Number Forty-One · Autumn

A quarterly that reads everything, and says so.

Four hundred manuscripts came in for this issue. Nine are printed here. What follows is the part a reader sees. The reading desk is the part a reader does not — the queue, the scores, the tiers, and the decisions that produced these nine.

Open the reading desk Send us something

What this demonstration is really about. A literary magazine looks like a reading experience. Underneath, it is an intake and adjudication system: tracks with different rules, deadlines that actually close, word limits that actually refuse, blind reading, two-reader scoring, tiered advancement, withdrawals that have to propagate, and a policy on machine-generated text that no software can enforce on its own. All of that is built here and all of it runs in front of you.

The library

Everything we have printed.

Forty-one issues, filtered the way a reader actually looks: by form, or by what a piece is about.

Form

Theme

Submissions

Send us something.

Choose a track. Each one has its own rules, its own reading fee, and its own deadline — and the rules are enforced here, not after you have waited four months.

Please don’t paste real work. The manuscripts below are locked and pre-filled with invented samples. Nothing here is transmitted or stored, but there is no reason to put anything real into a demonstration.

1. Pick a track

2. Pick a sample manuscript

Sample manuscript

3. Declaration

Penstock does not accept work containing machine-generated text. No software can verify that claim, so the magazine does what it can: it requires a declaration, records it against the submission, and shows it to every reader who opens the file.

I declare this manuscript contains no machine-generated text.

4. Send it

Choose a track and a manuscript, then check what happens.

Prizes

What is open, what is closed, and what it costs.

Every track the magazine runs, with its real limit, fee, and deadline. The submission form reads this same table — there is no second copy of these rules to fall out of date.

Reading fees on the prize tracks pay the readers. The general track is free and always will be. Both of those are editorial positions, not technical ones, and a system should make them easy to hold.

Staff only · fictional queue

Reading desk

Blind reading

This is what the nine printed pieces looked like before they were nine. Score a manuscript as a reader and watch the advancement rule decide what happens to it.

Queue

Tier