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Small World City is a Dhaka, Bangladesh-based online literary magazine looking for speculative stories in the very different forms they take. We publish fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and art.

SWC publishes 4 times a year; every 3 months. Our issues are released on the 1st of February, May, August, and November. We accept submissions on a rolling basis, year-round; deadlines for individual issues are periodically announced on our social media pages.

Thank you for your interest in Small World City. At this time, we are ONLY considering submissions from Bangladeshi and POC authors.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We want unpublished works that take us out of the ordinary.

If you are submitting a translated work, please attach the original-language version.
Simultaneous submissions are okay as long as it is disclosed in your email.
If your submission is accepted, SWC retains the exclusive right to be the first publisher of your work. All other rights pertaining to the work remains with the author, who is the sole owner of the work.
Hybrid texts are welcome.

FICTION GUIDELINES

We are looking for speculative fiction—this is a broad, almost unlimited category which entails anything that pushes back against realist fiction. How much you want to push is wholly up to you. We welcome entirely imagined realms, as well as worlds precisely like our own, barring one small change. Give us the unnatural, the preternatural, the antinatural, however way it comes.

How to Submit: Email your submission to smallworldcity@gmail.com. Use the header format, “[FICTION] First name Last name – TITLE OF STORY”
Author Bio: Include your third-person author’s bio + relevant socials. You can also choose to be published anonymously
Author Photo: Include your author picture if you’d like one
Word Count: Up to 7,000 words
Language: English (for translations, see above)
Genres: Fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, pulp, utopian/dystopian, detective, alternate history, slipstream, magic realism, wuxia, black comedy, new weird… If you are unsure of what your genre is, all the better
File Format: DOCX, DOC, or PDF

Note: (1) Swear words are fine, violence is fine, erotic content is fine. (2) Every few issues, we will feature the occasional non-speculative story. This, however, is a hard sell, depending entirely on the tone and feel of the work as well as issue.

Here are some stories that we like:

“The Summer People,” Kelly Link
“The Dirty Kid,” Mariana Enríquez
Anything from One Thousand and One Nights (partial to “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad” cycle)
“The School,” Donald Barthelme
“I'm Waiting for You,” Kim Bo-Young
“Adventure,” Sherwood Anderson
“Let Shadows Slip Through,” Kali Napier
“The Book of Sand,” Jorge Luis Borges

NON-FICTION GUIDELINES

Our non-fiction criteria is two-fold. You can choose from either, or combine them. (1) We welcome reflective, philosophical, or confessional non-fiction that sheds light on corners of life unfamiliar to us: too strange to be true, too pathetic to have happened, too perfect... (See “Woven” by Lidia Yuknavitch, or “I Thought You Were a Poet” by Joshua Mehigan, to get an idea of this.)

(2) We are also looking for stories + essays revolving around speculative works. This includes film, TV, literature, music, comics, video games, theater, etc. We want something with a hypothesis; something to be argued. If you’ve grown up incessantly loving Wes Anderson and are now of the opinion that maybe he’s not all that great (and might be a racist?), then send it here.

How to Submit: Email your submission to smallworldcity@gmail.com. Use the header format, “[NONFICTION] First name Last name – TITLE OF PIECE”
How to Query: You may also send us a query first. Email your proposal to smallworldcity@gmail.com. Use the header format, “[QUERY] First name Last name – TOPIC”
Author Bio: Include your third-person author’s bio + relevant socials. You can also choose to be published anonymously
Author Photo: Include your author picture if you’d like one
Word Count: Up to 5,000 words
Language: English (for translations, see above)
File Format: DOCX, DOC, or PDF

Note: Swear words are fine, risqué content is fine. Refrain from hate speech.

Here are some examples of what we like:

“20 years on, a self-proclaimed Enid looks back at Ghost World,” The A.V. Club
“Imagining Sisyphus Happy: A Groundhog Day Retrospective,” Slant Magazine
“Woven,” Guernica
“I Thought You Were a Poet,” Poetry Magazine
“The Greatest Hip-Hop Album Of All Time Doesn’t Exist,” Stereogum
“Elegy for the Screenshot,” Screen Slate
“Mapping the Social: The Bedroom in the Japanese New Wave,” Offscreen

POETRY GUIDELINES

We are looking for literary and speculative poetry. As above, this is a broad, almost unlimited category entailing anything that challenges conventional poetry. This could mean an experimental, structure-challenging poem, or it could mean a formal-verse poem centered around ghosts and freaks and incantations. Give us poems of darkness and the strange. How you interpret it, or go about bringing it to us, is wholly up to you.

Please submit no more than 5 poems at a time.

How to Submit: Email your submission to smallworldcity@gmail.com. Use the header format, “[POETRY] First name Last name – TITLE OF POEM”
Author Bio: Include your third-person author’s bio + relevant socials. You can also choose to be published anonymously
Author Photo: Include your author picture if you’d like one
Word Count: Any length up to 200 lines
Language: English (for translations, see above)
Genres: Fantastical, slipstream, science fiction, horror, mythological, weird, gothic, melancholic… If you are unsure of what your genre is, all the better
File Format: DOCX, DOC, or PDF

Here are some poems that we like:

“Goblin Market,” Christina Rossetti
“Night of the Living, Night of the Dead,” Kim Addonizio
“The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple,” Patricia Lockwood
“Annabel Lee,” Edgar Allan Poe
“[you fit into me],” Margaret Atwood
“The Two-Headed Calf,” Laura Gilpin
“A Day Is Vast,” Jane Hirshfield
“Lying My Head Off,” Cate Marvin
“Elm,” Sylvia Plath

ART GUIDELINES

Art submissions that are accepted will be used as illustrations for short stories, essays, poems, and more, throughout the magazine. It is highly advisable to look through our website to get a good feel for what we might want. Anything AI-generated will not be accepted.

If the art is accompanied by text, or story, the piece could be considered as a hybrid work or comic (see Fahim Anzoon Rumman’s “The Secret” and far2short’s “Sweeter Than Poison” as examples of this.)

How to Submit: Email your submission to smallworldcity@gmail.com. Use the header format, “[ART] First name Last name – TITLE OF ART PIECE”
How to Query: You may also send us a query first. Email your proposal to smallworldcity@gmail.com. Use the header format, “[QUERY] First name Last name – TOPIC”
Illustrator Bio: Include your third-person illustrator’s bio + relevant socials. You can also choose to be published anonymously
Author Photo: Include your author picture if you’d like one
File Format: JPEG, JPG, PNG, GIF, MP4, MOV, or MKV

Note: Violence is fine, risqué content is fine.

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

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