Each year we put forward six pieces from the previous year of Neon Literary Magazine to be considered for the Pushcart Prize. In case you’ve never heard of it, the Pushcart Prize is intended to celebrate the very best of the small press world by collecting together the finest works of fiction and poetry published in literary magazines and anthologies…
Year: 2017
Dead Drop
the phonebox stood at the edge of an abandoned trading estateand was easy to missI fumbled for coins in the darknessthe call was brief he spoke without accent he sounded tired contents fragilehandle with care it was a couple of hours before the message went out I watched from a café across the streetmy pager…
Daytime Television
First Program Spiders The talk show host invites the Naturalist onto his stage. The Naturalist looks as all Naturalists do: he is dressed in khaki shorts, a button-up white shirt, a pith helmet, brown leather boots. The exposed bits of his arms and legs are coated in a thick layer of hair, a little too…
Dream #14: The Egg
Previously published in Lungs. In my dream I boiled an eggto relive a childhood pleasure, to dip in – but there were so many otherchores to do in that moment. Packing my bags, dusting awaya matrix of web, and my kitchenhad stretched to a banquet hall – candle litand murky with my father’s antediluvian wares.So…
Five Stories in Which the Devil Appears
I A woman is walking to her car with a bag of groceries. Her young daughter is waiting inside the car. The woman has instilled in her daughter a powerful fear of strangers. The daughter thinks a strange man will try to kidnap her if he sees her sitting in the car alone, so she…
Neon Literary Magazine Issue 45
[ Download Digital Edition | Print Edition SOLD OUT ] Strange goings on abound on every page of this issue of Neon: urban wildlife becomes oddly violent, the devil appears in a familiar-looking toy car, and a woman throws the last party she’ll ever need to organise. Esteban Rodriguez takes us on a visit to…
2017 Forward Prize For Best Single Poem Nominations
Each year Neon Literary Magazine nominates a select handful of its featured poems for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. The award has been running since 1992, and is recognised as one of the greatest honours for poetry in the United Kingdom and Ireland…
Neon Literary Magazine Issue 44
[ Download Digital Edition | Print Edition SOLD OUT ] In this edition of Neon we visit the quaint yet dystopian English town of Scarfolk, observe mysterious goings on in a grand hotel, meet a rather more respectable imaginary version of the president of the United States of America in a dream prison, sit in…
Grand Hotel
As a courtesy, the government manlets the manager sit in onthe surveillance. But the cameras are the hotel’s, and the manager thinksit’s his courtesy. The other agentsin the room could set him straight,but their chief signals them to stand down. On the screen they’re watching,a man viewed from the ceiling in green lightuneasily sleeps. Earlier…
Signals of Fear and Uncertainty
There is a fist-sized hole in the concrete floor and another in the ceiling. The hole in the floor is bearded with sunblack shit, and at night the beetles climb out of it and crawl across my toes. The smell is worse in the daytime. Sometimes I stand under the hole in the ceiling and…