Announcing the 2026 Long Story Winner and Finalists!

We are happy to announce the winner and finalists of our Iron Horse Literary Review Long Story competition. Iron Horse Literary Review’s annual The Long Story is an opportunity for writers to submit their fiction and nonfiction manuscripts that run between 20-40 pages. Each year we dedicate an e-single to the winner of the submission.

This year, we selected Adam Straus's "Building 2667" (fiction), as the IHLR Long Story winner. Adam Straus is a Marine veteran. The author of Remedial Action (University of Nevada Press, 2027), his writing has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, HAD, Best Small Fictions 2024, and elsewhere. Adam lives in Philadelphia with his wife. 

About his story, Straus wrote, "Since my own time in the Marine Corps, I've been interested in the cyclical nature of military life. There's an overall macro cycle, in which one leaves the civilian world, assimilates into the military, has a variety of pleasant and not-so-pleasant experiences, transitions out of the military, and ultimately re-assimilates (hopefully) into civilian society. Along the way, there are micro cycles around each deployment: The training steadily ramps up, you go overseas, you return home, there's a lull, and then the training ramps up for another deployment. Normally, my narrators are human beings who find themselves at some point in these cycles, but I was starting to find that perspective limiting. A new guy can only speak as a new guy and a veteran can only speak as a veteran; I wanted some way to encompass these different realities in a single voice. So, I chose to focus on a static object that bears witness to dozens of cycles: A barracks. 

When I first began drafting 'Building 2667' I imagined the piece as a novella-in-flash, with separate stories linked by the barracks. That conceit quickly fell away and I found myself writing a short story narrated by the building itself, which then became a long story. I workshopped an early draft with some friends from my MFA; their main suggestion was, 'stop overthinking the experimental aspects of this, and focus on plot and character.' Good advice, and I did my best to take it, but I knew the resulting draft wasn't done. It still felt too much like a series of snapshots, rather than a coherent whole. So I workshopped the piece again at Sewanee. The comments I received there helped flesh out the narrator's storyline, especially the ending; I'd been missing the fire/water motif I'd already set up in the story and just had to push that to its logical conclusion. I don't normally work like this, but the last line of the story was the absolute last thing I wrote. With those final words in place, I clicked submit and crossed my fingers."

We are also pleased to announce our finalists:

"Mother of God" (nonfiction), by Vince Granata

"Lost Dogs" (fiction), by Kindall Gray

"A Trog to War" (fiction), by Daniel Reiss

"The Internal Lives of Men" (nonfiction), by Sarah Terez Rosenblum

"Split Night" (fiction), by Rachel Taube

"The Rails" (fiction), by Marcos McPeek Villatoro

Congratulations to Adam and our finalists!