These magazines publish a wide variety of flash fiction, up to 1,500 words. Many of them publish other genres as well, like nonfiction and poetry. They are a mix of literary and genre magazines.
Many, but not all of them, are open for submissions now. A few of these magazines pay writers.
Ink In Thirds
They publish print and digital copies. Send prose of up to 600 words; “This includes 3 word stories, 100 word stories, drabbles, microfiction, flash fiction, and whatever your imagination can conjure.
In reality, our only absolute requirement is to make us feel something! Sad, fine. Tormented, better. Angst, gah. Happy, meh—we’ll take it.” They also accept poetry and art. The deadline is 31 January 2026 for their spring/summer issue, which will be their 10th anniversary issue. Details here.
A-Minor Magazine
They want flash fiction, flash nonfiction, and poetry for their next issue, slated for publication in late January 2026. Send prose of 50 to 1,500 words. Details here.
elsewhere
“elsewhere cares only about the line / no line. We want short prose works (flash fiction, unlineatedprose poetry, nonfiction) that cross, blur, and/or mutilate genre. We publish only six writers quarterly.” Send works up to 1,000 words. Details here.
Short Beasts
Their tagline is, ‘Flash Fiction Literary Magazine’. They want
“Flash Fiction – Short stories and excerpts from unpublished novels, typically 50-1000 words.
Micro Flash Fiction – Short stories, typically 5-50 words.” Submission is via a form on their website. Details here.
Spark Flash Fiction: Snowed In Love
“Spark provides flash fiction romance and women’s fiction stories under 1,000 words. We want stories that will grab the reader and put a lil’ spark in their day.” They want stories of 700-1,000 words. They accept contemporary romance, historical romance, romantic suspense, rom-com, and fantasy/sci-fi romance. YA in these genres is also accepted. Stories have to be PG13. For Winter 2026, the theme is Snowed In Love: “Forced proximity can bring out what we’d rather leave unspoken, so for this issue, we want stories of characters getting snowed in. Whether they’re rivals who discover a different side of each other or exes getting a second chance, give us plenty of spark to create that cozy feeling we love.” The deadline is 9th January 2026. See this, and other upcoming themes here. Submission is via a form. Details here.
Free Flash Fiction
They accept fiction of 100 to 500 words. “Entries must be fiction but can be on any subject, and written in any style or form.” Submission is via a form on their website. Details here.
10 by 10 Flash
They accept all genres of flash fiction of 200 to 500 words. They also need authors to “Include bio and head & shoulders jpeg photo”. They accept submissions on an ongoing basis. Details here.
Toasted Cheese Literary Journal
“TC does not restrict publication based on subject matter, however, due to the nature of our audience and our service provider’s Terms of Service, we do not publish work that includes excessively graphic sex or violence.” Send flash fiction (up to 500 words), as well as short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. They read through the year, with cut-off dates for issues. The deadline is 31st December 2025 for their March issue. Details here.
The Citron Review
This is a journal of brief literature; their tagline is, ‘Short forms that shimmer’. They publish micros (100-word pieces across genres), flash fiction and nonfiction (up to 1,000 words), and poetry. They will reopen on 1st February 2026. Details here and here.
Flash Frog
They want flash fiction of up to 1,000 words that is “Small. Brightly Colored. Deadly to the Touch.” They accept general submissions year-round, with some exceptions (contest submissions in January, ghost story submissions in July). Pay is $25. Details here.
Notch Magazine: If/Else
“Notch is a literary and arts magazine based in New York and Paris, published biannually in print and online.
Notch was founded with the goal of de-siloing the creative arts and underscoring their shared root system. We consider all genres with an equal level of seriousness—publishing nail art alongside 18th century philosophy; scientific essays with video sculpture.” You can read more about them here. For Issue 4, they want submissions on the ‘If/Else’ theme. “Top of Form
We welcome meditations on conditionality and nested possibilities. Please send essays on the foundations of computational logic and stories that capture capillaries of reasoning. Share art that seizes visual polarity, cultivating contrast or queering light vs. dark. Track the evolution and architecture of decision trees—particularly when neat root systems spawn a Dantesque forest of disorientation. Consider temporal parallels, alternative paths that tug at the seams of the present. Capture the essence of elseness, being as/in/of otherness. Inhabit the space between If and Else; a clearing in which to grapple with potential.” They accept writing (up to 1,500 words), including translation, visual art, and sonic. The deadline is 7th January 2026. They pay. Details here.
The Molotov Cocktail
This magazine wants “volatile flash fiction, the kind of prose you cook up in a bathtub and handle with rubber gloves.” They accept both literary and genre fiction. They have detailed guidelines. They accept works up to 1,000 words; the average length of accepted pieces is 300-600 words. Details here and here.
Little Fruits Magazine
“We want your ripest writing. Tart, rotten, or dripping with sweetness.” They accept flash (up to 1,000 words), as well as short fiction and creative nonfiction. The deadline is 31 January 2026. Submission is via a form. Details here.
Brilliant Flash Fiction
They want a story in 1,000 words or fewer, and accept all fiction genres. They pay $20 per accepted story. They’re open year-round, and publish quarterly – on the last day of January, March, June and September. Details here.
Feign
“Feign is an online literary magazine for fiction and operates out of Reno, Nevada. Inspired by the city’s gambling roots, Feign seeks fiction that takes risks. Feign seeks stories that entertain, surprise, and devastate.” They accept fiction – flash and short stories, and publish on the 7th and 21st of each month – see here. Submission is via a form on their website. Details here.
SmokeLong Quarterly
They publish flash narratives–fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid–up to 1,000 words; they pay $100/story or $150/story with audio. They also publish reviews and craft essays, work for their Global Flash series (French and German), and offer mentorships (see guidelines). Their fee-free submission deadline is 31st December 2025, and after that, they’ll read fee-based submissions till mid-February. Details here.
Flash Fiction Magazine
They accept stories of 300 to 1,000 words. “We are not interested in lyrical musings, journal entries, poetry, vignettes, or slices-of-life with no discernible plot or STORY.” They publish 365 stories a year. Details here.
Flash Phantoms
They accept micros (100 words) and flash fiction (up to 1,000 words) in the horror genre. “Make them edgy right from the get-go and end with a bang. We don’t like to be bored with a lot of exposition.” They also select a story for their Story of the Month. Details here.
Factor Four Magazine
They want flash speculative fiction — science fiction, fantasy, supernatural, super hero, or any combination of these, of up to 1,000 words. Pay is $0.11/word. They also accept artwork. Details here.
J Journal
This journal is affiliated with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. They want “fiction, flash, creative nonfiction (1st person narrative, personal essay, memoir) and poetry – that takes on justice. Our most powerful pieces relate tangentially to the justice theme, though we do occasionally publish work that speaks directly of crime, criminal justice, law, and law enforcement. As a literary project, however, J Journal is less likely to publish straightforward genre fiction. We look for writing brave enough to find the justice question in the ordinary.” Details here.
Nature: Futures
Nature is a weekly international journal publishing research in all fields of science and technology. While this is not a literary magazine, they are on this list because they also publish flash science fiction – “Futures is the award-winning science-fiction section of Nature and it accepts unsolicited articles. Each Futures piece should be an entirely fictional, self-contained story of around 850–950 words in length, and the genre should, broadly speaking, be ‘hard’ (that is, ‘scientific’) SF rather than, say, outright fantasy, slipstream or horror.” They also say, “The subject is typically near-future, hard SF, although this can be interpreted liberally.” They pay £85. See here (scroll down to Futures) and here.
Seaside Gothic
This UK-based magazine publishes fiction (up to 1,000 words), poetry, and nonfiction that meet the criteria of seaside gothic literature (it is led by emotion, not reason, exploring the human experience mentally and spiritually as well as physically; It addresses duality—land and sea, love and hate, the beautiful and the grotesque; It connects to the edge, living on the seaside either literally or figuratively, and has one foot in the water and the other on solid ground). They’ll open briefly in January 2026, from 12th to 18th. Pay is £0.01/word. Details here.
Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast
“We love settings that hint at greater world-building without leaving us feeling lost; We like to see characters which feel whole and have real agency despite the small glimpse we get into their lives; and we appreciate stories that have a recognizable plot with a classic arc. A story doesn’t have to tick all of these boxes to make it into MSFFP, but if it doesn’t hit any of them, it’s not a good story for us. All genres will be considered, but the editor’s proclivities lean toward the speculative, the fantastic, the futuristic, and the weird.” Also, “The ideal length is around 800 – 1100 words, but stories as short as 500 or as long as 1500 may be considered.” They also accept reprints and translations. They pay $10 for originals. Details here and here.
Bright Flash Literary Review
They publish flash, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir; send works of 50 to 1,500 words. Details here and here.
Milk Candy Review
“Please send us your beautifully weird, lyrical flash fiction pieces of up to 750 words.” They are scheduled to reopen for submissions in January 2026. Details here.
365tomorrows
They publish science fiction and speculative fiction of up to 600 words. “We like science fiction in all its incarnations, from hard sci-fi to cyberpunk and beyond.” Details here and here (scroll down).
StepAway Magazine
They publish urban flash fiction and poetry. “The title of the magazine draws inspiration from Frank O’ Hara’s landmark flâneur poem, “A Step Away from Them”. Our magazine is hungry for literature that evokes the sensory experience of walking in specific neighborhoods, districts or zones within a city. This is flânerie for the twenty-first century.
Our writers lead our readership through the streets of his or her chosen city. They do so in one thousand words or less.
Send onestory or poem at a time.” As with all magazines, please read some issues to get a sense of the kind of work they publish. Details here.
ShortStory Substack
They want a story, of 6 words to 10,000 words, in any genre. They publish one story a month. Send a story by the month-end, and the winner is announced on the 15th of the following month. They also accept reprints. Pay is $100, and 50% of subscription revenue (see November 2025 statistics here, which includes their latest payout.) Details here.
Blink-Ink: Lost Civilizations – The Silurian Hypothesis
This is a print magazine of microfiction; they publish 50-word stories, which are usually set around a theme. “Extreme geological forces of nature make our Earth something like a gigantic trash compactor. Physical evidence of anything at all doesn’t last long. This and the great age of the planet might imply that civilizations as advanced or even more advanced than our own have come and gone. Civilizations that are completely lost to us today. Or are they? Send us your best stories of approximately 50 words to do with Lost Civilizations: The Silurian Hypothesis”. The deadline is 15th January 2026. Details here and here.
Suddenly, and Without Warning
“Flash fiction is an under-appreciated form of prose. It is a place where every sentence needs to speak volumes, a place where constraint leads to freedom. Here at Suddenly, and Without Warning it means this: a self-contained story of 600 or less words. It can be any genre.” Submission is via a form on their website. Details here and here.
Bio: S. Kalekar is the pseudonym of a regular contributor to this magazine. She can be reached here.
