Best Fiction Literary Magazines in 2026

Online magazine for Fiction,

Lightspeed is a digital science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF—and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales.

Submission guidelines →

Print magazine for Fiction,

Published three times a year by the Georgia State University Department of English, each issue features poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews with the most compelling writers working today.

Submission guidelines →

Print & Online magazine for Fiction,

Able Muse predominantly publishes metrical poetry and poetry translation complemented by art and photography, fiction and non-fiction including essays, book reviews and interviews with a focus on metrical and formal poetry. We are looking for well-crafted poems of any length or subject that employ skillful and imaginative use of meter and rhyme, executed in a contemporary idiom, that reads as naturally as your free verse poems.

Submission guidelines →

Print & Online magazine for Fiction,

Clarkesworld is a monthly science fiction and fantasy magazine first published in October 2006. Each issue contains interviews, thought-provoking articles, two reprints, and at least four or five works of original fiction. Our fiction is also available in ebook editions/subscriptions, audio podcasts, print issues, and in our annual print/ebook anthologies.

Submission guidelines →

Print magazine for Fiction,

Bard College's literary journal Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters.

Submission guidelines →

Print magazine for Fiction,

The Massachusetts Review is one of the nation's leading literary magazines, distinctive in joining the highest level of artistic concern with pressing public issues. As The New York Times observed, "It is amazing that so much significant writing on race and culture appears in one magazine." MR was named one of the top ten literary journals in 2008 by the Boston Globe.

Submission guidelines →

Print magazine for Fiction,

Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is America's oldest continuously published literary quarterly. SR has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent: we published excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor's first novels, and the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman.

Submission guidelines →

Online magazine for Fiction,

Beneath Ceaseless Skies publishes “literary adventure fantasy”: stories with a secondary-world setting and some fantasy feel, but written with a literary approach.

Submission guidelines →

Online magazine for Fiction,

Uncanny Magazine is an online Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine featuring passionate SF/F fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, provocative nonfiction, and a deep investment in the diverse SF/F culture. Each issue contains intricate, experimental stories and poems with verve and imagination that elicit strong emotions and challenge beliefs, from writers of every conceivable background.

Submission guidelines →

Print magazine for Fiction,

The Denver Quarterly is a well-regarded, avant-garde literary journal based at the University of Denver. Founded in 1966 by novelist John Edward Williams.

Submission guidelines →

Print magazine for Fiction,

The Michigan Quarterly Review is an eclectic interdisciplinary journal of arts and culture that seeks to combine the best of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction with outstanding critical essays on literary, cultural, social, and political matters.

Submission guidelines →

Print & Online magazine for Fiction,

The Carolina Quarterly has been publishing established and emergent writers for 65 years. Pieces published in The Carolina Quarterly have appeared in New Stories from the South, Best of the South, Poetry Daily, O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prizes, and Best American Short Stories.

Submission guidelines →

Print magazine for Fiction,

Epiphany is committed to publishing literary work, wherever it may fall on the spectrum from experimental to traditional, that is realized both in its vision and its devotion to artistry. We are especially open to writers whose explorations of new territory may not yet have found validation elsewhere.

Submission guidelines →

Print magazine for Fiction,

Founded in 1980, Sonora Review is one of the oldest student-run literary journals in the country. Former staff members include Antonya Nelson, Robert Boswell, Richard Russo, Tony Hoagland, David Foster Wallace, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Tim Peterson, and Richard Siken. Work originally printed in Sonora Review has appeared in Best of the West and Best American Poetry, and has won O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes.

Submission guidelines →

Print & Online magazine for Fiction,

A Public Space seeks work that is brave and unexpected. We are interested in writing that uncovers the extraordinary in the everyday, provides a rare glimpse, exposes an unexpected truth, or puts forth a daring hypothesis.

Submission guidelines →