Announcing WAR & PEACE

Submissions open August 15

“We’ve each got a dollar, and the army wouldn’t be much helped by our giving that.”

-Jo March, Little Women

Bad Clown Books is announcing submissions for our next anthology: a trilogy of stories about war, and about peace, and about the in-between times.

We will select seven works for each printed volume, twenty-one in total.

Submissions open August 15th and close September 30th.

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The stories in these collections don't need to be factual, but they need to be true in an axiomatic way: absurd and relatable, harrowing and humorous, mundane and excruciating. They should make you hate the military and make you wish to enlist. We want stories of combat, but also non-combatants, and those who stay home; the primary and the tertiary effects.

War

‘War’ interrogates inhumanity, witnessing horror and the minimization of life; we are bored and we are scared, wondering who will live and who should die.

War is the battlefield, those in combat, civilians at the mercy of strange men, knee-deep in contradictions and brutalities.

It’s Band of Brothers episodes 2–9, Storm of Steel, Herman Melville’s Starship Troopers, blistering sun, unending rain, accidental death, Matterhorn the book, Matterhorn the mountain, Jane Austen

&

‘&’ is no man’s land, brittle ceasefires, conflicts so long that they defy names. It’s a break in the horror. It’s relief and elation from approved leave passes. It is wary of force. It examines benefitting from fraught systems. It looks at the sacrifices of duty, at home and on the front.

It’s late-stage Lana Del Rey, Tolstoy, squalls, kissing a stranger, Paris in ‘43, Los Alamos in ‘46, the Staten Island Ferry, On the Marble Cliffs, waiting to get a drink at a bar where every stool is taken.

Peace

‘Peace’ is moving forward amongst the grief and the graves. Making meaning of meaningless death. It is the harmony that came before the bombs dropped.

It studies the contradiction of peace by way of war. It’s a wholesome existence, loving one’s neighbor, living in a world where little is agreed upon.

It’s early-stage Lana Del Rey, Vermont, In Cold Blood, Mississippi, kissing your wife, the Salinas Valley, Jane Austen

-The Editors: Christian, Trey, Nate

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Submission Details

Word Count: roughly 2,000—5,000 words. Shorter works will be considered if they feel complete. Longer works will be considered if the length feels absolutely necessary.

Format: Word/Google doc preferred. PDFs cannot be accepted.

Please title your submission lastname_firstname_storytitle

We are not interested in writing that has been generated by Large Language Models.

Submissions will be through a Google Form to be posted August 15th. See you then.

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Bad Clown Books’ Publishing Philosophy

Bad Clown Books is an independent publisher specializing in short story anthologies. We care about our writers as much as the stories they write. We believe the editing process is a conversation between editor(s) and writer. We take risks on newer writers who show potential and are willing to do the work of revision. We have a special bent for working class writers who work exhausting jobs and still make the time to write. They make it happen. They inspire us. Most importantly, we care about honest work—stories that expand our understanding of the human experience, stories that speak to our lives, stories that continue to live with you long after they’ve been read. We are not interested in stories that offer moral certainty, but we respect moral conviction.