From the Editor

Dear Readers, Writers, and the Terminally Disillusioned,

 

Most literary contests are limp-dicked exercises in self-congratulation—vanity pageants for people who treat rejection slips like papercuts from God.

This ain't that.

The Anxious Nihilist Prize for Fiction isn’t about finding the “next great voice.” We’re not here to elevate the culture. We’re here to shake it until the guts fall out. If you’ve got something polished, respectable, and ready for a staff pick at some masturbatory MFA journal, keep it. Feed it to your workshop. Let it die of politeness.

But if you’ve got something unstable, something mean, naked, twitching on the page like it just climbed out of your spleen, we want it. Not because we’re edgy. Not because we’re chasing shock value. Because we’re bored, and boredom is a kind of violence.

This prize is for fiction that shouldn’t exist. Stories that shouldn’t be told. Voices that got kicked out of the party before they even found the keg. The ones too angry, too honest, too fucked up for the delicate sensibilities of the literary knitting circle.

The rules are simple:
—You send us your best worst thing.
—We read it.
—We give $100 to the one that makes us feel alive or at least less dead.

(Full details here)

Judged by a firing squad of degenerates: me, Leia John, Paula Deckard, and G.R. Tomaini. No safe words. No trigger warnings. Just fiction that drags something bleeding into the daylight and dares us to look.

Email your submission to: theanxiousnihilist@gmail.com
Deadline: August 1st

Understand: this isn’t for everyone. If it was, we’d shut it down.

 

 

Cody Sexton

Managing Editor/Founder/Creator