Welcome
This is > kill author, an online literary journal. Yes, another one. We make no excuses for ourselves. We have a desire to shake things up if we can, and not only by having a name that appears to suggest committing brutal acts of violence against innocent writers.
We don’t really want to murder authors, of course. You’re safe with us. No, we just want writing which takes risks. Words that will surprise us, shock us and rouse us from our slumber. We’ve been asleep for far too long. It’s time to put forward something different. We’re not afraid of change. Are you?
If you knew that you were going to die—shortly, soon, imminently—you would want to get every last word out of your head and onto the page. Not for the sake of crafting perfect prose or poetry that would live on after your final death rattle, but just because it would be necessary. Vital. Urgent. You’d want to communicate while you still had time. You wouldn’t be concerned with fine tuning every last adjective of your literary style. You wouldn’t care about competing with, or even consciously echoing, what the latest cool lit kid was writing. That last rush of words would come out bruised and raw. All heart and liver, guts and spleen.
Find out more about what we’re looking for, then go here to submit your work to us.
Issue titles: a non-explanation
Every issue of > kill author is subtitled with the surname of a deceased writer, though the choice of subject has no bearing on the content.
The journal’s title is inspired by The Death Of The Author, a work by the French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes, whose name graced our first issue. We completely agree with the criticism he makes in that essay–that readers rely far too much on their knowledge of an author’s personality in an attempt to try and gain some meaning from a work. Barthes’ preference was that the meaning should come only from the impression left in the reader’s mind by the words on the page, rather than from the identity of the writer. That’s our preference, too.
Masthead: an explanation
Our masthead is as follows: we are who we are, and no more. As the editors of this journal, we have taken the decision to remain anonymous. We have our reasons. Read this explanatory statement to find out what they are.
