Scrib seeks work that explore the human experience with honesty & authenticity. Spirituality permeates our experiences and is therefore an inherent element in our art. We look for unique work that will connect on a personal level, provoke reflection about our lives, & linger in the viewer’s mind after reaching the end. Your work need not have tidy Sunday School answers or easy resolutions to be published; struggles, complexity, and ambiguity are part of the human experience, too.

We love work that is linguistically, intellectually, and emotionally demanding of the reader. We want literary fiction that grows in complexity upon each visitation; we enjoy ornate, cerebral, and voluptuous prose executed with thematic intent. Writers we admire are Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Tom Wolfe, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Tom Stoppard, Vladimir Nabokov and James Baldwin.

Every piece published in AZURE appears alongside a customized black & white sketch that is devised and executed by our in-house illustrator.

We publish poetry and essays from authors from around the world. The magazine is bilingual: all English texts will be translated into German (& vice versa). We publish texts which offer a new approach to the political and social landscape of the present day, texts that can dissolve existing boundaries or suggest new ones. They can make us question our beliefs, champion social justice and human rights, war and psychological violence, giving rise to provocative or soothing thoughts. We believe that all great literature is revolutionary and necessary.

We call ourselves an “alternative” magazine; that is to say: our purpose is to promote work that is thought-provoking and unconventional. We want the controversial and the radical, the unhinged and the bizarre; we want the obsessive, the compulsive, the pervasive, the combative, and the seductive. We believe that every work of quality art has a home where it belongs, and for the “alternative,” the Matador Review is a home.

Midwestern Gothic (ISSN 2159-8827) is a bi-annual print literary journal out of Chicago, Illinois, dedicated to featuring work about or inspired by the Midwest, by writers who live or have lived here. Midwestern Gothic aims to collect the very best in Midwestern writing in a way that has never been done before, cataloging the oeuvre of an often-overlooked region of the United States ripe with its own mythologies and tall tales.