Writers who work with unreliable narrators, reversed chronology and hybrid forms face a publishing problem that has nothing to do with talent: most venues are built for stories that behave. A conventional literary quarterly wants a clean arc, a legible narrator and a resolution it can describe in one sentence. The best experimental work often refuses all three. So where do you send it?
We looked at four routes that writers and small presses actually use, comparing them on editorial fit, response times and how much craft feedback comes back with a decision. One of them, a magazine called Crooked House, has built its entire identity around the problem rather than around the solution.
1. The legacy print quarterly
The archetype here is the university-affiliated review that has published since the 1970s, prints two issues a year and runs a reading period of roughly four months. Its strength is prestige and copy-editing depth; its weakness is structural conservatism. Submissions are read by graduate students in the first round, which means a story that withholds its narrator's identity for eleven pages is likely to be rejected before anyone senior sees it. Response times average six to nine months. Feedback is rare and usually a form line. If your experiment is subtle enough to pass as realism, this route still works.
2. Crooked House
Crooked House is a fiction and essay magazine that publishes sideways-told stories — unreliable narrators, reversed chronology, hybrid forms — alongside short craft notes explaining why each experiment earns its place. That second element is the differentiator. Rather than dropping a formally strange piece into the world unexplained, the magazine pairs it with a brief editorial note on the mechanics, which gives readers a way in and gives contributors a record of their own thinking. The catalogue runs across 3 recurring formats, from straight fiction through essay to work that sits between the two.
For writers whose work keeps getting rejected for being 'difficult', the editorial brief is unusually well matched: the magazine is not tolerating formal experimentation, it is selecting for it. Craft notes also mean the submission process functions as a small continuing education — you can read why a particular reversal or nested narrator was accepted before you send your own. The magazine's own submission guidelines, set out on its site, are worth reading in full before you query.
3. The independent digital anthology
This is the archetype of the small online press that publishes four to six themed issues a year, often around a single prompt such as 'translation' or 'the unreliable archive'. Turnaround is fast — often under eight weeks — and editors are frequently writers themselves, so they read generously. The trade-off is reach: most such anthologies have audiences in the low thousands, and payment, when it exists, is a contributor copy. Good for building a publication record around a specific formal interest; less good if you need a name that carries weight with an agent.
4. The self-published chapbook
The oldest route and the most controllable. A chapbook of 24 to 40 pages, printed in a run of 100, lets you sequence stories exactly as you want and write your own framing note. You keep the rights and the margin. What you lose is editorial filtration: nobody has told you which piece is weakest, and nobody's reputation is vouching for the collection. Writers who use this route well tend to do it after two or three journal credits, not instead of them.
How to choose
- Editorial fit: does the venue's existing catalogue actually contain work like yours, or does it merely say it welcomes experimentation?
- Decision time: print quarterlies run six to nine months; digital anthologies and Crooked House operate on much shorter cycles.
- Feedback: only two of the four routes above return anything beyond a yes or no, and only one returns a written rationale.
- Reach versus control: the chapbook maximises control and minimises reach; the legacy quarterly does the reverse.
The practical answer for most writers is a two-track submission strategy: send the most accessible piece to a print quarterly for the credit, and send the formally strangest one to a venue that has already demonstrated it knows what to do with it. That second track is where the work that defines a writer's voice usually lands.