A quarterly anthology featuring dark and unconventional stories and poetry with an uncanny twist.

GossamerWight is an independent online literary magazine founded in the UK in 2025. We publish quarterly digital anthologies of dark, unconventional, and uncanny prose and poetry: horror (both mainstream and folk), weird and New Weird, speculative, dystopian, supernatural/spectral, fantasy, and the Gothic. If it unsettles, haunts, or quietly refuses to behave, it may well belong here.

Submissions are open to lay writers, academic, and other professional writers.

Our editorial ethos embraces the full gamut of lived experiences, ensuring that diverse, underrepresented, and marginalised voices also find a home with us. We encourage submissions from all without condition, except those stipulated within our general and theme-specific anthology guidelines.

We accept:

* Micro-fiction.
* Flash fiction.
* Short stories.
* Extracts from a longer work (e.g., from a novel).
* Multilingual works (with a British or American English translation).
* Graphic short stories, and
* Poetry.

At the time of your submission(s), those aged 16 to 17 years of age must have parent or guardian authorisation; otherwise, the minimum submission age is 18.

Our editorial ethos embraces the full gamut of lived experiences, ensuring that diverse, underrepresented, and marginalised voices also find a home with us. We encourage submissions from all without condition, except those stipulated within our general and theme-specific anthology guidelines.

Online publications putting forward exceptional short stories for Best of the Net.

Fiction Magazines That Nominate for Best of the Net

A targeted resource for short story placements with potential for Pushcart recognition.

Fiction Magazines That Nominate for the Pushcart Prize

Specialized publications that recognize exceptional brief fiction through Pushcart nominations.

Digital publications advancing very short fiction for Best of the Net consideration.

Flash Fiction Magazines That Nominate for Best of the Net

Best Microfiction, edited by Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke, celebrates the art of the extremely brief narrative. These publications have editorial teams with particular sensitivity to the craft.

Literary Magazines That Nominate for Best Microfiction

Identifies publications that put forward outstanding online work for this respected digital anthology established in 2006.

Literary Magazines That Nominate for Best of the Net

Publications that nominate work for this respected anthology series founded in 2015 by Tara Masih to celebrate fiction under 1,000 words.

Literary Magazines That Nominate for Best Small Fictions

A comprehensive guide to journals that regularly nominate work for the Pushcart Prize.

Literary Magazines That Nominate for the Pushcart Prize

Check out the all-time most popular speculative fiction literary magazines. These publications have a long-standing reputation for quality speculative fiction.

Most Popular Speculative Fiction Magazines of All Time

Online journals that specifically champion poetry for Best of the Net consideration.

Poetry Magazines That Nominate for Best of the Net

Focuses specifically on poetry journals with established histories of Pushcart nominations.

Poetry Magazines That Nominate for the Pushcart Prize

GossamerWight Literary Magazine

<div><b>FLASH FICTION</b></div><div><br></div>The Deep Roots anthology is about what endures. What does the land hold in its memory long after the living have forgotten? What do the dead leave behind in the soil, the stories, and the habits of those who come after them? With our last anthology, Unstable Realities, we questioned whether the ground beneath us could be trusted; Deep Roots questions that which has been buried and what, at a time of its choosing, will rise to confront us.<div><br></div><div>What we seek: for the Deep Roots call, we seek prose and poetry that is rooted in the folk tradition, the spectral, and the eco-Gothic. Writing that shows the land remembers, that the dead may be restless, and that what forms in the void where loss has been may often be strange, persistent, and perhaps even beautiful in its strangeness. We seek writing that shoulders the weight of inheritance and ancestral haunting, and of landscapes scarred by what they have endured; and within that weight, something that refuses to yield.</div><div><br></div><div>What we are drawn to:</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Show us folk belief in its most uncompromising forms: rituals, traditions, and entities that persist because they answer to something older than human reason.</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Give us hauntings that are not supernatural alone but ecological in nature: land that carries the memory of all that it has witnessed and felt – forests, rivers, and shorelines with long and unquiet histories.</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Write of characters who carry the past in their bodies, habits, names… and nightmares; who learn to live within the weight of those things rather than beneath them.</div>

Over 18 (but will consider submissions from those aged 16 to 18, with confirmation of parental or guardian consent).

Deep Roots

<div><b>SHORT STORY</b></div><div><br></div>The Deep Roots anthology is about what endures. What does the land hold in its memory long after the living have forgotten? What do the dead leave behind in the soil, the stories, and the habits of those who come after them? With our last anthology, Unstable Realities, we questioned whether the ground beneath us could be trusted; Deep Roots questions that which has been buried and what, at a time of its choosing, will rise to confront us.<div><br></div><div>What we seek: for the Deep Roots call, we seek prose and poetry that is rooted in the folk tradition, the spectral, and the eco-Gothic. Writing that shows the land remembers, that the dead may be restless, and that what forms in the void where loss has been may often be strange, persistent, and perhaps even beautiful in its strangeness. We seek writing that shoulders the weight of inheritance and ancestral haunting, and of landscapes scarred by what they have endured; and within that weight, something that refuses to yield.</div><div><br></div><div>What we are drawn to:</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Show us folk belief in its most uncompromising forms: rituals, traditions, and entities that persist because they answer to something older than human reason.</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Give us hauntings that are not supernatural alone but ecological in nature: land that carries the memory of all that it has witnessed and felt – forests, rivers, and shorelines with long and unquiet histories.</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Write of characters who carry the past in their bodies, habits, names… and nightmares; who learn to live within the weight of those things rather than beneath them.</div>

<div><b>POETRY</b></div><div><br></div>The Deep Roots anthology is about what endures. What does the land hold in its memory long after the living have forgotten? What do the dead leave behind in the soil, the stories, and the habits of those who come after them? With our last anthology, Unstable Realities, we questioned whether the ground beneath us could be trusted; Deep Roots questions that which has been buried and what, at a time of its choosing, will rise to confront us.<div><br></div><div>What we seek: for the Deep Roots call, we seek prose and poetry that is rooted in the folk tradition, the spectral, and the eco-Gothic. Writing that shows the land remembers, that the dead may be restless, and that what forms in the void where loss has been may often be strange, persistent, and perhaps even beautiful in its strangeness. We seek writing that shoulders the weight of inheritance and ancestral haunting, and of landscapes scarred by what they have endured; and within that weight, something that refuses to yield.</div><div><br></div><div>What we are drawn to:</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Show us folk belief in its most uncompromising forms: rituals, traditions, and entities that persist because they answer to something older than human reason.</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Give us hauntings that are not supernatural alone but ecological in nature: land that carries the memory of all that it has witnessed and felt – forests, rivers, and shorelines with long and unquiet histories.</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Write of characters who carry the past in their bodies, habits, names… and nightmares; who learn to live within the weight of those things rather than beneath them.</div>

<div><b>GRAPHIC NARRATIVES</b></div><div><br></div>The Deep Roots anthology is about what endures. What does the land hold in its memory long after the living have forgotten? What do the dead leave behind in the soil, the stories, and the habits of those who come after them? With our last anthology, Unstable Realities, we questioned whether the ground beneath us could be trusted; Deep Roots questions that which has been buried and what, at a time of its choosing, will rise to confront us.<div><br></div><div>What we seek: for the Deep Roots call, we seek prose and poetry that is rooted in the folk tradition, the spectral, and the eco-Gothic. Writing that shows the land remembers, that the dead may be restless, and that what forms in the void where loss has been may often be strange, persistent, and perhaps even beautiful in its strangeness. We seek writing that shoulders the weight of inheritance and ancestral haunting, and of landscapes scarred by what they have endured; and within that weight, something that refuses to yield.</div><div><br></div><div>What we are drawn to:</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Show us folk belief in its most uncompromising forms: rituals, traditions, and entities that persist because they answer to something older than human reason.</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Give us hauntings that are not supernatural alone but ecological in nature: land that carries the memory of all that it has witnessed and felt – forests, rivers, and shorelines with long and unquiet histories.</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Write of characters who carry the past in their bodies, habits, names… and nightmares; who learn to live within the weight of those things rather than beneath them.</div>

<div><b>MICROFICTION</b></div><div><br></div>The Deep Roots anthology is about what endures. What does the land hold in its memory long after the living have forgotten? What do the dead leave behind in the soil, the stories, and the habits of those who come after them? With our last anthology, Unstable Realities, we questioned whether the ground beneath us could be trusted; Deep Roots questions that which has been buried and what, at a time of its choosing, will rise to confront us.<div><br></div><div>What we seek: for the Deep Roots call, we seek prose and poetry that is rooted in the folk tradition, the spectral, and the eco-Gothic. Writing that shows the land remembers, that the dead may be restless, and that what forms in the void where loss has been may often be strange, persistent, and perhaps even beautiful in its strangeness. We seek writing that shoulders the weight of inheritance and ancestral haunting, and of landscapes scarred by what they have endured; and within that weight, something that refuses to yield.</div><div><br></div><div>What we are drawn to:</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Show us folk belief in its most uncompromising forms: rituals, traditions, and entities that persist because they answer to something older than human reason.</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Give us hauntings that are not supernatural alone but ecological in nature: land that carries the memory of all that it has witnessed and felt – forests, rivers, and shorelines with long and unquiet histories.</div><div><br></div><div>➥ Write of characters who carry the past in their bodies, habits, names… and nightmares; who learn to live within the weight of those things rather than beneath them.</div>

GossamerWight Literary Magazine

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