Shoegaze Literary's fourth issue, 'Reality Bites Back,' positions itself at the intersection of reality television's manufactured intimacy and the literary imagination. The editors seek work that interrogates the confessional mode—not merely as a narrative device but as a cultural condition. The call is for poetry and fiction that inhabit the spaces where producers place their cameras: confessionals, reunion couches, hot tubs, elimination ceremonies, rented mansions, tropical villas, restaurant back rooms, makeover chairs, soundstages, kitchens under pressure, and houses where no one is allowed to know what time it is. This is a curatorial vision that treats the tropes of unscripted television—immunity, roses, secret alliances, public votes, private betrayals, blurred faces, black boxes, bombshells, hot mics, villain edits, producer interference, dramatic exits—as legitimate literary material, worthy of the same scrutiny as any other human comedy. The issue's thematic architecture is built on a series of productive tensions: the manufactured and the sincere, the humiliating and the glamorous, the moment someone forgets the cameras are there and the moment they remember. These binaries are not meant to be resolved but explored. The editors are hungry for work that captures the desperation of believing you are here for the right reasons, even as the apparatus of surveillance and performance shapes every gesture. The result is a call that invites writers to consider how reality television has become a dominant grammar for contemporary selfhood—a grammar of exposure, vulnerability, and the relentless negotiation between authenticity and performance. Shoegaze Literary is an online magazine, and this issue will be published digitally. There is no submission fee, and the editors have not announced a prize or payment. What the journal offers is a focused editorial context: a themed issue that will gather work engaging with a specific set of images, phrases, and scenarios. For poets and fiction writers, this is an opportunity to place work within a conversation that is both pop-cultural and deeply literary, where the confessional booth and the confessional poem meet.