Winner of the Tenth Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest
With an introduction by contest judge Ira Sukrungruang

A concise and compelling novella-in-flash spanning decades from the1960s to the present, Lex Williford’s Superman on the Roof offers an elegiac coming-of-age tale and a family portrait imbued with tragedy, guilt, grief, and forgiveness. The arguments, injustices, and triumphs of childhood echo into the adult world in unforgettable detail in these short powerful stories.

«Superman on the Roof is an exemplary reminder of what the short form can do. There is a red siren of urgency in Williford’s every sentence, every word. It is a book that reiterates what Lee K. Abbott once said to me many years ago: “Everything is the matter in the short story.” Everything is the matter in Superman on the Roof. In its brevity, its pace, the contained voice of the consistent narrator, in the flashes of story about a family trying hard to find themselves after heartbreak. The book asks: What is lost when someone we love passes on? What do we keep losing? How do we shoulder this loss and carry on, even decades later?»

Ira Sukrungruang

Lex Williford has taught in the writing programs at Southern Illinois University, the University of Missouri—St. Louis, and the University of Ala­bama. His book, Macauley’s Thumb, won the 1993 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His fiction and nonfiction have ap­peared in numerous journals. Coeditor, with Michael Martone, of the Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fic­tion and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction and founding director of the online MFA at the University of Texas at El Paso, he currently chairs UTEP’s on-campus bilingual creative writing program. Visit his website at www.lexwilliford.com.