Literary journals is where I go to get my short work published: flash fiction, short stories and essays. I know from sad experience how hard that is and how wonderful it feels when it works.

Any editor of a literary journal will tell you that the best way to get accepted is to understand what the journal wants. It’s great advice and no longer cost-prohibitive since many journals now publish at least some content online.

All the same, I don’t normally read journals to work out a submission strategy. I just like to read them. You never really know what you’ll find in a literary journal and that’s the part I like best. Surprise me. Shock me. Plant an idea in my mind and let me go to town.

Since I started publishing reviews in 2017, I’ve only managed to read a handful of journals. The photo you see above is a collection of the journals still languishing in my to-be-read pile. Until I get to them, you’ll have to make do with the reviews below. It’s an eclectic bunch that includes online, old school print and live performance journals.

Listed in alphabetical order by journal title.

Dystopia Now: Global Dystopias, The Boston Review (Fall 2017)

Kaleidoscope: Glimmer Train Winter 2015, No. 92

Little Public Library: Granta 63: Beasts (Autumn 1989)

Australia: Granta 70: Australia: The New New World (Summer 2000)

The World As We See It: Granta 131: The Map Is Not the Territory (Spring 2015)

Idiolect: Granta 135: New Irish Writing (Spring 2016)

Electric Literature: The Masters Review (Feb-June 2017) and The Common (2017)

Narrative Magazine: Story of the Week in Narrative Magazine, April and May 2017

On the Road: The New Yorker podcasts, Bitter Oleander, The Masters Review

Magazine Mashup: The New Yorker (Jonas Hassen Khemiri, 25.09.2017), Narrative Magazine (Art Hanlon), VERSO/ (Uprising – Seat at the Table 22.02.2018), and The Shanghai Literary Review (December 2017)

At the Antiquarian: Object Lessons, the Paris Review presents the art of the short story edited by Loren Stein and Sadie Stein

Cityscapes: Concrete, a special edition of The Shanghai Literary Review (May 2018)

Playtime: Tahoma Literary Review, Issue No 22 (Mar 2022)

Khmer Stories: Words without Borders, “Cambodia: Angkor to Year Zero and Beyond;” Electric Literature, “The Cambodian American Writers Who Are Reimagining Cambodian Literature,” 11 June 2019