Welcomes International Submissions:
Phantom Drift Literary Journal
(paying market)
Deadline: 31 March 2013
Phantom Drift is one of the few literary journals in the United States focused on fabulist writing. We aim to nurture the literature of fabulism, the fantastic, and the surreal by publishing an appealing, top-quality literary journal featuring only the best fiction and poetry from the U.S. and abroad. Our support for writers takes the form of not only providing a showcase for their works, but offering payment, a practice that both assures us the best of writers' work and supports literature as a whole.
FICTION:
We are looking for fabulist flash fiction and short stories. We like stories that favor the unusual over the usual; we like stories that create a milieu where anything can happen. Stories can take the form of myth or fable. They can invent or suggest an unreal ambience or describe a realistic landscape gripped by a surreal or unexplained event.
We are fond of Calvino, South American Magical Realism, and Talmudic legends. Kafka and Orwell now and will forever totally rock. Some contemporary favorite reads you might have missed include “Flying Leap” by Judy Budnitz, “Carmen Dog” by Carol Emshwiller, “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” by Robert Olen Butler, “Wild Life” by Molly Gloss, “Serial Killer Days” by David Prill, “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A.S. Byatt, “ Riding the Red” by Nalo Hopkinson, “The Child Garden” by Geoff Ryman, and the “Interfictions” and “Polyphony” anthologies. The list of writers of stories we enjoy numbers in the thousands.
We accept simultaneous submissions if so noted, but request that you inform us immediately if your piece is accepted elsewhere. As a general rule we do not read previously published work, including work that appears on the web or in electronic format. Please send one fiction submission during each submission period, and we ask that writers wait for several weeks beyond the end of the reading period before querying about the status of your submission, though I will do my best to read and respond to work as quickly as possible.
We request first North American Serial Rights and exclusive rights for six months following publication. We request permission to publish an excerpt of your story on our website. We pay on publication ($10-25 for flash fiction to 2000 words and $50 for fiction 2001-6500 words), plus 1 contributor copy and additional contributor copies at a 55% discount.
Upload your story in RTF or Word by clicking SUBMIT button on our website and following instructions.
POETRY:
We prefer poetry composed in the new fabulist tradition. Phantom Drift exists because its editors wish to found a journal devoted to work that shatters or valuably distorts reality, whether this means surrealism, magical realism, fantastique, or bizarrerie. We value writing whose imagination is unafraid to shift shape, writing that generates unique alternatives to and uncharted voyages away from conventional realism. As poetry editor, I welcome your submissions and tend to favor poetry of a sinister bent, but am open to work readers might label new weird, slipstream, and/or fantastic. Poetry that demonstrates what Roger Caillois has referred to as “the impression of irreducible strangeness,” and that inspires what Franco-Bulgarian structuralist critic Tzevetan Todorov characterized as a “duration of uncertainty’’ between strange and marvelous explanations in the mind of the reader will be especially prized here.
Apart from these considerations, content, language, and form remain quite wide open. Submit sonnet, abcedarius, prose poem, or lipogram. Send gothic, supernatural, steam punk, or science fiction. If you possess unabashedly strange, unpublished work which shows such unusual tendencies as these, Phantom Drift wants to see it. Send us your weirdest verse in submissions of 3-5 poems. Our submission period is January 1 - March 31, and submission can be made on-line through the Phantom Drift website.
There are no fees for submissions.
Payment is $10 per poem and 1 contributor copy. Additional contributor copies will be available for 55% discount.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For queries:Leslie What, Fiction Co-Editor, at phantomdriftfiction@yahoo.com, or Martha Bayless, Fiction Co-Editor, at pdfiction2@yahoo.com, or Matt Schumacher, poetry editor, at phantomdriftpoetry@yahoo.com
For queries/ submissions: via Submittable
Website: http://www.phantomdrift.org