We’re thrilled to announce that Nightboat Books is considering prose manuscripts from June 9th-August 1st, 2025. 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 manuscripts of formally experimental fiction and/or nonfiction. We welcome prose translations, international anglophone writing, and multi-lingual texts. We’re most excited about projects that disrupt our expectations of what prose can do. 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. We’re looking for text based projects. 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 emerges from the liminal

    Writing that builds up / writing that tears down

    Writing that torques conventional prose forms or genre

    Writing that examines & perverts existing narratives around identity

    Writing that documents past / present / future periods of political uprising

    Writing that investigates or borrows from other mediums: visual art, music, film, performance

    Writing that searches for and troubles the sacred / sacrilegious

    Writing that illustrates and proliferates complexity in our world

    Writing that glitches the algorithm

    Writing that proposes

    instigates

    bewilders

    seduces

Examples of Prose books from Nightboat Books:

   Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter

   Crocosmia by Miranda Mellis

   Residual by Tisa Bryant

   !PóNK! by Marcus Clayton

   The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia

   Dreaming in the Fault Zone by Eleni Stecopoulos

   Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook

   Tree Spirits, Grass Spirits by Hiromi Ito, translated by Jon L. Pitt

   Greasepaint by Hannah Levene

   The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell & Ned Asta

   Honey Mine by Camille Roy

   Phototaxis by Olivia Tapiero, translated by Kit Schluter

   Virgil Kills by Ronald V. Wilson

   Neotenica by Joon Oluchi Lee

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 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.