As always, THE NORTHVILLE REVIEW seeks magic in the ordinary. Our fondness for suburban and pop culture themes is especially well known. We like absurdly obsessive attention to language. We like well executed irreverence and slyness. We like other things, too.
We don't typically provide feedback when we decline submissions. If you're curious about why, this essay at The Nervous Breakdown summarizes our views better than we ourselves could. If you'd like us to offer our thoughts if time permits, you're welcome to indicate that.
Which reminds us...provide a bio in your cover letter, or at the end of it. On our side, it is much easier to have an author's work and bio in the same place, which rarely happens if a bio is provided on acceptance. We truly do not read them first...and even if we did, we wouldn't care! It's all about the work.
Currently, we are not considering reprint submissions.
Please read through the archives. Please read the guidelines. We know these things take time, and we appreciate the effort. We promise, we'll still be here when you're done.
FICTION
Size limit: 3000
The Northville Review seeks fiction with suburban and/or pop culture aesthetics. We’ve got literary tendencies, but we know better than to write off other genres. Look through our archive to get a sense of what interests us. Be aware that we have a particular eye out for humor, irreverence, and experimentation.You may submit up to 3,000 words at a time. Six flash fictions of exactly 500 words each? No problem.
We would prefer you send stories individually. We would also prefer, in the case of stories over 1,000 words, that you have no more than one story in our queue at a time.
Please use the Query category to query anything with a word count over 3,000 words.
NONFICTION
Size limit: 3000
We’ve made it clear that we like personal essays. We also like reviews, letters, interviews, lists, and other ephemera. We’d REALLY like some opportunities to prove it.Please use the Query category to query anything with a word count over 3,000 words.
POETRY
The Northville Review seeks ONLY poetry with pop culture elements. No exceptions.Submit poems individually. No exceptions. Submit no more than three poems at a time. No exceptions. If you have more than three poems in our queue at any time, we will remove the most recent excess submissions without notification.
We always STRONGLY advise poets to read our archives to get a sense of what we’re about. Our notorious pickiness usually has less to do with perceived merit than it does with style and subject matter.
A note on layout: Poems that are not left-justified can be challenging to publish, for online magazines that use certain WordPress themes. The Northville Review is one of those online magazines. If your poem is not left justified, please indicate if that change would be acceptable to you.
INSIDE JOKES, EXPLAINED
We continually seek work for a regular feature titled "Inside Jokes, Explained." It is what it says on the box.You'll find previous Inside Jokes at the top of our Archives page, but we are open to interpretations of the concept.
Submissions for this department can be in any format that can be rendered digitally.
SUMMER 2012: The YouTube Issue
YouTube: The planet’s third most visited website, where the average user spends 15 minutes per day, every day. Where memes live, and naivete dies. And, at last…the subject of The Northville Review’s Summer 2012 issue!
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT:
- Send us a story, a poem, an essay that is somehow related to an embeddable YouTube video.
- “Somehow related to” is deliberately very open-ended. If you retrofit a video to something you’ve already completed, that’s between you and your deity.
- “Embeddable YouTube video” is not open-ended. Click “Share” and then “Embed” to make sure the video is embeddable. Submissions without this will be rejected.
- Include a link to the YouTube video and a bio in your cover letter.
- Anything submitted in this category that does not include a link to an embeddable YouTube video will be deleted unread. Not even remotely kidding.
- Work selected for publication will run underneath the corresponding embedded video.
- PLEASE NOTE: If your submission is accepted and your video goes dead on YouTube before the publication date, so does your work. Choose wisely. Tip: It’s probably not a good idea to send anything related to Prince.
DEADLINE: June 30.
ONE LAST THING: Response time for this issue may be considerably longer than Duotrope reports might suggest.
ART/AUDIO/OTHER MULTIMEDIA
The Northville Review welcomes submissions in all multimedia forms.If your submission does not conform to the allowable file formats, please use the Query category to contact us for further instructions. We will probably be able to accommodate nearly anything you send our way, but we want to make sure that we can before you go through the hassle of sending it to us.
QUERIES
Size limit: 100 words
Please use this category to submit queries for work of more than 3,000 words, and multimedia items with incompatible file formats.By "query," we mean "tell us what it’s about, and why it belongs in The Northville Review."
Please do not submit queried work until you've received an invitation to do so.