The Cleveland Review of Books invites pitches and submissions of critical writing that prioritize formal vision and generous engagement with their subject matter. We look for writing that demonstrates a committed sense of style and perspective. We call for analysis that takes calculated risks and rewards attention. While the writing we publish frequently takes the form of a review, it is our conviction that the best “reviews” are critical-creative essays rooted in one or more texts operating within a recognizable critical mode. They may also be collaborations, letters, conversations, disruptions, or other inventions. Furthermore, a “text” can be many things. Our goal is to publish writing that examines ideas, techniques, and contexts extending beyond any singular work or moment, offering the aforementioned qualities of style and analysis regardless of the recognizability of its form. To acquaint yourself with the quality and styles we’re interested in, we recommend subscribing and reading what’s on the site before pitching.  

Although we’re especially committed to publishing writing on, about, and from Cleveland and Ohio, as well as the Rust Belt and greater Midwest, a regional connection is by no means a requirement. That being said, do let us know where you live in your pitch email.

Email pitches@clereviewofbooks.com to pitch or submit. Everything we receive is considered for both online and print publication. When pitching, please provide in two to five paragraphs outlining your a specific angle or provisional idea(s) for your review or essay. Our current rates are $150 for online publication and $400 for print. Print interviews are $200. We aim to respond to all pitches and submissions within six weeks.

“It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke.”

—Friedrich Schlegel on Irony

CRB is looking for fiction that invokes prickly narration. We are looking for difficult narrators, unlikable (to whom??), maybe foolish. Assholes and idiots, please.

We are humbled by authors and other creators who have taken this narrative risk, which has risked friendship, entry across borders, being misunderstood by harmonious bores, and the dignity of virtue. We pay homage to the Jamaica Kincaid of A Small Place, to Bernhard, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, to Robert Plunket, Dennis Cooper, Marie Darrieussecq (particularly of Pig Tales and Men), Garielle Lutz, and Larry David. We look to recent contemporary work by Chantal V. Johnson, Tony Tulathimutte, and Patrick Cottrell, and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice.

If you are writing in this vein, or want to try, we will very much look forward to your submission.

Send your writing, along with a short bio, to fiction@clereviewofbooks.com. Our current rates are $50 for online publication and $100 for print. Stories should not exceed 5,000 words.

We invite submissions of poetry and adjacent texts. We are interested in experimentation. We like work invested in sustained attention, research, texture, or performance. Send up to six poems or equivalent to poetry@clereviewofbooks.com. Include a short bio and any desired context. If you are or were living near Cleveland, however you term nearness, feel free to tell us.  

We publish poems from one writer a month on the web and four to six writers a year in print. Our current rates are $50 for online publication and $100 for print.

We value critical writing in any shape that riffs on one or more of the categories below. We also encourage pitches that purposefully push at their boundaries.

Literature

Fiction. Poetry. Nonfiction. “Creative” nonfiction. Hybrid, multi-genre, interdisciplinary, genreless writing and reading. Collections. Selections. Works in translation. Graphic texts. Art books. Photo books. Zines. Scenes. Small and independent presses. Community projects. New releases. Forgotten voices. Reissued classics. Medium-term bangers. Real stinkers. Physical, digital, ephemeral.

Poetics

Contemporary and ancient. Verse and prose. Aesthetic and ontological theories of reading and writing. (Mis)understanding. (Il)legibility. Saying. Looking. Hearing. Meaning. Making. Failing to.

Collaborative Criticism

Essays, reviews, interviews qua exchanges, arguments, rejoinders. Forms authored by two or more writers which forefront collaborative methods as essential techniques for thinking with, at, and through text/s with more than one mind, voice, body.

(Midwest) History

Places. Rural. Urban. Liminal. Towns. Cities. Lakes. Factories. Strip malls. Plains and prairies. The Rust Belt. Industrial decline, postindustrial perseverance. The Suburbs: how they were made, and for whom. People. Your people. Race, its histories. Human detail. Victories. Sorrows. Failures and why they matter. Ideas from and images of the Midwest. Main Street. Small town. Everytown. Common man. Average American. Communities. White. Black. Native. Immigrant. Violence. How to reckon with it. The past. How to remember it. The future. How to make it.

Publishing

As a practice. The state of literary-cultural production. Issues related to past and present publishing trends and methods. What editing is and isn’t. The poetics of the press. Sending pitches. Receiving rejections. Publishing as labor. IP. Small press. Journals. Awards. Submittable. The MFA. The CIA. Views from inside and out.

Comparatives

This. As opposed to that.

Culture and Politics

Ecocriticism. Rust Belt Blues™. Radical ruminations, appropriately formatted. 21st century party machines. The rural left. The urban right. Labor. Its resurgence. Its future. Amazonification. Agglomeration. Accelerationism. Deceleration. Slow Cities. Farm-to-table. Quiet lives, and how (not) to live them.

Psyche of Literature

Death to the author; long live the character. Death to the character; long live autofiction. Insights, analysis, and unbridled curiosity about the interplay between psychology and storytelling. Unreliable narrators. Unreliable authors. Unreliable critics, whose burden it is to objectify her intuitions with all the intellectual rigor at her command. Nuances of motivation. Objectivity as no more than relative.

Literary Chronology

The enigma of time, and its hold on letters; cyclical patterns, and how they shape our literary landscapes. The détournement of literature and literary minds.

Visual Art

Modernism. Postmodernism. The built environment. Gallery openings. Painting. Design. Film. Documentary. Typography. Cartography. Photography. Placemaking. That mural you love.

The Book

As art object. As discursive subject. As monetized product. As product of production. As independent collaboration. Forms of the book and forms of reading. Book-making, -un-, -remaking. What reading is. What paper is. What screens are. Inks. How the damp finger flips, how the clammy hand holds. Book UI/UX. Promises of and challenges to the book and book culture: social, economic, technological, historic. Book design (inside and out) as text. Close consideration of aesthetic and material choices (or non-choices) of the made book as critical frame and entry to title, text, texture. 

Lists

No listicle. No best. No round-up. The list as technique, gesture, interruption—yes.