Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism

We are looking for fabulist flash fiction and short stories. We like stories that favor the unusual over the usual; we like stories that create a milieu where anything can happen. Stories can take the form of myth or fable. They can invent or suggest an unreal ambience or describe a realistic landscape gripped by a surreal or unexplained event. We are fond of Calvino, South American Magical Realism, and Talmudic legends. Kafka and Orwell now and will forever totally rock. Some contemporary favorite reads you might have missed include “Flying Leap” by Judy Budnitz, “Carmen Dog” by Carol Emshwiller, “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” by Robert Olen Butler, “Wild Life” by Molly Gloss, “Serial Killer Days” by David Prill, “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A.S. Byatt, “ Riding the Red” by Nalo Hopkinson, “The Child Garden” by Geoff Ryman, and the “Interfictions” and “Polyphony” anthologies. The list of writers of stories we enjoy numbers in the thousands.

We are looking for essays on New Fabulism (or the range of imaginative literature generally referred to as slipstream, new weird, magic realism, fabulist and a literature of the fantastic difficult to categorize). Essays can be academic or non-academic, personal or critical but must illuminate with originality, insight and intelligence work in this range of literature. Our preference is for work that presents a view of how this literature is so vital in gaining an understanding of inner experience throughout history and casts a light on what it means to be human. We're interested in features that focus on neglected or underappreciated authors whose work best exemplifies achievements in this arena.

I must warn poets ready to submit beforehand, however, that I have forsworn a promise to favor poetry of a sinister bent. Phantom Drift prefers poetry composed in the new fabulist tradition. As editor, I will welcome work readers might label new weird, slipstream, and/or fantastic. Poetry that demonstrates what Roger Caillois has referred to as “the impression of irreducible strangeness,” and that inspires what Franco-Bulgarian structuralist critic Tzevetan Todorov characterized as a “duration of uncertainty’’ between strange and marvelous explanations in the mind of the reader will be especially prized here. In part, Phantom Drift exists because its editors wish to found a journal devoted to work that shatters or valuably distorts reality, whether this means surrealism, magical realism, fantastique, or bizarrerie. We value writing whose imagination is unafraid to shift shape, writing that generates unique alternatives to and uncharted voyages away from conventional realism.