Literary Laundry :: NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines
Literary Laundry
E-mail: info[at]literarylaundry[dot]com
Simultaneous submissions: yes Email submissions: no Online submissions: yes (see website) Reading period: 6/15-9/1; 12/1-3/1 Response time: within 3 months of when our submission cycle closes Payment: no Contests: yes (see website) Founded: 2010 Issues per year: 2
Publisher’s description: We believe that literature should strive to re-conceptualize the world and render with nuance its complexities. Literary work must evolve the poignancy with which the reader experiences life. Unfortunately, much contemporary literature, galvanized by the perverted specter of “make it new,” has prioritized novelty over potency. At best, such literature conveys an attitude in place of the intellectual wonder that underlies meaningful writing. We have established Literary Laundry to promote the literature that we, as readers, crave: masterful writing that can hold discourse with great literary and intellectual traditions while still engaging the complexities of our world today.
Recent issues:
In this, its newest issue (Volume 2 Issue 1, Autumn 2011), Literary Laundry continues to pursue the overwhelming question: for what “sake” should literature exist? The works selected for this issue underscore the intellectually transformative power of the word, charting the capacity of literature to dramatize the processes by which we construct both meaning and reality. It offers only tentative answers, but asserts without timidity that art for art’s sake is nothing but a fallacy. This issue also inaugurates a new “Critical Reflections” section that will supplement the poetry, prose-fiction, and one-act drama already published by Literary Laundry.
Contemporary art misunderstands its quest for novelty. The new is inherently relational, and as such, requires a point of contrast in order to assert its claims to innovation and difference. In this, its newest issue (Volume 1 Issue 2, Spring 2011), Literary Laundry continues in an exploration of contemporary literature that holds discourse with great intellectual traditions while still engaging the complexities of our world today. The poetry, short-stories, and one-act dramas that it features aspire to both daring and difficulty as they evoke the intellectual wonder that the journal’s editors regard as the foundation of artistic poignancy.