The Gateway Review: A Journal of Magical Realism is just in its infancy–we’re working on getting our submission guidelines and a Submittable account started, and hope to be taking submissions later this fall (by mid-September, if all goes well).
In the meantime, if you’d like to know a little bit about our sensibilities:
The Gateway Review is a biannual print literary journal that features the best contemporary magical realism, surrealism, and new fabulism written by new and emerging along with established and seasoned writers.
What do we mean by magical realism?
In the introduction to their anthology Magic Realist Fiction, David Young and Keith Hollaman write that “one way to understand ‘magical realism’ is as a kind of pleasant joke on ‘realism,’ suggesting as it does a new kind of fiction, produced in reaction to the confining assumptions of realism, a hybrid that somehow manages to combine the ‘truthful’ and ‘verifiable’ aspects of realism with the ‘magical’ effects we associate with myth, folktale, tall story, and that being in all of us—our childhood self, perhaps—who loves the spell that narrative casts even when it is perfectly implausible.”
This is the kind of writing we seek: work that, while engaging with the fantastic and absurd, still grounds itself in a sense of what is real. Think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s groundbreaking novel One Hundred Years of Solitude: although Macondo is a place where flowers rain down in mourning of a patriarch’s death, a young girl ascends to heaven, and the blood of a murdered young man rushes down the street to find his mother, the place still feels real; the world is the human world that we readers know, and the experiences and hardships the Buendia family faces are difficulties that resonate with us. We seek work that resonates in that same way, combining the quirky, unusual, and bizarre with the profoundly honest and true.
More specific details regarding our submission guidelines and process will appear in the coming months!
The Gateway Review 