Conquistadore Films

Pilgrimages. Crucibles. Tactile worlds.
Bi-annual print journal of fiction & creative non-fiction that enlarges the reader's world through physical experience, unforgettable places, and journeys of intellectual or or spiritual consequence.

PILGRIMAGES. CRUCIBLES. TACTILE WORLDS.
New World publishes fiction and nonfiction that immerse readers in compelling worlds through physical journeys, intellectually serious questions, and cinematic imagination.

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.

We look for stories with:
I. PHYSICALITY - The world is hard and real. Story is externalized.
II. TIME & PLACE - Setting could not be arbitrarily swapped for somewhere else. 
III. INTELLECTUAL/SPIRITUAL SERIOUSNESS - The physical journey produces profound questions.
IV. MYTHIC STRUCTURE - The outward journey is personally, philosophically, or spiritually transformative.
V. CINEMATIC IMAGINATION - The story is visual, uses tactile prose, or presents scenes dramatically.
VI. DISCOVERY - The story exposes us to a different worldview, experience, culture, vocation, or way of life.
VII. TIMELESSNESS - The stories have staying power to be passed down to future generations and are not dependent on excessive use of contemporary references, trends, discourse, or cultural shorthand to remain comprehensible and meaningful.

VOLUME I: THE STARS
Every volume of New World is built around an aesthetic world. For Volume One, that world is the stars. 

The Stars is a collection of fiction, nonfiction, illustration, and photography, presented in a hardcover book meant to last. The stories can take place anywhere and at any time. A modern astronomer at an observatory. Ancient travelers navigating across a desert. A nineteenth-century expedition. Sailors crossing an ocean by celestial navigation. An astronaut beyond Earth. A person alone beneath a night sky.

The stars connect astronomy, exploration, navigation, history, mythology, geography, and the human experience of looking into something larger than ourselves.

Deserts. Observatories. Star charts. Telescopes. Sailors. Astronomers. Constellations. Expeditions. Spacecraft. Ancient cosmologies. Dark skies. Distant planets.

NOW SEEKING SHORT FICTION & NONFICTION SUBMISSIONS FOR VOLUME I: THE STARS.

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

Fiction Magazines That Nominate for the Pushcart Prize

Essential publications that nominate short fiction for the O'Henry Prize anthology, one of America's most venerable literary awards. Established in 1919.

Literary Magazines That Nominate for the O'Henry Prize

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

Highlights publications that regularly put forward essays, memoirs, and other creative nonfiction for Pushcart consideration.

Nonfiction Magazines That Nominate for the Pushcart Prize

New World Journal

We seek short fiction with a powerful sense of place, physical experience, and encounter with the wider world.<div><br></div><div><b>A Foreign World</b></div><div>We seek stories that explore unusual cultural worlds and encounters. Whether it comes in the form of a travel narrative, a hero's journey, or any other dramatic exploration of cultural, religious, or political ideas.</div><div><br></div><div>We prize stories that</div><div><ul><li>Show the reader an unusual, misunderstood, or unheard of foreign world,</li><li>Are written in a way that makes the culture accessible without dumbing it down or misleading the reader. The author needs to consider that jargon or regionally-specific terms, cultural habits, etc may not be understood by a reader anywhere in the world, and thus these things should be shown or explained in an accessible way.</li><li>Explores culture and environment through strong drama rather than passive witness, </li><li>Explores the culture honestly and in good faith: through good research or first-hand experience rather than through assumption, orientalism, or exoticism.</li><li>Stories of present day culture experiences or historical explorations.</li><li>We especially love stories, whether fiction or nonfiction, that are built from the author's real first-hand experiences interacting with or in an unusual culture.</li></ul><div><br></div><div><b>New World is particularly interested in stories involving: </b></div><div><ul><li>Exploration/expeditions</li><li>Travel</li><li>Folklore</li><li>Unusual cultural/moral worlds</li><li>Historical worlds</li><li>Myth</li><li>Discovery/experiment with the world</li><li>Ordeal</li><li>War</li><li>Unusual religious practices or cosmology</li><li>Adventurous vocations, hard labor</li><li>Journalism/Reportage</li><li>Colonies, frontiers, outskirts, foreign worlds</li><li>Competence, mastery, &amp; self-reliance</li><li>Science</li><li>Spiritual encounter</li><li>People confronted by circumstances larger than themselves</li><li>Exile</li><li>Speculative fiction that is heavily influenced by real wild places</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>For <i>Volume I: The Stars</i>, 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.</div><div><br></div><div><b>WHAT WE DON'T PUBLISH:</b></div><div>We are generally not looking for </div><div><ul><li>Domestic realism</li><li>Campus fiction</li><li>Relationship-centered stories</li><li>Primarily interior psychological narratives</li><li>Stories written from a therapeutic worldview <i>(e.g. 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)</i></li><li>Stories in which place functions only as background</li><li>Young-adult stories</li><li>Politically directed stories</li><li>Personal biography</li><li>Pulp adventure fiction (action-adventure without thematic exploration)</li><li>Formulaic genre fiction</li><li>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.</li><li>Either "white savior" narratives or "noble savage" narratives that dumb down the complexity of a real culture into a Hollywood-esque formula.</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>Above all, we want stories that leave the reader with the feeling of having gone somewhere, encountered something, and returned.</div></div>

A Foreign World - NWJ

We seek nonfiction concerned with the world beyond the writer: exploration, history, geography, science, nature, culture, travel, expeditions, unusual professions and ways of life, and encounters with unfamiliar places and people. We welcome narrative nonfiction, literary reportage, research-driven essays, historical essays, travel writing, and creative nonfiction. Personal experience is welcome where it serves as an entry into a larger subject.<div><br></div><div><b>WHAT WE DON'T PUBLISH: </b></div><div>We are less interested in</div><div><ul><li>Confessional personal essays</li><li>Healing and recovery narratives</li><li>Relationship and family essays</li><li>Pieces concerned with identity</li><li>Coming-of-age/self-discovery essays</li><li>Travel diary / travel memoir that is divorced from active dramatic structure</li><li>Psychological or philosophical interiority</li><li>Lifestyle writing, wellness, modern adulthood, finding purpose, etc.</li><li>Political opinion pieces</li><li>Topical cultural commentary</li><li>Explainer articles</li><li>Academic papers written for specialists</li><li>Biographies/profiles without encounter or inquiry</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li></ul><div><br></div></div><div><b>We love works about:</b></div><div><ul><li>Expeditions</li><li>Travel</li><li>Folklore</li><li>Unusual cultural/moral worlds</li><li>Lived experience</li><li>History</li><li>Myth</li><li>War</li><li>Unusual religious practices or cosmology</li><li>Adventurous vocations, hard labor</li><li>Journalism/reportage from the field</li><li>Colonies, frontiers, outskirts, foreign worlds</li><li>Competence, mastery, &amp; self-reliance</li><li>Anthropological curiosity</li><li>Exile</li></ul></div>

Essays, Narrative Nonfiction & Reportage - Vol. I: The Stars

We seek short fiction with a powerful sense of place, physical experience, and encounter with the wider world.<div><br></div><div><b>New World is particularly interested in stories involving: </b></div><div><ul><li>Exploration/expeditions</li><li>Travel</li><li>Folklore</li><li>Unusual cultural/moral worlds</li><li>Historical worlds</li><li>Myth</li><li>Discovery/experiment with the world</li><li>Ordeal</li><li>War</li><li>Unusual religious practices or cosmology</li><li>Adventurous vocations, hard labor</li><li>Journalism/Reportage</li><li>Colonies, frontiers, outskirts, foreign worlds</li><li>Competence, mastery, &amp; self-reliance</li><li>Science</li><li>Spiritual encounter</li><li>People confronted by circumstances larger than themselves</li><li>Exile</li><li>Speculative fiction that is heavily influenced by real wild places</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>For <i>Volume I: The Stars</i>, 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.</div><div><br></div><div><b>WHAT WE DON'T PUBLISH:</b></div><div>We are generally not looking for </div><div><ul><li>Domestic realism</li><li>Campus fiction</li><li>Relationship-centered stories</li><li>Primarily interior psychological narratives</li><li>Stories written from a therapeutic worldview <i>(e.g. 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)</i></li><li>Stories in which place functions only as background</li><li>Young-adult stories</li><li>Politically directed stories</li><li>Personal biography</li><li>Pulp adventure fiction (action-adventure without thematic exploration)</li><li>Formulaic genre fiction</li><li>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.</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>Above all, we want stories that leave the reader with the feeling of having gone somewhere, encountered something, and returned.</div>

Short Stories - Vol. I: The Stars

Very Short Stories - Vol. I: The Stars

We seek fiction with a powerful sense of place, physical experience, and encounter with the wider world.<div><br></div><div><b>New World is particularly interested in stories involving: </b></div><div><ul><li>Exploration/expeditions</li><li>Travel</li><li>Folklore</li><li>Unusual cultural/moral worlds</li><li>Historical worlds</li><li>Myth</li><li>Discovery/experiment with the world</li><li>Ordeal</li><li>War</li><li>Unusual religious practices or cosmology</li><li>Adventurous vocations, hard labor</li><li>Journalism/Reportage</li><li>Colonies, frontiers, outskirts, foreign worlds</li><li>Competence, mastery, &amp; self-reliance</li><li>Science</li><li>Spiritual encounter</li><li>People confronted by circumstances larger than themselves</li><li>Exile</li><li>Speculative fiction that is heavily influenced by real wild places</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>For <i>Volume I: The Stars</i>, 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.</div><div><br></div><div><b>WHAT WE DON'T PUBLISH:</b></div><div>We are generally not looking for </div><div><ul><li>Domestic realism</li><li>Campus fiction</li><li>Relationship-centered stories</li><li>Primarily interior psychological narratives</li><li>Stories written from a therapeutic worldview <i>(e.g. 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)</i></li><li>Stories in which place functions only as background</li><li>Young-adult stories</li><li>Politically directed stories</li><li>Personal biography</li><li>Pulp adventure fiction (action-adventure without thematic exploration)</li><li>Formulaic genre fiction</li><li>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.</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>Above all, we want stories that leave the reader with the feeling of having gone somewhere, encountered something, and returned.</div>

Novellas - Vol. I: The Stars

<span style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">For those who have undertaken journeys and pilgrimages of their own, we accept expedition reports, diaries, and reflective or dramatized first-hand accounts of personal adventures.</span><div><br></div><div><b>We are particularly interested</b> in journeys that require physical friction with the world: expeditions undertaken on foot, by sea, through wilderness, across borders, into difficult environments, or by other means that demand sustained participation rather than passive observation. This may include thru-hiking, alpinism, sailing voyages, overland journeys, field expeditions, long-distance travel, and other experiences of comparable commitment.</div><div><br></div><div>We prefer journeys that demanded meaningful sacrifice to undertake—of time, comfort, money, security, or certainty—and that left the traveler changed by what they encountered. The journey itself should matter: its distances, hardships, people, landscapes, routines, dangers, failures, discoveries, and unexpected turns.</div><div><br></div><div><b>We are less interested in</b> conventional travel writing centered primarily on tourism, recommendations, lifestyle, or generalized reflections about personal growth. We want accounts in which the writer went somewhere, attempted something, and returned with something worth reporting.</div>

Nonfiction Journey/Travel Stories - NWJ

We seek short fiction with a powerful sense of place, physical experience, and encounter with the wider world. <div><br></div><div>For historical fiction submissions in this category, we prize stories closely adherent to historical events, exploring historical figures, events, and little known or under-appreciated time periods.<div><br></div><div>We are seeking historical fiction that is researched in-depth, with a strong dramatic structure, but not necessarily at the expense of historical truth.<br><div><br></div><div>New World is particularly interested in stories involving: </div><div><ul><li>Exploration/expeditions</li><li>Travel</li><li>Folklore/Mythology</li><li>Unusual cultural/moral worlds</li><li>Under-appreciated time periods</li><li>Discovery/experiment with the world</li><li>Ordeal</li><li>War</li><li>Unusual religious practices or cosmology</li><li>Adventurous vocations, hard labor</li><li>Colonies, frontiers, outskirts, foreign worlds</li><li>Competence, mastery, &amp; self-reliance</li><li>Science</li><li>Spiritual encounter</li><li>People confronted by circumstances larger than themselves</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>WHAT WE DON'T PUBLISH:</div><div>We are generally not looking for </div><div><ul><li>Domestic realism</li><li>Campus fiction</li><li>Relationship-centered stories</li><li>Primarily interior psychological narratives</li><li>Stories written from a therapeutic worldview (e.g. 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)</li><li>Stories in which place functions only as background</li><li>Young-adult stories</li><li>Politically directed stories</li><li>Personal biography</li><li>Pulp adventure fiction (action-adventure without thematic exploration)</li><li>Formulaic genre fiction</li><li>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.</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>Above all, we want stories that leave the reader with the feeling of having gone somewhere, encountered something, and returned.</div></div></div>

Historically-Accurate Fiction - NWJ

We seek short fiction with a powerful sense of place, physical experience, and encounter with the wider world.<div><br></div><div>We are seeking science-fiction and speculative fiction with a strong sense of place and physical ordeal. We like stories that adhere closely to real science, history, economics, psychology. But we also admire stories that use mythology/folklore, creative world-building, and non-scientific or agnostic interpretations of the universe. We like science fiction/speculative that asks serious questions and attempts to explore original and unusual ideas and philosophical questions.<br><div><br></div><div><b>New World is particularly interested in stories involving: </b></div><div><ul><li>Exploration/expeditions</li><li>Travel</li><li>Folklore</li><li>Unusual cultural/moral encounters</li><li>Historical worlds</li><li>Myth</li><li>Discovery/experiment with the world</li><li>Ordeal</li><li>War</li><li>Unusual religious practices or cosmology</li><li>Adventurous vocations, hard labor</li><li>Journalism/Reportage</li><li>Colonies, frontiers, outskirts, foreign worlds</li><li>Competence, mastery, &amp; self-reliance</li><li>Science</li><li>Spiritual encounter</li><li>People confronted by circumstances larger than themselves</li><li>Exile</li><li>Speculative fiction that is heavily influenced by real wild places</li><li>Strong dramatic stories</li><li>Witness</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>For <i>Volume I: The Stars</i>, the stars 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.</div><div><br></div><div><b>WHAT WE DON'T PUBLISH:</b></div><div>We are generally not looking for </div><div><ul><li>Domestic realism</li><li>Campus fiction</li><li>Relationship-centered stories</li><li>Primarily interior psychological narratives</li><li>Stories written from a therapeutic worldview <i>(e.g. 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)</i></li><li>Stories in which place functions only as background</li><li>Young-adult stories</li><li>Politically directed stories</li><li>Personal biography</li><li>Pulp adventure fiction (action-adventure without thematic exploration)</li><li>Formulaic genre fiction</li><li>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.</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>Above all, we want stories that leave the reader with the feeling of having gone somewhere, encountered something, and returned.</div></div>

A Science-Fiction/Speculative World - NWJ

We seek short fiction with a powerful sense of place, physical experience, and encounter with the wider world.<div><br></div><div><b>Strange Moral/Spiritual Encounters:</b></div><div>We are looking for dramatic fiction that explores an unusual moral/spiritual encounter or environment. Whether an encounter with a foreign practice, exploration of a historical habit or decision that seems contrary to contemporary values without necessarily demonizing it, or exploring hypothetical decisions through science/speculative/fantasy worlds.</div><div><br></div><div>We prize stories that </div><div><ul><li>Use the world to facilitate moral exchange,</li><li>Stories that take differing/difficult values seriously without necessarily criticizing them, </li><li>Stories that are written from inside a practice, letting a protagonist be morally complicated from a contemporary perspective without necessarily demonizing and/or sanitizing them,</li><li>Stories that aren't afraid to depict these practices honestly and in good faith without necessarily promoting them.</li></ul><div><br></div><div><b>New World is particularly interested in stories involving: </b></div><div><ul><li>Exploration/expeditions</li><li>Travel</li><li>Folklore</li><li>Unusual cultural/moral worlds</li><li>Historical worlds</li><li>Myth</li><li>Discovery/experiment with the world</li><li>Ordeal</li><li>War</li><li>Unusual religious practices or cosmology</li><li>Adventurous vocations, hard labor</li><li>Journalism/Reportage</li><li>Colonies, frontiers, outskirts, foreign worlds</li><li>Competence, mastery, &amp; self-reliance</li><li>Science</li><li>Spiritual encounter</li><li>People confronted by circumstances larger than themselves</li><li>Exile</li><li>Speculative fiction that is heavily influenced by real wild places</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>For <i>Volume I: The Stars</i>, 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.</div><div><br></div><div><b>WHAT WE DON'T PUBLISH:</b></div><div>We are generally not looking for </div><div><ul><li>Domestic realism</li><li>Campus fiction</li><li>Relationship-centered stories</li><li>Primarily interior psychological narratives</li><li>Stories written from a therapeutic worldview <i>(e.g. 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)</i></li><li>Stories in which place functions only as background</li><li>Young-adult stories</li><li>Politically directed stories</li><li>Personal biography</li><li>Pulp adventure fiction (action-adventure without thematic exploration)</li><li>Formulaic genre fiction</li><li>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.</li><li>Moral encounters designed to promote a propagandistic idea. (Depicting difficult morality is the point when presented honestly, but we aren't here to promote political/moral ideas.)</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>Above all, we want stories that leave the reader with the feeling of having gone somewhere, encountered something, and returned.</div></div>

A Strange Moral/Spiritual Encounter - NWJ

We seek nonfiction concerned with the world beyond the writer: exploration, history, geography, science, nature, culture, travel, expeditions, unusual professions and ways of life, and encounters with unfamiliar places and people. We welcome narrative nonfiction, literary reportage, research-driven essays, historical essays, travel writing, and creative nonfiction. Personal experience is welcome where it serves as an entry into a larger subject.<div><br></div><div><b>An Adventurous Vocation, Project, or Experience:</b></div><div>We seek nonfiction stories and essays that introduce the reader to a vocation, project, craft, or experience that is interesting, adventurous, laborious/difficult, old, challenging but rewarding to master, and physical. Whether the story follows bush pilots, hand craftsmen, travelers encountering difficult terrain, or martial arts, we love stories that offer an exciting look at a practice that isn't common for the average contemporary reader.</div><div><br></div><div>We love stories that</div><div><ul><li>Expose readers to old traditions kept alive, or historical vocations and crafts that are endangered or extinct</li><li>Expose readers to culturally-specific or subcultural vocations</li><li>Expose readers to the difficulties of mastering and becoming competent in a physical skill</li><li>Show vocations that are largely physical, rather than only intellectual. Astrophysics, philosophers, writers can make great subjects, but their practice must be explored physically through craft, labor, or encounter.</li><li>Heroic or romantic vocations being explored in their physical reality. Not necessarily subverted or deconstructed, but stories that show the physical reality behind the romance.</li><li>Adventurous vocations or journeys, encounters, or crafts that lead to adventurous competence.</li><li>Experiences, projects, and difficult adventures finally untaken after years of practice and work.</li></ul><div><br></div><div><b>WHAT WE DON'T PUBLISH: </b></div><div>We are less interested in</div><div><ul><li>Confessional personal essays</li><li>Healing and recovery narratives</li><li>Relationship and family essays</li><li>Pieces concerned with identity</li><li>Coming-of-age/self-discovery essays</li><li>Travel diary / travel memoir that is divorced from active dramatic structure</li><li>Psychological or philosophical interiority</li><li>Lifestyle writing, wellness, modern adulthood, finding purpose, etc.</li><li>Political opinion pieces</li><li>Topical cultural commentary</li><li>Explainer articles</li><li>Academic papers written for specialists</li><li>Biographies/profiles without encounter or inquiry</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li></ul><div><br></div></div><div><b>We love works about:</b></div><div><ul><li>Expeditions</li><li>Travel</li><li>Folklore</li><li>Unusual cultural/moral worlds</li><li>Lived experience</li><li>History</li><li>Myth</li><li>War</li><li>Unusual religious practices or cosmology</li><li>Adventurous vocations, hard labor</li><li>Journalism/reportage from the field</li><li>Colonies, frontiers, outskirts, foreign worlds</li><li>Competence, mastery, &amp; self-reliance</li><li>Anthropological curiosity</li><li>Exile</li></ul></div></div>

An Adventurous Vocation/Project/Experience - NWJ

We seek short fiction with a powerful sense of place, physical experience, and encounter with the wider world.<div><br></div><div><b>An Expeditionary, Pilgrimage or Journey Narrative:</b></div><div>We seek fiction stories of characters who must go on a journey through a physically-demanding and fascinating world. We love dramatic and difficult travels in strange <i>terra incognita</i>.</div><div><br></div><div>Stories in this category can be </div><div><ul><li>voyages, mountain climbing, trekking across unforgiving landscapes, </li><li>technical or scientific expeditions (underwater, space, overland, etc.), </li><li>Pilgrimages to encounter the self through physical journey,</li><li>or stories of well-researched historical expeditions/journeys.</li></ul><div><br></div><div><b>New World is particularly interested in stories involving: </b></div><div><ul><li>Exploration/expeditions</li><li>Travel</li><li>Folklore</li><li>Unusual cultural/moral worlds</li><li>Historical worlds</li><li>Myth</li><li>Discovery/experiment with the world</li><li>Ordeal</li><li>War</li><li>Unusual religious practices or cosmology</li><li>Adventurous vocations, hard labor</li><li>Journalism/Reportage</li><li>Colonies, frontiers, outskirts, foreign worlds</li><li>Competence, mastery, &amp; self-reliance</li><li>Science</li><li>Spiritual encounter</li><li>People confronted by circumstances larger than themselves</li><li>Exile</li><li>Speculative fiction that is heavily influenced by real wild places</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>For <i>Volume I: The Stars</i>, 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.</div><div><br></div><div><b>WHAT WE DON'T PUBLISH:</b></div><div>We are generally not looking for </div><div><ul><li>Domestic realism</li><li>Campus fiction</li><li>Relationship-centered stories</li><li>Primarily interior psychological narratives</li><li>Stories written from a therapeutic worldview <i>(e.g. 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)</i></li><li>Stories in which place functions only as background</li><li>Young-adult stories</li><li>Politically directed stories</li><li>Personal biography</li><li>Pulp adventure fiction (action-adventure without thematic exploration)</li><li>Formulaic genre fiction</li><li>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.</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>Above all, we want stories that leave the reader with the feeling of having gone somewhere, encountered something, and returned.</div></div>

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Essays, Narrative Nonfiction & Reportage - Vol. I: The Stars

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