Category Archives: Blog

We continue to love our slush pile, and always will. It is where the action is—we love to find new writers. But we get a lot of submissions, and our response time is right now longer than we (or you) want it to be. We therefore need to adjust. We will be open May 15 to June 15 for regular submissions.

For years our regular submissions were open from October through December and February through May, about nine months a year. But with the closing of Tin House and the narrowing of submission windows at other venues (Paris Review, Kenyon Review) in some cases to as short as one month a year, LitMag has no choice but to shorten its window to keep response times reasonable.

Our three contests are important parts of the magazine that bring to our attention wonderful new writers. The reading periods for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, LitMag’s Anton Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction, and LitMag’s Emily Dickinson Award for Poetry will therefore remain unchanged.

We are still going strong, but we must adjust our submission windows to ensure reasonable response times. Thanks to you all.

We at LitMag wish you all happy holidays and a happy new year. We thank all of you who read LitMag and tell us how much you love it. We thank everyone who submits. We thank everyone who supports us in all those various ways. We keep believing in the literary life. We go on with excitement to the new year in the world of letters. May it be literary and grand.

For years we have brought you LitMag, a beautiful print magazine open to unpublished and award-winning writers. We will continue to bring you LitMag. And today we want to tell you about a sister project.

We have wanted to bring the LitMag spirit to book publishing. And today we are excited to announce the launch of a new independent book publisher.

Bard Books has launched!

Bard Books will publish its first two book this spring. The first will be To Have Written a Book by Gordon Lish.

Bard Books is now open for submissions. No need for an agent. Like Litmag, Bard Books will show love to the slush pile and dig for gems.

We will let Bard Books tell you all about it. Visit Bard Books.

We get a lot of submissions, and we thank all of you for trusting us with your work. We still love our slush pile, and always will. But we need to manage it differently.

For years we have been open for regular submissions from October through December and February through May for most categories, about nine months a year. With the closing of other literary magazines such as Tin House and the narrowing of submission windows at other venues (in some cases to as short as one month), LitMag’s response time for regular submissions has continued to lengthen, and we think it has gotten too long.

We need to adjust. But first we need to catch up. We will be closed for regular submission this fall. Our next reading period for regular submissions will be February 1, 2024 to May 31, 2024.

Our two fiction contests are important parts of the magazine that bring to our attention wonderful new writers. The reading periods for both LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction and LitMag’s Anton Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction will remain unchanged.

LitMag #5 is in production, and it marks five years of publishing a journal that has done most of what we hoped back when we conceived it. It’s actually six years, or close to seven. But does one count the gestation period when computing the birthday of an elephant? So it’s five years, and we’re excited about publishing issue #5. It should be at your Barnes & Noble in a few weeks.

During those five years, we lost Tin House, and other literary notable magazines have also closed. Many of the big ones that remain have narrowed their submission windows, to three months a year, or two months, or even only one month. We can understand why they do that, but we remain open about eight months a year. And there have been consequences: we used to take two months to reply with a decision; now we generally need six months.

We remain dedicated to giving unpublished and emerging writers a good look and a rare opportunity, publishing exciting debuts next to award-winning writers.

LitMag is all about print—the long painstaking labor of luscious print. We try to make every issue the kind of object that book lovers will love, a beautiful journal that feels good to hold and ogle.

We hope you will all keep spreading the words we publish. You can celebrate LitMag by buying five copies of issue #5 for five friends. And you can celebrate LitMag by continuing to send us your gems.

We thank all of you who take time to send us your good wishes. We thank all of you who read, subscribe, and submit. We are nothing without all of you. And now we are five. Cheers!

First Tin House, then The Believer, and today Conjunctions. Bard College will no longer fund Conjunctions. Confirmation by Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions editor for three decades, was this morning’s sad literary news. Universities have always been places of fads and trends. Well, there’s a new trend of universities defunding their literary magazines.

“Long-standing literary magazines are struggling to stay afloat,” a recent CNN Style article recounts, asking: “Where do they go from here?” Electric Literature offers an answer: “Rather than waiting for benefactors to fund, defund, and then ‘save’ our favorite publications, we must support them now.” Must? Well, readers and writers certainly should support their favorite literary magazines. One can simply buy a copy. Or buy a few copies and give them to friends.

Whether one is solely a reader or mainly a submitter, there are facts to be concerned about. For instance, the submissions windows at many of the leading literary magazines have been shrinking—for some down to three months, two months, or even just one month.

The future of literary magazines is no doubt parlous. And now is a good time for one to act.

We hear so much from so many of you about how much you appreciate what we do — giving voices attention, putting them in our pages, which are really your pages after all.

LitMag #4 is in production — the stories, the poems, that wonderful cover. It will be out soon.

We thank you for the love.

Editing is different during a pandemic. Go ask any editor.

But there’s one thing even a pandemic cannot stop: submissions. Thankfully, they kept coming. In fact, they even surged, giving us hope of finding more new voices to sustain us.

We look forward to publishing our next issue in the fall, another beautiful printed object it feels good to hold. After a year of pandemic, it is important to learn again to touch and hold things with an open heart.

And we look forward to reading more submissions. Many of the top literary magazines have narrowed their windows for unsolicited submissions–to three months, two months, or even only one month. We at LitMag remain committed to long submission periods. We’re here to read and sift, part of our mission to provide you with a literary magazine you cannot put down.

We’re glad it’s spring again. Wishing all in our community good health and a springtime of reading that renews.

This virus has hit so many so hard. Lost lives. Lost jobs. Difficult changes to daily lives. And  so much more. It is not over yet, and we do not know when it will be over, or how long it will take to “recover” once it is.

LitMag was hit hard in a number of ways, most significantly the destruction of copies of the beautiful issue that had just been printed weeks prior. LitMag #3 shipped off to our distributor in late February. Weeks later we received from our distributor an email saying that due to the Covid-19 crisis all of the copies our printer had shipped were being destroyed and counted as “returns.”  A few clarifying emails yielded the better news that of the three shipments of LitMag to the distributors three different warehouses (East, Midwest, and West) only the total shipment to one of those warehouses (West) was destroyed. The other two warehouses had received the copies and shipped them in turn to Barnes & Noble stores.

So two-thirds of copies of LitMag #3 did make it to the the Barnes & Noble stores. But there was further bad news, the distributor told us: most of the Barnes & Nobel stores are closed, and those few that remain open have no traffic. (more…)

We just changed the Barnes & Noble on-sale date of LitMag #3 from March 25, 2020 to April 25, 2020, so you can all stay home and help stop the spread of the Coronavirus. (Thanks to our distributor ANC for facilitating the last-minute change!)

It’s a beautiful printed thing, LitMag #3, and it has already shipped out to subscribers. You can get it online at litmag.com (through the fulfillment by the good people at The Sheridan Press.)

And when it’s safe to go out and buy LitMag at a Barnes & Noble bookstore, go get another copy and give it to a friend you know needs it.

Be safe, be healthy. Stay home. Read.