Editor Interview: The Manchester Review

quality literary fiction

In the US, we're fans of The Paris Review, Tin House, A Public Space, Crazyhorse, The Chicago Review, One Story, The Missouri Review and plenty more. We like magazines that publish diverse styles and writers, that are open to publishing unknowns as well as big names.

Kevin Barry, Jennifer Egan, Lorrie Moore, Anthony Doerr, Junot Diaz, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, Ben Marcus, Hilary Mantel, Kelly Link, Paul Murray, Richard Ford, Chris Adrian...

While we publish well-known writers (Martin Amis, Colm Toibin, Ali Smith, Jennifer Egan) we pay real attention to the slush pile, so you will always find new names in our issues. We match our fiction and poetry with artworks from emerging artists, so our issues are beautiful as well as interesting. We're one of the few high-tier journals in the UK to exist online, and thus free to read, which guarantees us a high readership each time.

Read our guidelines and send appropriate material within the stated submission times - no children's books, fantasy novels or film scripts, please! Don't go overboard with a cover letter: the work will speak for itself. Have a read through our archives - they're all online and free - to see what we've selected in the past. And - obviously - proofread your work before you send it. Avoid peculiar fonts and layouts - they won't work with our site design. And send us work in Word format where possible rather than PDF - it's easier on our end.

We don't have a particular house style but we tend to favour stories between 3000 and 6000 words: we have published flash fiction, but only occasionally, and we don't accept novellas. We like work where the writer has a great eye for language and characterization, whatever the topic or style happens to be. It's a cliché, but we've got to be hooked from the first couple of lines, which isn't to say that you mist start with a very dramatic incident, but that your prose has to strike us as confident and compelling from the beginning.

Sending work outside submission windows; immediately following a rejection slip with more work (we will only read one submission per writer per submission period); sticking our submissions address on their promotional mailing lists!

We like a polite note, with perhaps a couple of lines outlining the highlights of your publishing career, but we don't need anything lengthy - much of the work we've published via the slush pile has come from people with very minimal cover letters. You don't need to wow us that way - your work itself is the way to impress us. There's never any need to explain your story in the cover letter, either: if it needs explanation, it's probably not ready yet. At the same time, a blank email with a story attached feels rather too robotic. Strike a balance!

We can generally tell if the piece isn't right within the first few paragraphs, but we'll mostly read through to the end anyway, unless the piece is clearly riddled with grammatical, spelling or typographical errors. If any of us feel a piece is a contender, it'll go to an editorial meeting with all three editors and we'll share the work and come to a joint decision.

If one of us likes a piece we'll share it with the others and we'll all decide in an editorial meeting which pieces are finally selected for publication. Occasionally we'll query something with an author, but usually a piece is accepted as is.

We have a three-month turn around, so I'll read in bursts - mostly after our submission window has closed. The run-up to publication involves a lot of meetings and back-and-forth before we finalize the contents. During submission periods it's quieter, and we'll monitor the account for mix-ups - somebody who's forgotten to attach their story, for instance - and get back to those writers. but otherwise the action generally happens when we're closed to the public. Between times I'm always busy coordinating our event-review section, which is specific to Manchester - we have a team of local reviewers who cover cultural events for us on a rolling basis, and occasional book reviewers.