We publish lyrical philosophy, experimental fiction/poetry/non-fiction, dark humor, classical forms, and innovations in craft. We do not publish contemporary realist fiction. If you think your work is a good fit, please read on for more details.

We love work that is linguistically, intellectually, and emotionally demanding of the reader.  We want literary fiction that grows in complexity upon each visitation. Writers we admire are Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Aphra Behn, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, W.B. Yeats, and W.H. Auden. We are not concerned with genre distinctions—send us the best you have; we want only for it to be thoughtful, intelligent, and beautiful.

We accept fiction, creative non-fiction, excerpts,  screenplays, stageplays, fragments, meanderings, philosophy and poetry. Your submission should not exceed 50 pages.

If your submission is part of a novel-length work or feature-length screenplay, there exists the possibility of publishing it in installments in future issues. In this case, please indicate your intentions in your cover letter.

If your submission is accepted, we will digest the writing and create in its honor a unified artistic product: That is to say, every piece published in AZURE appears alongside a customized black & white sketch that is devised and executed by our contributing illustrator.

Your cover letter will not affect the success of your submission. We assess solely based on the quality of the writing and its suitability of style/purpose for AZURE; this is to say, we don't look at the cover letter until after the fact, when we become curious as to what sort of mind has wrought the compelling piece that appears before us.