Best Short Fiction Literary Magazines in 2025

Online magazine for Short Fiction,

The Incandescent Review is an entirely non-profit, teen-run literary magazine, and our team hails from across the globe: from San Jose to Shanghai, from Atlanta to Athens. Our purpose is to create a platform for teens and young adults to express their opinions and emotional response to world issues in the form of poetry, prose, visual art, and more.

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Print magazine for Short Fiction,

Hayden’s Ferry Review looks for well-crafted work that takes risks, challenges readers, and engages us emotionally and artistically. A small portion of our publication is solicited from established authors, while the majority of our contributors are chosen from the thousands of manuscripts we receive each year.

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Print & Online magazine for Short Fiction,

Curlew Quarterly, New York’s literary and photo journal, publishes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, which includes nearly all forms of reporting and journalism. Launched in August of 2017, our printed journal and online Daily celebrate the lives, homes, and work of poets, writers, and distinct professionals living in New York, NY.

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Online magazine for Short Fiction,

Invisible City is an online publication of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco that publishes in the fall and spring. We seek work that encourages us to see the world from new perspectives and different angles, ones that we may not have previously considered or imagined.

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Print & Online magazine for Short Fiction,

Seaside Gothic is a quarterly literary magazine from the edge of the sea where the frontier of civilisation meets the wild of the water.

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Print magazine for Short Fiction,

The Layered Onion is looking for submissions for their publication, The Shallot: Journal of Mental Health, Art, and Literature. The Shallot’s goal is to amplify the voices of artists with lived mental and emotional health experience and accepts poetry and short stories/fiction under 1,001 words. The Shallot is part of The Layered Onion, a social benefit organization dedicated to uplifting the voices of artists with mental and emotional health struggles.

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Online magazine for Short 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.

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Print & Online magazine for Short Fiction,

For over sixty years, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine has been one of the foremost publishers of mystery, crime, and suspense short stories, offering mystery fiction of the broadest range and the highest quality.

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Print magazine for Short Fiction,

Southern Humanities Review publishes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. $1,000 and publication in SHR will be awarded annually to one poem of witness by an American poet. Full guidelines on our website.

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Print & Online magazine for Short Fiction,

Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine continues to bring together celebrated authors, new talent, and award-winning stories, poems, and articles, as it has since its launch in 1930. Originally published as Astounding Stories of Science Fiction, Analog remains the unparalleled literary magazine in the genre, and rewards readers with realistic stories that reflect both the highest standards of scientific accuracy and the far reaches of the imagination, as well as lively articles about current research on the cutting edge of science.

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Print & Online magazine for Short Fiction,

Founded in 1952, Grub Street is Towson University's student-run literary magazine that is published annually. We accept work from anyone and especially look to promote voices from new writers. We feature poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual art, essays, and plays in our print and online editions.

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