We believe in narrative as pilgrimage — a journey through wild and wounded places into strangeness and transformation. We read to arrive somewhere we haven’t been before, to glimpse life through another’s eyes in an attempt to understand. The work we’re drawn to is surreal, philosophical, sincere, and unforgettable — stories and essays that get under your skin and reach the heart of the human condition.

We see writers as essential voices in the fabric of society, articulating our delights and sufferings. Each piece we publish is accompanied by a brief interview with the author, offering readers a deeper sense of their world. Together, we hope they form a map of the strange pilgrimages we take through language and life.

꧁ WHAT WE PUBLISH ꧂

We publish one piece each week, alternating between flash and long-form writing:

🜂 Short Stories (up to 5000 words)

🜁 Essays / Narrative Nonfiction (up to 5000 words)

☉ Flash Fiction (under 1000 words)

☾ Flash CNF (under 1000 words)

We’re not married to any genre, structure, or subject. We love surreal, speculative, and fabulist stories; unhinged, lyric, and fragmented essays; voice-driven experimental narratives and slow-burn realism; cultural and literary criticism; hyper-intellectual riffs and children’s stories — so long as they move. If your work is honest, well-crafted, and offers something emotionally and intellectually vivid, we want to read it.

Some of the writers who guide our taste: Gabriel García Márquez, Susanna Clarke, Toni Morrison, Brian Doyle, Han Kang, Kelly Link, Lydia Davis, Roland Barthes, Franz Kafka, James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Geetanjali Shree, Leo Tolstoy, Mariana Enriquez, David Foster Wallace, Lidia Yuknavitch, Chuck Palahniuk, Clarice Lispector, Ted Chiang, Ali Smith, Milan Kundera, Saadat Hasan Manto, Karen Russell, Fernando Pessoa, and many, many others.

PAY ˗ˋˏ$ˎˊ˗

We pay all our contributors:

• $200 per short story/essay

• $50 per flash piece

Payments are made via PayPal within one week of publication.

Writers are at the center of everything we do, and raising our contributor payments is one of our highest priorities. If you’d like to help us grow, you can upgrade your subscription to paid, or make a one-time donation.

Submission Guidelinesજ⁀➴ ✉︎

We welcome submissions from anywhere in the world.

We publish one piece each week, which means we’re highly selective and read with care.

Simultaneous submissions are fine — just let us know immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

We do not currently accept previously published works. Self-published pieces (on your blog, Substack, etc.), however, are welcome.

All submissions are handled through our custom submission portal.

Submissions are always free for general categories. If you’d like to support the magazine, you can become a paid subscriber, leave a tip, or request paid editorial feedback. These options help us sustain the magazine and pay our writers.

Currently, our general response time is ~4 months. We offer a $10 Fast Response option, wherein we’ll respond within 4 weeks.

We nominate for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net.

Our Editorial Style-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈

We edit lightly and collaboratively. If we accept your piece, we may suggest small changes for clarity, flow, or line-level polish, but we only take on work that already feels complete and carefully revised.

Rights 𖤓☽˚.⋆

We ask for first serial rights and the right to archive your piece on our website (and, hopefully in time, in a print anthology). All rights revert to you upon publication. If your piece is reprinted elsewhere, we’d love an acknowledgment of Strange Pilgrims as the original publisher.

Short Note On Our Magazine’s Name𓇢𓆸

Strange Pilgrims takes its name from Gabriel García Márquez’s lesser-known short story collection. He remains our greatest influence, and the title is a small homage to him.

Contact Us ˗ˏˋ ꒰ ✉︎ ꒱ ˎˊ˗

Our inbox is always open for your queries. If you have any questions related to Strange Pilgrims, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via editors@strangepilgrims.com.