500 magazines
Most Competitive Literary Magazines of All Time
Our twenty-five most competitive lit mags according to thousands of rejection letters collected by our community. Go us! Or, well, go you, if you can land a spot in any of them. To make this list, we cut any with 0% acceptance rates (I mean, why bother?) and only counted lit mags with at least 100 tracked submissions. Your chances? Oh, a bit less than .5%. But hey, fuck it?
500 magazines
upd ∙ Nov 8, 2026
- 1Ploughshares Literary Journal0.20% (700 tracked subs)
- 2The Sun0.21% (41330 tracked subs)
- 3Haven Spec Magazine0.25% (455 tracked subs)
- 4Interzone0.27% (729 tracked subs)
- 5CRAFT Literary0.27% (1405 tracked subs)
- 6Granta0.30% (865 tracked subs)
- 7The Blood Pudding0.33% (336 tracked subs)
- 8The Lascaux Review0.33% (654 tracked subs)
- 9The Yale Review0.34% (406 tracked subs)
- 10Georgia Review0.36% (645 tracked subs)
- 11Sequestrum0.37% (359 tracked subs)
- 12The Drift0.38% (830 tracked subs)
- 13West Branch0.39% (628 tracked subs)
- 14Uncanny Magazine0.40% (311 tracked subs)
- 15Berlin Lit0.44% (245 tracked subs)
- 16The American Poetry Review0.46% (351 tracked subs)
- 17Guernica0.47% (865 tracked subs)
- 18The Masters Review0.47% (1321 tracked subs)
- 19Clarkesworld0.48% (658 tracked subs)
- 20Three-Lobed Burning Eye0.49% (1033 tracked subs)
- 21Seize the Press Magazine0.53% (214 tracked subs)
- 22Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores0.57% (518 tracked subs)
- 23Orion's Belt0.57% (1075 tracked subs)
- 24Chicago Review0.57% (246 tracked subs)
- 25Big Whoopie Deal0.59% (204 tracked subs)
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