Discordia Review seeks book reviews and guest articles
You could be the next person ostracized from your literary faith community
Good morning assorted jackals, hurdy-gurdy people, temporarily embarrassed literati (oafs), and other assorted subscribers: we are interested in receiving pitches for future book reviews and guest articles. This post includes some general information on what we’re looking for, and how to pitch us (see the final section). This post does not include info on how to submit your creative writing to us for zines and Fellow Travellers features—for that you’ll want to head over to our Submission Guidelines. As a note there, while Fellow Travellers subs are open year-round, we are currently closed for zine submissions until we work through the backlog of projects we are committed to. We expect to reopen those in fall.
Alright, here we go.
Features & Interviews
As of March 2026, Discordia Review has nearly 4,000 subscribers and gets 50,000-100,000 visits per month, and we are looking to expand our pool of guest writers. Discordia Review is primarily a literary journal, but our remit is pretty wide: music, politics, visual arts, the psychedelic, the sordid, the high strange, and a lot more fit under our umbrella. Discordia’s founder and primary critic is Eris, and while you should by no means feel required (or even encouraged) to ape his style, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with his tone to get an idea of what our readership is accustomed to.
Here are some typical examples of what our staff writers put out:
Here are some examples of recent guest posts we’ve admired:
Dimitri Karakostas’s “Procedural Seeing: the Archive of Nothing in Particular”
Hilde von Bingen’s “MAGA Minaj, Muhammad Ali, and the costs of Black canonization”
Most of our guest feature posts run from about 1,000 to 4,000 words; longer posts are possible (Substack has no strict upper limit), though in some cases we might suggest serializing very long pieces.
We are highly selective. The Discordia editorial board consists of five members and it takes only one veto to reject a submission. Harsh, yes, but it keeps our objectives and quality consistent. In the event your pitch is accepted, you will be assigned an editor to discuss your plans and settle on a loose delivery schedule. Once the piece is delivered, your editor will also perform a proofread, and may have a few suggestions to consider as you revise and edit the piece.
While we offer a token payment of $10 for Fellow Travellers posts (our guest artist series) in order to help those who rely on arts grants to be able to claim us as a “paid” publication, we do not currently offer a standard payment for other types of featured posts. If you are in a situation where being able to list Discordia as a “paid” publication for your critical or journalistic work would be helpful to your career, we may be able to work something out.
Email your pitches for features to: discordia.sucks@gmail.com
Note: While we are most interested in original material, we are open in some cases to re-posting articles which have already appeared in other venues (e.g. your personal Substack). Please mention whether a piece has been previously published in your query email.
Book Reviews
Discordia Review is seeking to expand its coverage by publishing more book reviews. We are seeking both capsule reviews of around 500 words for a periodic review roundup, and longer reviews of a single book or set of thematically-related titles to be published as standalone pieces (1,000 to 3,000 words, generally).
We are primarily interested in reviews of books published within the past three years (or those which have been notably reissued within the same timeframe). For reviews of older titles, please send a pitch explaining why you’d like to cover the book now and what your approach will be—we might for example be interested in a close formal analysis of a classic book of poetry, or perhaps an examination of a work that has taken on greater resonance in the current political moment. (For example, Raúl Zurita’s poetry in this moment of renewed right-wing government in Chile.)
We are looking for work that is biting, funny, irreverent, and mostly casual in tone, though experimental reviews are welcome too. As we feel that part of the crisis in today’s review culture is an absence of, well, critical reviews, for your first piece we would encourage (but do not require!) you to write something at least somewhat negative to sorta “make your bones,” if you will.
Although our work is sometimes political, your work doesn’t have to be. When we do put out political work it is left-wing, though it is not necessary to share our political opinions to write for us on literature and art. But we won’t put out anything with an explicitly right wing thesis. We also do not tend to be interested in stuff that deals heavily with identity politics / representation politics, and we hate buzzwords: no “bodies,” no “spaces,” you get the drift. There are PLENTY of places you can go to with that kind of work. This isn’t one of them.
While we offer a token payment of $10 for Fellow Travellers posts (our guest artist series) in order to help those who rely on arts grants to be able to claim us as a “paid” publication, we do not currently offer a standard payment for other types of featured posts. If you are in a situation where being able to list Discordia as a “paid” publication for your critical or journalistic work would be helpful to your career, we may be able to work something out.
Email your pitches for reviews to: discordia.sucks@gmail.com.
Pitching
When pitching Discordia Review, we recommend using the following format:
Briefly introduce yourself (and your experience if any) and talk about how you found Discordia Review
Give us a synopsis of the piece you would like to write for us
Attach/link two or three writing samples; we will consider pitches from first-time writers, but in these cases more of the weight will be on the pitch itself, so we advise taking time to really craft it
(If you haven’t sent many pitches before, this guide from Defector may be helpful!)
Our authors publish under either their real names or pseudonyms if they don’t want to take too much heat for their hot takes, you can choose either if accepted.
Onward and downward, as you were.
—The Management