Wallstrait
A Literary Journal of Hard-to-Define Fiction
Wallstrait is an online literary journal featuring bold, innovative, and hard-to-define fiction. We publish biweekly and respond quickly.
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr [...]
— Finnegans Wake
James Joyce
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"Wallstrait" has been "defined" by scholars as an adjective referring to Wall Street or the Wall Street crash, or maybe Walkin Street in Boston. Or tall. No, straight. Well-straight? Straight as a wall? Or a Joycean portmanteau of wall (meaning wall) + strait (meaning difficulty, crisis; or narrow sea-passage)?
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"Wallstrait" is hard to define. So is great fiction. Our mission is to publish great fiction. We're not overthinking it. If you can't easily describe your work in a one-line pitch, we'd love to hear from you. We welcome all genres and pay $25 upon publication.
— New Fiction —
— What We Publish —
We publish a new piece every two weeks. ​We welcome flash fiction, longer stories, and hybrid experimental stuff you can't quite define. We encourage first-time authors to submit.
Wallstrait is a paying market. We pay $25 per story.
Everything we publish comes from unsolicited submissions. We don't reach out to established writers. We don't have a "Slush Pile." We have a Submissions Pool, and it's the lifeblood of our journal. We depend on your submissions to keep this thing going.
Like the name of our journal, what we publish is hard to define. We publish short fiction — we know that much, at least. Typically, 500 - 3000 words is our sweet spot, but we'll consider stories up to 5,000 words. See our Submissions page for more info RE: logistics, guidelines, and other assorted details and potentially interesting miscellanea.
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As for genre, we'll consider almost* any type of fiction. If you're not sure how to classify it, that's even better.
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Send us your best work. We'll read and publish short stories in the realm of action, adventure, coming-of-age, crime, detective, drama, dystopia, fairytale, fantasy (high/low/second-world/portal/Eldritch/magical realism/paranormal; just go for it), gothic, horror, humor literary, mystery, noir, philosophy, psychology, politics, realism, romance, satire, science fiction, steampunk, supernatural, thriller/suspense, tragedy, Western, etc. Send us your work. If your genre isn't on this list, just pretend it is and send it.
If you can't figure out what genre you're writing in, we're all about that! We want to read it now. Yesterday, if possible.
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* Exceptions: We absolutely will NOT consider AI-generated fiction.