Open Reading Period

Lanternfish Press is currently closed to unsolicited manuscripts.

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Lanternfish Press Call for Submissions

Lanternfish is seeking gothic and speculative fiction that pushes genre boundaries, dark historical fiction, and magical realism.* We are also interested in intersectional memoir.

We enjoy delicious language, weird protagonists, a strong sense of place, and great worldbuilding. We look for writing that transcends borders, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. The best way to get a sense of what we’re after is to get to know our catalog.

We would love to see more writing by and about migrants and refugees, whether fiction or memoir.

Novella manuscripts should fall between 20-40K words and novel manuscripts between 60-90K. Memoirs may be submitted at any length between 20-90K words.

How to Submit

Please submit the full manuscript in .docx form at our Submittable portal, along with a cover letter and short bio.

Only one manuscript per author during the open subs period, please. Additional manuscripts from the same author will not be considered. Revised versions of manuscripts submitted earlier in the window will not be considered either, so make sure the version you submit first is the one you’re committed to.

We encourage simultaneous submissions. If you receive an offer from another publisher, however, please notify us promptly.

We are a small and neurospicy staff, and our reading process can be slow. Our sincere apologies for this. If you have not received a response within six months of submission, you can assume that your work is no longer under consideration.

*In the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez’s sainted grandmother:

Interviewer: How would you describe the search for a style that you went through after Leaf Storm and before you were able to write One Hundred Years of Solitude?

García Márquez: …I had an idea of what I always wanted to do, but there was something missing and I was not sure what it was until one day I discovered the right tone—the tone that that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was based on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness…

Interviewer: How did she express the fantastic so naturally?

García Márquez: What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write One Hundered Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.

Interviewer: There also seems to be a journalistic quality to that technique or tone. You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something that you have picked up from journalism?

García Márquez: That’s a journalistic trick that you can also apply to literature. If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you… When I was very small, there was an electrician who came to the house. I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he used to suspend himself from the electrical posts. My grandmother used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies. But when I was writing [One Hundred Years of Solitude], I discovered that if I didn’t say the butterflies were yellow, people woludn’t believe it.

—Paris Review, Art of Fiction interview, 1981