We welcome manuscripts of 7,500 – 20,000 words. All submissions must be self-contained works of fiction. We welcome longer novel excerpts so long as the submission entered can stand alone as its own entity.

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The novelette and novella form carries a bunch of meanings and suggestions. They act like novels but are crafted with the concision and containment of a short story. This in-between space creates opportunities to explore linear and non-linear narratives, alike, as well as experimental approaches to perspective, structure, and language.

We can list so many fascinating takes on what the form ambitions to be, but we particularly enjoy Lindsay Drager's in the Michigan Quarterly that the form is "a book-length work that uses conciseness and unity to create a narrative of suggestion that feels at once compressed and expanded." You can also consider Ian McEwan's take (which Drager quotes in her epigraph) and also Meg Pokrass's take on how to discover alternate forms within the form.

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