Illustration by Na Kim

Today marks the opening of our October online-submissions period for prose and poetry. This week, we asked our assistant editor, Owen Park, to describe the journey a piece can take from the slush pile into our pages.

Over the past seventy-three years, The Paris Review’s commitment to reading unsolicited submissions has yielded the discoveries of work by writers such as Yiyun Li, Philip Roth, and Wells Tower. We know that the next writer we fall for won’t necessarily have an M.F.A. or an agent, and so the slush pile remains our best line of contact with the emerging authors whose names we haven’t yet heard.

Many of the poems in our recent issues have come to us through our online submissions system, Submittable, including Rachel Lapides’s “Public Domain,” Yongyu Chen’s “Outpost,” Eugene Ostashevsky’s “Falling Sonnet XI,” Edward Salem’s “My Aerodynamics,” and Olivia Sokolowski’s “Lover of Cars.” Occasionally, we will pull a great piece of prose straight from Submittable, too, and accept it for the magazine. More often, however, when we read something we think shows real promise, we’ll reach out to the writer, sharing thoughts on what they’ve sent us and asking to see more. This is how we came to publish the writer Brian Ma in our recent Fall issue. Ma had submitted several stories to us by the time January Santoso, a member of the Review’s reading team—a group of ten readers who carefully consider the thousands of submissions we receive online and by mail each year—urged us to read his latest, last October. We got in touch, asked what else he had, and were ecstatic to later receive his novel in progress, about a haunting series of events at a cell-phone factory in Vietnam, from which “Their Utopia” is extracted.

The Review’s journey to publishing Chad Fore, who appeared in this year’s Summer issue, involved a similarly extended conversation, one that began in early 2025, after we received an excited note from the former Review reader Clayton Wickham. We read more of Fore’s work and traded notes with him for nearly a year, a correspondence that culminated in “Lil Spooky,” his story of freestyle rap and small-town gang violence in late-nineties California. I remember, the first time we spoke on the phone, picking up and saying, “Chad!” and him saying, “Owen!” and then neither of us saying anything else for a while. We’d exchanged dozens of emails, which went far beyond the usual small talk; it was the kind of back and forth that made us both forget we’d never actually met. Fore’s debut novel, which expands on the world of “Lil Spooky,” is forthcoming from Henry Holt.

Of course, discovering new voices also requires leaving our inboxes, our laptops, and our office behind. We travel to book festivals, strike up conversations with teachers and translators, and ask friends to attend readings all over the world. As satisfying as it is to find up-and-coming writers in the wild, some of the prose and poetry we’ve published in our recent issues—such as Millicent Borges Accardi’s poem “Good Tank Farms”—reached the Review the same way it did in our earliest days: through the mail. Avigayl Sharp’s “Uncontrollable, Irrelevant,” which ran in our Winter 2022 issue, landed on our doormat in late summer of that year. The story was picked up by our reader Jay Graham, who had been churning through the backlog of paper submissions we’d accrued during lockdown. At the time, I was working as a reader myself—and when I next visited the office for a fresh stack of manuscripts, I found Sharp’s story waiting for me, with an exclamatory Post-it from Jay affixed to the first page. I handed it to the editors that same day. Sharp’s debut novel, Offseason, was published in May by Astra House, who will also release her debut collection, Sickness, Health (which includes “Uncontrollable, Irrelevant”), in the spring.

We know that, as a writer, it’s easy to imagine, as you pause with your finger on the Submit button, or drop an envelope into the mailbox, that your work is heading into a kind of void. But our reading process remains as personal as it always has been—predicated on such analogue tasks as licking envelopes, exchanging notes, arguing respectfully, and making long phone calls. It’s not always efficient, but as anyone who has read the above poems and stories will know, it’s entirely worth it.

You can read our frequently asked questions about submitting work to the Review here. And if you, like some writers we know, aren’t great with deadlines, you can now send us a hard-copy, snail-mail submission any day of the year.

Owen Park is the Review’s assistant editor.