We're thrilled to announce that Nightboat Books is considering prose manuscripts from May 15th-July 9th, 2023. Please familiarize yourself with our editorial affinities by checking out our catalogue. Buy our books! Borrow them from the library! Read them!
We're looking for innovative prose writing, including inter-genre/hybrid writing, book-length essays, collaborations, and manuscripts of formally experimental fiction and/or nonfiction. Prose translations, international anglophone writing, and multi-lingual texts welcome. No strict forms. No limits. Your manuscript might include poetry and poetic sections, but we're not considering full length poetry collections at this time. You're welcome to include images in your manuscript, but please note that we are not able to print in full-color.
The kinds of work we are are excited to encounter might include, but isn’t limited to:
Writing that illustrates and proliferates complexity in our world
Writing that gestures towards or reports back from other worlds
Writing that documents past / present / future periods of political uprising & experiment
Writing that builds up / writing that tears down
Writing that investigates & complicates existing narratives around identity
Writing that torques conventional prose forms or genre
Writing at the intersection of the material & the metaphysical
Writing that borrows from or investigates other mediums e.g. visual art or performance
Writing that cannot be easily categorized by any algorithm
Honestly the weirder the better—surprise us!
Examples of Prose books from Nightboat Books:
The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia
Virgil Kills by Ronald V. Wilson
Honey Mine by Camille Roy
Neotenica by Joon Oluchi Lee
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell & Ned Asta
Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil
Phototaxis by Olivia Tapiero, translated by Kit Schluter
Please include the following with your manuscript (of up to 300 pages, double spaced) through Submittable.
(a) your name and contact information (b) a short professional biography (100 words maximum) (c) a description of the book/project (150 words maximum).
There is a $15 submission fee that goes towards fairly compensating screeners, readers, and editors. We are offering 10 fee waivers for Black and Indigenous writers on a first come first served basis. To request a fee waiver, please write to info@nightboat.org with the subject line "Prose Reading Period Fee Waiver." We plan to accept 1-2 manuscripts. Authors will receive a $1,000 advance and royalty contract.
We look forward to reading your work!
Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk. We are committed to publishing complicated work by a diverse group of writers. We encourage people of all backgrounds, ages, races, ethnicities, gender and sexual identities, and disability statuses to submit.