At Squalorly, we believe in solid writing. Period. So, suspend our disbelief and ground us in reality. Move, amaze, horrify, and educate us about the complex world in which we live. Bare your soul and bleed on the page.

We publish storytellers. Whether they are MFAs or ditch diggers is of little concern, so long as the words seem to have clawed their way onto the page, defying the will of the author, with little regard for sleep, safety or comfort. The words that we love have a mind of their own. They exist out of necessity and apologize for nothing. They are both careful and reckless and leave us screaming for more.

Squalorly is 100% independent. As in, we are staff funded and reader driven. We do this because we believe it is necessary and vital to our existence. We do this because we love the written word. We do this because we believe that literature deserves to be published beautifully and unobtrusively, no matter the medium. And, above all, we do this for you.

I’m a huge fan of the common man or woman in literature. Authors looking to impress me should submit stories or essays that deal with the trials and tribulations of everyday people. Prose should be polished and sharp. I do not enjoy excessive adjectives or dialogue tags, or too much time spent mulling about in description. The reality of the world we live in is what interests me. Reasonable jaunts into the fantastical are tolerable (see, for example, Jesse Ball’s novel Samedi The Deafness or Kevin Brockmeier’s short story The Ceiling), but I am bored rather quickly by works of straight science fiction and fantasy.

Authors I admire: Jim Harrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Grand, Tao Lin, Lynda Barry, Junot Diaz, James Gunn, Irvine Welsh, Hubert Selby, Jr., Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, and Spencer Holst.

As a fiction editor here at Squalorly, I’m looking for prose that reflects the fragmented, modern times in which we live. With an attention to detail, I want to be excited and engaged at a sentence level. Don’t bother with narcissistic submissions that ignore the world around us. Make me laugh, cry, whatever, just make me. For some of my own work, check out my website.

Authors I Admire: Marlon James, Lorrie Moore, John Jodzio, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chris Bachelder, Maggie Nelson and Lydia Davis.

I want to be introduced to both the bizarre and the mundane. Nothing excites me more than a writer taking something minute, some seemingly innocuous event, and expounding upon that moment with the type of language and lyricism that renders the reader incapacitated. When an author makes me stop and reread a sentence two or three times over, when I literally have to catch my breath after a certain descriptor is used or because of the way a certain sentence is constructed, that’s beauty to me. I crave the moment when I’m irrevocably awestricken by words. More than anything, I long to see the human condition amplified through literature.

Authors I admire: Don DeLillo, Matt Ruff, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Sam Shepard, Kurt Vonnegut, Elliot Perlman, James Ellroy, Tim O’Brien, Ken Kesey, Tobias Wolff, Jesse Ball, Lynda Barry.

Daniel Abbott, Garrett Dennert, Meghan McAfee, Kristina Pepelko, Seth Piccolo, Rachel Scheinke, Tyler Steimle