Beyond - An Anthology of Short Stories

Deadline 30th of April 2020 (Midnight GMT)

This anthology is dedicated to re-imagining and recovering the future, and all of its exhilarating, bewildering and unsettling possibilities. Rejecting the facile assumptions of neoliberal technological optimists who propagate the limited novelty of ‘innovation’ as progress, we’re looking for work that proceeds from the more disconcerting notion that our current paradigm is one of chaos and disorder. This could include fiction that deals with the various symptoms of this perceptible crisis; polarization, disaffection, alienation, ecological collapse, sensory over-stimulation, the destabilization of perception, the increasingly fraught and contended field of desire, and psychopathology in all of its quotidian manifestations. The psychological and material terrain which we inhabit is continuously in flux, and demands new forms of sublimation.

These are some of the basic themes we have in mind, but they cannot really be more than mere guidelines. What we’re after is prose that embodies a form of aesthetic resistance to the institutionalized mediocrity which pervades neoliberal society, what the late Mark Fisher designated as imaginative work that acknowledges and accelerates what is new without recourse to nostalgia and pastiche.

We purposefully leave this call for submissions brief, because it’s highly likely that what we’re looking for hasn’t been written (or imagined) yet.

We hope to receive a broad range of submissions to consider and reflect on.

Criteria

Original short fiction in English* of between 4000 - 6000 words

Please send all submissions to the email address listed below as a Word or Pdf document.

Use the following formula in the subject heading: ‘Submission - Title, First Name + Last name’

Please include a covering letter with some brief biographical information (150 - 300 words max.)

We commit to reading all submissions, and will offer feedback (if requested) irrespective of the decision to publish.

Deadline 30th of April 2020 (Midnight GMT)

*We have plans to accept submissions in French and German in the future, however this is not possible as of yet.