the engine(idling is an independent online literary journal founded and run as a one-person operation by Pennsylvania-based poet Danielle McMahon, whose own work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. The journal publishes themed issues of poetry and visual art — including collage, photography, drawing, illustration, and mixed media — in PDF format, with all issues free to read, download, and share.
The Gorko Gazette is an independent online humour publication founded in the mid-1990s by Wisconsin-born writer Colin “Raddy” Gee, who now operates it from southern Mexico. The Gazette is a proudly eccentric outlet devoted entirely to comedy, publishing fake news headlines, one-panel cartoons, spoof film reviews, humorous poetry, flash and micro fiction, and other miscellaneous oddities. It
Okay Donkey is an independent online literary magazine that has been publishing since 2018, specialising in the odd, the off-kilter, and the weird. The journal publishes flash fiction and poetry exclusively, with a strong preference for experimental, surreal, magical realist, and genre-bending work — writing that is funny, sad, or somehow both at once.
Luna Luna Magazine is an independent online literary journal founded in 2013 by writer Lisa Marie Basile, devoted to what it describes as “lush poetics, fever dreams, and the dark ecstatic.” Originally a broader community publication covering identity, feminism, the occult, personal essay, and culture — and featured in outlets like BuzzFeed, Bust, and VIDA — the magazine went on hiatus before being relaunched by Basile as a focused, single-editor poetry journal.
L’Esprit Literary Review is an independent, entirely non-profit literary journal founded in February 2022 — the centenary month of the publication of Ulysses — in deliberate celebration of the literary revolution of High Modernism. Edited by Jessica Denzer and operating as a sister publication to Indirect Books, the journal publishes short fiction, creative nonfiction, novel extracts, literary criticism, book reviews, artwork, and photography in the fearless, risk-adept spirit of writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rachel Cusk, David Foster Wallace, and Annie Ernaux.
Maudlin House is a Chicago-based independent online literary magazine and small press founded by Mallory Smart, serving as a bridge between experimental fiction and new form literature filtered through the lens of 21st-century indie and pop culture.
BRUISER is an independent online literary magazine with a distinctly anti-establishment ethos, publishing poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, film writing, visual art, photography, and columns with no genre restrictions and no rules.
Queen’s Quarterly is one of Canada’s oldest and most distinguished literary and intellectual journals, published continuously since 1893 out of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
West Trade Review is a quarterly literary journal founded in 2009 by Ken Harmon and based in Charlotte, NC. An imprint of Iron Oak Editions, a nonprofit independent press, the journal publishes contemporary poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction (personal essays and memoir), book reviews, visual art, and interviews.
Expat Press is an independent online literary magazine publishing fiction, poetry, essays, and miscellaneous writing. Operating since at least 2012, it has built a reputation as an outlet for raw, unconventional, and underground literary work, with a tone and aesthetic that sits outside the mainstream. The publication also operates a small press arm, releasing print books and chapbooks by individual authors, giving it a dual identity as both a magazine and an indie publisher.