Current issue
Inside the issue
Claudia Tong’s To Be Or Not To Be is the cover and also the last piece in the issue.
One author, Claudia Tong, has published here before.
From the editors
This month, Neon & Smoke sits at the intersection of horror and speculative.
It’s an issue where our characters face monsters (internal and external), real and imagined, obstacles, and circumstances beyond their control.
Some of them wish for second chances; others refuse to give them.
You’ll root for some; you’ll cry for others. And the rest… you’ll be glad you don’t walk in their shoes.
Ten authors. All of them. Walking through the smoke. We invite you to journey with them.
Our newest feature, Author Spotlight, continues with Isabel Fontes and Jimmy Frohman. You’ll also find Jimmy’s work in this issue.
Though fiction has closed, it will reopen next month with a special call: Our Annual Love Issue. This call welcomes fiction writers, poets, and visual artists. We want the love you saved and the love you should have left behind.
This call will only be open for 30 days, so make sure you don’t miss the window.
As you know, we’ve redesigned our site and introduced a couple new features. And we aren’t finished. We have more plans before the end of the year.
Neon & Smoke continues to grow. We appreciate your growing with us.
We hope to hear from you: in our submission queue, via email, or somewhere on social media.
Until then, keep it smoky!
— T & J
We read for the piece that made someone nervous to send it.
Where the editors say what they are actually looking for, at more length than a guidelines page allows.
Literary magazines often describe the work they want in beautiful, ambitious language—but writers can still finish reading the guidelines with no clear idea whether their story belongs. This post examines the gap between mission statements and useful submission guidance, why greater editorial transparency benefits both writers and magazines, and why sometimes the confusion is not the writer’s fault.
In print
Our first anthology. If you like what the magazine does, this is the part you can put on a shelf.
“Human beings don’t fit cleanly into categories, and we’ve never understood why fiction should.”
T, What We Mean By “Half Genre / Always Lit”
Newsletter
One email when a new issue lands. Nothing else.
