What?

Short stories, 2k-8k words long (with the 3,000-5,500 range being our real sweet spot).

When?

Every two weeks. (We’ll see how this goes? If I get so much good stuff, maybe more often? Although, maybe even more than quality & quantity of short stories I get, this might depend on how many people subscribe? I’m going to pay contributors, and commission art for every story… and I can only float that for so long.)

Who & Why?

In the last couple of years, after primarily devoting my energies to novel- and essay-writing, I’ve been writing short stories again. And when it came time to send them out, I looked around some and… wasn’t sure where to send them. There are exceptions, of course, but it feels like there are a lot of great journals that are publishing fun, powerful, weird, exciting flash fiction and then the journals that are publishing longer stories felt… less exciting. I wanted to try to fill that gap in between.

Also, I miss editing and publishing short stories. I founded Hobart in 2001, which I edited until stepping away in 2021. Across those 20 years, I edited and published stories that were anthologized in Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading; that were collected in some of my favorite short story collections of the last twenty years; and countless other stories that maybe got less officially recognized but that I think about often and fondly.

So, I’m giving it a shot. We’ll see how it goes? If it takes off, great! If it doesn’t, for any number of reasons—this will have been a short experiment. Those are fun, too!

Can I submit?

So far, I’ve been opening submissions for a month, every 3-5 months. I’d like to move toward something a little more regular but, at least for now, this slightly more random makes it a little more manageable for myself, between teaching, my own writing, family, life, etc. If there is a call open, it will be live on our Submittable; if there are no open calls, there likely will be in the next month or two? Subscribe and you’ll be among the first to know when submissions reopen!

https://ashortstorylong.submittable.com/submit