FOMITE

Submissions

If the green light is on, we’re open for submissions.  

If the red light is on the home page, we’re so overwhelmed at the moment with long submissions and second and third drafts, that we have to call a temporary halt to reading new material. Please check back later. 

At this point, I (Marc) am the only one requesting, receiving or reading manuscripts. Consequently, acceptance comes down to "what I like" — and no accounting for tastes. 

To submit

If you want Fomite to consider a manuscript, email me a description of the work, the opening section, and your favorite writing in the book.

Novels

We’re interested in non-trivial works, serious, and seriously funny books, chronicles of souls hacking through the jungles they encounter.

Short Story Collections

The same might be said here as above, but within the peculiar exigencies of the short story form. Linked stories which approximate a novel, or wildly differing tales which approximate the madhouse out there – either will do, as long as they are brilliantly written. Flash fiction which doesn’t cohere beyond the initial flash probably not. We are interested in collaborations between authors and artists for any interior graphics.

Poetry

As with short story collections, we are open to many forms from haiku to epic. Again, we are especially interested in text/graphic art collaborations in which the latter does not “illustrate” the poetry, but is a parallel meditation on the same theme. We prefer poems unified around a particular theme, such as poems about music, or death, or animals, or some particular person, or poetic studies of a particular place, or social group….You get the picture: we are not particularly interested in “Selected Poems of…"

Odd Birds

While Fomite does not generally publish non-fiction, we are willing to consider books of high literary value in non-standard or mixed genres. See our published Odd Birds for a suggestion of the range.

Dual-Language Books

We seek shorter literary texts from around the world, accompanied by excellent translations into English on the same or facing pages. We at Fomite have limited knowledge of French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Russian, but we are also interested in other non-Roman-alphabet, or ideographic language texts – provided the translators take major responsibility for proofreading the originals.

Tracts

Given the exigencies of the time, Fomite would like to step outside its normal literary publishing practice, and add to its offerings a series of bound pamphlets on urgent political, social, cultural, and organizing issues from a radical, anti-capitalist viewpoint, useful to readers seeking to participate in political action.  We invite submissions of eloquent essays, analyses, and manifestos of approximately 5,000 words which speak to the devolving situation in America and around the world. 

Essays

A new category for us. Some of the greatest writing in English – from Swift to Foster-Wallace has been in the form of literary essays. Several of our Fomite authors have submitted essay mss of such high quality, that we are persuaded to try this as an invite-category. So if you have something to say, and can say it greatly, give us a try.

Plays and Theater Pieces

While there are many examples of unforgettable "fourth wall" dramas, where people, often in extremis, converse with one another in various settings, realistic (Ibsen, Chekhov, Albee) or abstract (Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams) about important issues -- plays wonderful to produce, direct, or act in, Fomite would like to concentrate on publishing theater pieces that explore the surreal, the hyperreal, the infrareal, pieces which show its reader/audience worlds beyond their worlds. We think of Godot, or Endgame, or Ubu Roi, or the productions of the Bread & Puppet Theater, of writers like Brecht or Peter Weiss, (Marat/Sade), or even lunatic Mel Brooks, practitioners of Artaud's preachings about the scope and intensity of theater and its effects. 

Memoirs

Fomite does not publish memoirs. While an essential part of the literary canon, almost- and should-be-canon, we have found that memoirs of living authors raise uniquely difficult editorial issues we'd rather avoid. Fill in any blanks here — they're probably correct.

Updated 8/2023