Pilgrimages. Crucibles. Tactile Worlds.

Our Mission

New World is a journal of stories devoted to reuniting a divided tradition: writers who experience, adventure or live on the fringe first, then draw upon those experiences to create captivating and thought-provoking stories. We seek to assemble the modern continuation of that tradition in hardcover journals made to last and to be passed down from one generation to the next.

We look back to the lost age of Conrad, London, Stevenson, Hemingway, Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, and National Geographic: a tradition of adventure and discovery, but also of strange moral systems, philosophical questions, distant places, and encounters with unfamiliar ways of life.

What We Want

Setting should be essential to the story. We are drawn to fiction that could not simply be moved from one country, landscape, historical period, or way of life to another without becoming a fundamentally different work.

Stories may be realistic, historical, speculative, mythic, or otherwise difficult to categorize. We care less about genre than about physicality, atmosphere, narrative movement, and a genuine sense that the reader has been taken somewhere.

For Volume I: The Stars, the theme should be integral rather than incidental. We welcome stories involving astronomy, navigation, observatories, celestial mythology, expeditions, spaceflight, ancient cosmologies, darkness, remote landscapes, or other meaningful encounters with the night sky and the worlds beyond it.

Above all, we want stories that leave the reader with the feeling of having gone somewhere, encountered something, and returned.

Editorial Values

Forms We Are Looking For

• Novellas: 15,000-30,000 words
• Short Fiction: 3,000-8,000 words
• Nonfiction: 3,000-8,000 words
• Very Short Fiction: 500-3,000 words

Areas of Interest

New World is particularly interested in stories involving:

• Exploration/expeditions
• Travel
• Folklore
• Unusual cultural/moral worlds
• Historical worlds
• Myth
• Discovery/experiment with the world
• Ordeal
• War
• Unusual religious practices or cosmology
• Adventurous vocations, hard labor
• Journalism/reportage from the field
• Colonies, frontiers, outskirts, foreign worlds
• Competence, mastery, & self-reliance
• Science
• Spiritual encounter
• People confronted by circumstances larger than themselves
• Exile
• Speculative fiction that is heavily influenced by real wild places

We do not discriminate by genre. New World will consider work from any genre that matches our criteria.

Translations & Foreign-Language Submissions

We accept foreign language fiction and will translate selected work into English for final publication.

What We Are Generally Not Looking For

Fiction

We are generally not looking for:

• Domestic realism
• Campus fiction
• Relationship-centered stories
• Primarily interior psychological narratives
• Stories in which place functions only as background
• Young-adult stories
• Stories influenced by contemporary politics
• Personal biography
• Pulp adventure fiction — meaning action-adventure without thematic exploration
• Formulaic genre fiction
• Stories written from a therapeutic worldview — Stories organized around processing emotions, buried trauma, healing, psychological closure, or characters explicitly interpreting their own psychology rather than revealing it through action and encounter.
• Postmodern or excessively self-conscious fiction — particularly stories driven by irony, metafiction, deconstruction, pastiche, or formal gamesmanship rather than sincere engagement with character, action, place, and the world.

Nonfiction

We are less interested in:

• Confessional personal essays
• Healing and recovery narratives
• Relationship and family essays
• Pieces concerned with identity
• Coming-of-age/self-discovery essays
• Travel diary / travel memoir that is divorced from active dramatic structure
• Psychological or philosophical interiority
• Lifestyle writing, wellness, modern adulthood, finding purpose, etc.
• Political opinion pieces
• Topical cultural commentary
• Explainer articles
• Academic papers written for specialists
• Biographies/profiles without encounter or inquiry
• Stories written from a therapeutic worldview — Stories organized around processing emotions, buried trauma, healing, psychological closure, or characters explicitly interpreting their own psychology rather than revealing it through action and encounter.
• Postmodern cultural or philosophical analysis — particularly essays that approach reality primarily through deconstruction, relativism, detached irony, or the reduction of history, culture, belief, and human experience to systems of language, power, or social construction.

Publication

Our top priority is our quarterly print volumes, but New World also publishes relevant short stories, nonfiction, and essays on the New World/Conquistadore website, YouTube, or Substack.

Some of these stories and essays may be published as standard prose, audio readings, or video essays. Stories and essays published in New World volumes are first published in print, but may be republished online, or adapted to audio or video mediums at New World's discretion. Full details about publication will be reported and must be agreed to in publication contracts upon selection.

Other Details

Are Simultaneous Submissions Accepted?

Yes. Simultaneous submissions are welcome. If your work is accepted elsewhere, please notify us promptly at contribute@readnewworld.com to retract your submission.

What File Formats Do You Accept?

We accept submissions in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx), Google Docs, plain text (.txt), rich text, markdown, or PDF format.

Do You Accept Reprints?

For our inaugural volume, we will consider select reprints of exceptional quality, provided that:

• Rights have reverted to the author.
• The previous publication is disclosed and acknowledged.

Do You Pay Contributors?

We pay $150 USD for accepted short fiction and $150 USD for accepted nonfiction. For stories between 500 and 3,000 words, we pay a flat honorarium of $50. Compensation for novellas is determined on a case-by-case basis.

Rights

New World acquires First Serial Rights to publish accepted works and the non-exclusive right to republish them in future New World anthologies, collector's editions, anniversary editions, online in text, audio, or video formats, and other New World publications.

For works published in translation, these rights apply to both the original-language text and any translated editions published by New World. Contributors must have the authority to grant these rights.

We will also retain the right to use works in the marketing or promotion of New World, online and in print.

Copyright remains with the author. All other rights remain with the author. We ask that any subsequent publication acknowledge New World as the place of first publication.

Questions or Inquiries?

Email: contribute@readnewworld.com