Real, surreal, & brutally beautiful ✦ Independent, ad-free, & reader-supported

Strange Pilgrims is a literary magazine founded by two lovers & writers of prose.
We believe in narrative as pilgrimage — a journey through wild and wounded places into strangeness and transformation. We read to arrive somewhere we haven’t been before, to glimpse life through another’s eyes in an attempt to understand. The work we’re drawn to is surreal, philosophical, sincere, and unforgettable — stories and essays that get under your skin and reach the heart of the human condition.

We see writers as essential voices in the fabric of society, articulating our delights and sufferings. Each piece we publish is accompanied by a brief interview with the author, offering readers a deeper sense of their world. Together, we hope they form a map of the strange pilgrimages we take through language and life.

Some of the writers who guide our taste: Gabriel García Márquez, Susanna Clarke, Toni Morrison, Brian Doyle, Han Kang, Kelly Link, Lydia Davis, Roland Barthes, Franz Kafka, James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Geetanjali Shree, Leo Tolstoy, Mariana Enriquez, David Foster Wallace, Lidia Yuknavitch, Chuck Palahniuk, Clarice Lispector, Ted Chiang, Ali Smith, Saadat Hasan Manto, Karen Russell, Fernando Pessoa, and many, many others.

We edit lightly and collaboratively. If we accept your piece, we may suggest small changes for clarity, flow, or line-level polish, but we only take on work that already feels complete and carefully revised.

Strange Pilgrims takes its name from Gabriel García Márquez’s lesser-known short story collection. He remains our greatest influence, and the title is a small homage to him.

New Lit Mags Blowing Up RN (And They Want Your Writing!)

Strange Pilgrims

We’re not married to any genre, structure, or subject. We love surreal, speculative, and fabulist stories; unhinged, lyric, and fragmented essays; voice-driven experimental narratives and slow-burn realism; cultural and literary criticism; hyper-intellectual riffs and children’s stories — so long as they move. If your work is honest, well-crafted, and offers something emotionally and intellectually vivid, we want to read it.

Strange Pilgrims

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