Sean Sam of 128 Lit Recommends...

As an editor at 128 Lit, it is only possible to describe what we want to see more of and why. Writers must find their ideal publishers. Our responsibility is to create a space for them.

128 Lit seeks work outside the cathedral of the Western canon. Its aging architecture—buttresses of “acceptable” characters, joints of rusted narratives—has influenced as much as it has eroded. We want to experience and share a world of different dwellings.

To aid us, there is the internet, a borderless solvent dissolving the struts of the possible into a cybersoup. Languages are joined and unraveled in this deluge too, so it is no surprise to us that such potent writing often emerges in translated literature. From smaller villages or megacities, authors are generating literary terrains into being.

There, dynamic words and their countless histories build new cornerstones, parapets. 128 Lit aims to extend hospitality to such environments, beyond flesh or borders. Our advice is this: Consider how you might sidestep tired tropes—academic plots, martini divorce stories, conventional metaphors—and create a text that resists oppressive tradition while pulsing with joy and its painful entanglements.

—Sean Sam, fiction editor, 128 Lit