Literary Journal

New Absurdist

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About the magazine

New Absurdist is a digital and print platform dedicated to the absurdist tradition in contemporary art and writing. Founded in the early 2020s, it emerged from a collective of writers and artists seeking to reinvigorate absurdist strategies—irony, paradox, dark humor—as tools for engaging with the political and technological absurdities of the present. The platform publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and visual art that embrace the illogical, the circular, and the meaningfully meaningless. Its mission is to provide a home for work that resists conventional narrative resolution and instead revels in the disorienting, the playful, and the profoundly strange.

Editorial focus

The New Absurdist is a space for the creative, the curious, and the unapologetically passionate to engage in educated discourse and promote positive growth in the world. The editors want its name to remind everyone that everyone has unique values and experiences. The New Absurdists find meaning in art, culture, the environment, and most importantly, each other.

PoetryFictionCreative Nonfiction

Submitting your work

Reading periodJan 1 to Dec 31

Reading feeNo

PaymentNo payment

Response time3 to 6 months

Simultaneous submissionsNo

Unsolicited submissionsYes

Before submitting, read several pieces from recent issues to understand the editors' taste for work that is conceptually tight rather than randomly weird. They favor submissions that demonstrate a clear grasp of absurdist lineage—from Kafka to Ionesco to contemporary internet surrealism—while pushing into new territory. Avoid generic shock value or unedited stream-of-consciousness; instead, craft work that is formally inventive and darkly humorous. Simultaneous submissions are typically accepted, but notify promptly if accepted elsewhere. Expect response times of several months, and do not query before the stated reading period ends.

At this time, we’d like to invite artists and writers who are passionate about social reform to consider submitting their work to the New Absurdist , and as always, we will do our best to elevate these underrepresented voices on our platform.

Read official guidelines