Mickey Hess | Instead of buying nothing, he bought something. Tents in the Wal-Mart parking lot, protesters demonstrating for one day of no purchases….
Suzanne Marie Hopcroft | Dear Sylvia, It’s really rotten stuff, what you’re trying to do.
Melissa Ross | In our carnivorous garden in the country, a slew of beehives bobbed and glowed sensually in the dark, buzzing like tiny floating homes.
Natanya Pulley | I thought I made those lips. You small and new to my arms. “She has your nose” everyone saying to your mother, and to me, “those lips. Those lips.”
She steals. I watch her in the wine store. Instead of going for a normal-sized bottle, she takes a showcased magnum shaped like a black missile. Somehow it stays inside her flouncy skirt. On the counter is a silver platter with three, pie-shaped cuts of brie and a fan of domino crackers. She filches the …
Chad Simpson | that boy i mentioned who sizzled his brain by way of a joint stuffed with formaldehyde-laced weed? the one who spent some time in the hospital recovering and then re-entered the world all blissified, the walking and peaceful undead?
Jason Olsen currently teaches writing and literature at Utah State University-College of Eastern Utah in Price, Utah. His work has appeared in Indiana Review, Mid American Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review.
T. J. McIntyre The Ficus tree had not been there a moment ago. “Now, where’d you come from?” The Ficus didn’t answer. Charles shivered as a soft breeze blew down from the bathroom’s heater vent overhead and over his thin wrinkled skin, ruffling the little green waxy leaves on the Ficus’ branches that appeared …
by Randall Brown
Its window looked out over the stone chapel of the Order of the Holy Child, and inside completely bare, only a tangle of electrical cords, not even an outlet. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the snake appears to Eve walking erect, before God curses him, but these weren’t snakes. They were nerves.
A foul mist had been settling over the neighborhood all week, falling out of the sky at irregular intervals several times a day. The neighbors blamed it on me. They said my lawn was an abomination to their god. I could accept that it was unlikely to win yard of the month, what with the crabgrass and the foxtail and the chickweed and the clover, but it seemed a little harsh to call it an abomination.
Don Hucks was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2009. His fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, including decomP, Bartleby Snopes, Bananafish, and Pindeldyboz.
Eckleburg Workshops in Fiction
Short Story Workshop
Short Short Story Workshop
Novel: From Start to Finish Workshop
Magic Realism Workshop
Writing Sex in Literary Fiction: Are Your Sex Scenes Essential or Gratuitous?
About Eckleburg Fiction
Eckleburg runs online, daily content of original fiction and hybrid including work from Richard Peabody, Cris Mazza, Eurydice, Rick Moody, Steve Almond and more…. Read hard. Write hard. “Being a good lit citizen means supporting lit pubs. Donate. Buy. I’m going to show some #AWP17 mags that you need to support…”
FICTION SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
We accept previously unpublished and polished prose up to 8,000 words year round, unless announced otherwise. We are always looking for tightly woven short works under 2,000 words and short-shorts around 500 words. No multiple submissions but simultaneous is fine as long as you withdraw the submission asap through the submissions system. During the summer and winter months, we run our Writers Are Readers, Too, fundraiser when submissions are open only to subscribers. During the fall and spring, we open submissions for regular unsolicited submissions.
Note: We consider fiction, poetry and essays that have appeared in print, online magazines, public forums, and public access blogs as already being published. Rarely do we accept anything already published and then only by solicitation. We ask that work published at Eckleburg not appear elsewhere online, and if republished in print, original publication credit is given to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. One rare exception is our annual Gertrude Stein Award, which allows for submissions of previously published work, both online and print.
ANNUAL GERTRUDE STEIN AWARD IN FICTION
1st Prize $1000 and publication. Accepting entries year round. Eligibility: All stories in English no more than 8,000 words are eligible. No minimum word count. Stories published previously in print or online venues are eligible if published after January 1, 2011. Stories can be submitted by authors, editors, publishers, and agents. Simultaneous and multiple submissions allowed. Each individual story must be submitted separately, with separate payment regardless of word count. Eckleburg editors, staff, interns and current students of The Johns Hopkins University are not eligible for entry.
ANNUAL FRANZ KAFKA AWARD IN MAGIC REALISM
1st prize $1000 and publication. Accepting entries year round. Eligibility: All stories in English and magic realism no more than 8,000 words are eligible. No minimum word count. Stories published previously in print or online venues are eligible if published after January 1, 2011. Stories can be submitted by authors, editors, publishers, and agents. Simultaneous and multiple submissions allowed. Each individual story must be submitted separately, with separate payment regardless of word count. Eckleburg editors, staff and interns are not eligible for entry. Submissions for the Franz Kafka Award are currently closed.
NOVEL AND STORY COLLECTION MANUSCRIPTS
We publish short works at Eckleburg. At this time, we do not publish novel, long memoir, essay collections, story collections or poetry collections. We do offer manuscript workshops at The Eckleburg Workshops. If you are looking to place a manuscript, we can suggest several excellent small and large presses whose excellent books are promoted through our Eckleburg Book Club — i.e., Random House, Graywolf Press, Coffeehouse, Tinhouse, St. Martins Press and more.
Proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses
Supporter of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts