, and his stories enchant with both style and substance. Tell Everyone I Said Hi returns again and again to fractured families, to orphans and widows, the strange and the estranged, and each story offers new insight into loneliness and love. Each story is a delight.”

The books will be available at bookstores or from the UI Press, 800-621-2736 or www.uiowapress.org. Customers in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa may order from Eurospan Group at www.eurospanbookstore.com.

The Iowa Short Fiction Award has been presented annually since 1969. In 1998 the University of Iowa Press instituted the John Simmons Short Fiction Award—named after the first director of the Press—to complement the ongoing award series. Both national competitions are juried through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.