Recently we added a new request to our submission guidelines, hoping to get writers to look a little more closely at the kinds of work we publish. Now, in the submission cover letter, we ask writers to include a brief statement on why your work suits the mission of The Disappointed Housewife. What we’re hoping… Read More Submission guidelines update

And now for our nominations for the last anthology award of the year, the venerable Best Small Fictions contest. We published eleven qualifying stories in 2025, so it kills me to have to weed out six of them—all excellent pieces in their own right—to select the five nominees. That said, if you get a story… Read More Best Small Fictions 2026 Nominations

We’ve just wrapped up our eighth year of publication, and now, in the midst of award nomination season, Dottie and I are directing your attention to our DONATE button in the right-hand sidebar. Click on it and you can contribute any amount to help defray our website expenses, which have just come up for renewal.… Read More Our Annual Fundraising Appeal Is Here Again 🎅

We’re in something of a unique position this year with respect to the annual Best Microfiction contest. There’s a limit of 400 words on entries, and it turns out that we only published four pieces in 2025 that are eligible. Three of them are by a single writer. I happen to think that all three… Read More Best Microfiction 2026 Nominations

I never know what year to slap on this annual announcement. The Pushcart Prize anthology will come out in 2026, but all the pieces will have been published in 2025. Let’s just be forward-looking and go with 2026. In any event, here are the six pieces I’ve selected to represent The Disappointed Housewife this time… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations 2026

We’re making a change to our submission guidelines as we wrap up our eighth year of operation. From now on we’re going to allow document attachments rather than requiring writers to paste their work into the submission email. For the most part, literary journals allow attachments. I’ve become more confident as the years go on… Read More Attachments now welcome!

Recently Dottie and I added a statement to our submission guidelines that I thought I’d better highlight here for writers thinking about contributing: The Disappointed Housewife will not knowingly publish content generated by AI. It probably doesn’t really need to be said, but in a time when some creatives might convince themselves that AI is… Read More Our Policy on AI (it is verboten)

One again, Dottie and I are happy to announce this year’s Best of the Net nominations. We always love when this time of year rolls around because we get to review all the terrific work we’ve published in the last twelve months. And, as always, it’s exceedingly difficult to filter all this great material down… Read More 2025 Best of the Net Nominations

What a terrific surprise the other day to learn that two stories we published in 2024 have been selected for the forthcoming Best Microfiction anthology by Guest Editor Dawn Raffel and Series Editors Meg Pokrass and Gary Fincke. Celebrate! Congratulations to Barbara Diggs, for “Questions The Caseworker Should Have Asked After My Ex Accused Me… Read More Best Microfiction Taps Two of Our Own!

A little bit wistfully, I conclude the season’s award nominations with these for the Best Small Fictions anthology. As usual, whittling our published fiction down to these five was difficult, since my approach to curating the magazine is to accept material that could win just about any award. That’s why, at times, it seems like… Read More Best Small Fictions Nominations 2025

And now it’s time for our Best Microfiction noms—stories under 400 words published in 2024. We have some good ones this year, and Dottie and I only wish we could have nominated all of the qualifying stories because they were all excellent. Here are the five finalists: Questions The Caseworker Should Have Asked After My… Read More Best Microfiction 2025 Nominations

Since the early days of the zine, we’ve featured a DONATE button in the right-hand sidebar. Feel free to use it when you discover something amazing here, and one day maybe we’ll have a jar of cash substantial enough to pay our writers a little something. Humbly, we could also benefit from some help with… Read More Semi-occasional Fundraising Appeal

Here we are again, in the thick of awards nomination season, and it’s time for the Pushcart Prize! I say this with all sincerity, that it’s getting almost impossible to pluck a few titles from the array of spectacular writing we feature every year, and the Pushcarts make it even harder by limiting the nominations… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations 2025

Dottie and I are happy to announce this year’s Best of the Net nominations. As usual, we don’t take these decisions lightly, and it’s always difficult to make the granular distinctions between one piece and another when they’re all so good. As I always complain, Best of the Net doesn’t make it any easier by… Read More 2024 Best of the Net Nominations

I’m delighted to announce that four of our contributors have been tapped to appear in the Best Microfiction 2024 anthology. Congratulations to Audra Kerr Brown, Suzanne Hicks, Kati Bumbera, and Jon Doughboy. Here are the links to their stories: When the Cowbirds Come to Carry Your Sister Away ~ Audra Kerr Brown Reservoir ~ Suzanne… Read More Best Microfiction Picks Four of Ours!

It’s the end of one year and the start of another, and that means it’s time for our Best Small Fictions nominations. It probably makes sense that each of these pieces was nominated for one of the other annual awards: Best of the Net, Pushcarts, and Best Microfiction. To be perfectly frank, I could have… Read More Best Small Fictions Nominations 2024

Once again, I was delighted to see that we published a number of stories this year that qualify for the Best Microfiction anthology, which limits writers to 400 words. Among the qualifiers were these terrific standouts: When the Cowbirds Come to Carry Your Sister Away ~ Audra Kerr Brown Avery and Jacob ~ Perry Genovesi… Read More Best Microfiction 2024 Nominations

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following pieces for the 2024 Pushcart Prizes: ESSAY Expedition ~ Nancy Bell FICTION Andromeda Among the Asphodels, 2005 ~ Spencer Nitkey Like Trees in a Storm ~ Anika Carpenter Blackbird ~ Wayne Mok POETRY Oddly Satisfying: a meditation ~ Mikaela Nyman My Mother is a Contestant on… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations 2024

Nomination season is already upon us, and it’s my pleasure again this year to present our exceptional candidates for the Best of the Net competition. It seems like it’s getting harder and harder each year to choose from the variety of spectacular pieces we publish, and I had a ridiculously hard time with fiction this… Read More 2023 Best of the Net Nominations

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Dorothy Corsair! Our housewife finally has a name. First prize (a copy of my novel Parts Unknown) is shared by friends-of-the-zine and contributors Jake Sheff and Liz McShane, who suggested the first and last names, respectively. Jake had no idea that my mom’s name is Dorothy, so his entry was completely… Read More See her name

~Friends of The Disappointed Housewife ~ Now that we’re a few months past our five-year anniversary, I’ve been thinking a lot about the lady at the top of our home page—how steadfast she is, how stern but fully loving, just like the kind of mom who turns out a Greta Thunberg, a Michelle Obama, or… Read More Contest: Help name our disappointed housewife!

The Disappointed Housewife is delighted to announce that Lynn Mundell’s terrific flash story, “Centaurs in the Laundromat,” has been chosen to appear in the Best Microfiction 2023 Anthology. This is our second award since our inception, and we’re awfully proud to be able to offer a platform for works like Lynn’s so more readers can… Read More Best Microfiction selects one of ours!

And now for our final nominations for the 2022/2023 awards season: Sonder Press’s Best Small Fictions. A couple of years ago, one of our stories, The Apparitions by Kirsty McGrory, was chosen by the judges, so we’re on their radar. It’s nice to know that we’re reaching a wider audience thanks to that honor, but… Read More Best Small Fictions Nominations 2023

Attention, readers of The Disappointed Housewife: As our fifth year of publication comes to an end, we’re finally on Facebook. At the urging of a recent contributor, we thought we might as well go ahead and at least attempt to increase our readership by connecting with thousands of readers and writers there who have no… Read More The Disappointed Housewife is now on Facebook

For the first time, The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate a few works for the annual Best Microfiction competition. This one has a 400-word limit, so I’ve been remiss in combing through our archives to find eligible pieces. We have a nice debut stable of short fiction for the 2023 prize:   Now Look… Read More Best Microfiction 2023 Nominations

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following stories and poems for the 2023 Pushcart Prizes: FICTION How to Vanquish the Demon Raktabīja ~ Emily Hoover From the 2354 Galaxy Museum Exhibition of Lost Civilizations ~ Andrea Marcusa Forbidden Fruit ~ Karen Schauber POETRY Painting Party at an Indian Buffet ~ Megan Denese Mealor… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations 2023

It’s hard to believe, but The Disappointed Housewife is five years old this month. Our first piece was published on November 30, 2017—that is, our first piece by someone other than me. I had contributed a faux book review to get the ball rolling a couple of weeks earlier. I remember back then wanting to… Read More The Disappointed Housewife is 5 Years Old!

Now that The Disappointed Housewife has quite a few miles on its odometer, it’s time to announce a change in our submission requirements. Prose pieces should now come in under 1000 words. Different editors have different ideas of what flash fiction and CNF are—some, unreasonably, I think, limiting it to less than 500 words—but here… Read More New Prose Word Limit

Once again, The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to announce her nominations for this year’s Best of the Net competition. It’s always a pleasure to review the pieces we’ve published through the contest eligibility period (July 1 through June 30) and to be reminded of the wonderful variety of poetry, flash fiction, and essays we’re lucky… Read More 2022 Best of the Net Nominations

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased once again to nominate writers published in our virtual pages this year for the The Best Small Fictions anthology, assembled annually by Sonder Press. Our nominees are: Why I’m Angry ~ fiction by Brooke Brannon Reddit: Am I the Asshole? ~ Reddit thread by Caity Scott Two Micro Stories ~ fiction by… Read More Best Small Fictions Nominations 2022

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following stories and poems for the 2022 Pushcart Prizes: FICTION Why I’m Angry ~ Brooke Brannon But Who’s Counting? ~ Michael Cocchiarale Reddit: Am I the Asshole? ~ Caity Scott POETRY Sex Dream ~ Syreeta Muir Game Night ~ Julie Allyn Johnson Letter to Bernadette Mayer ~… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations 2022

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased (and proud) to announce that Kirsty McGrory’s flash fiction, “The Apparitions,” has been selected to appear in the 2021 Best Small Fictions Anthology, published by The Sonder Press. Read Kirsty’s excellent story, published last May. And here’s her bio: “Kirsty McGrory is a writer from Edinburgh, Scotland. Her writing has… Read More Look for The Disappointed Housewife in the 2021 Best Small Fictions Anthology!

One of the greatest pleasures I get as editor of your The Disappointed Housewife is opening an unsolicited submission and finding a piece that really “gets” our mission. My grin broadens as I read it, each line telling me that this writer is a natural at what we want to publish: We’re looking for stories… Read More What to Send to The Disappointed Housewife ~ editorial plea by Kevin Brennan

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following stories and poems for the 2021 Pushcart Prizes: FICTION: “Mid-Januinary Radio Jam” by Jim Meirose “The Hopskotch King” by Jake Sheff “The Apparitions” by Kirsty McGrory POETRY: “Oranges (for Frank O’Hara) by Christina M. Rau “If I seem distracted, I’m working on my party trick” by… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations 2021

The Disappointed Housewife is looking for fiction, poetry, and essays that address the coronavirus pandemic, quarantine, social distancing, and other consequences of the world’s public health crisis. Where there’s trouble, there’s fodder for art. Submissions must meet our offbeat needs and adhere to our usual guidelines. Show us how these extraordinary times have inspired you… Read More Call for Pandemic Submissions

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following pieces for the 2020 Sonder Press The Best Small Fictions anthology: “An Uninspired Kidnapping” by Lucy Zhang “The Saran Wrappers” by Xenia Taiga “How to Properly Distinguish Between a False Mermaid and a Genuine One” by Hiya Mukherjee “The Procedure” by Jeremy Stuart “[I really miss… Read More The Best Small Fictions nominations

The Disappointed Housewife is pleased to nominate the following stories and poems for the 2020 Pushcart Prize (click on titles to view each work): FICTION: “Destination Bulgaria” by Jim Meirose “The Saran Wrappers” by Xenia Taiga “How to Properly Distinguish Between a False Mermaid and a Genuine One” by Hiya Mukherjee POETRY: “Love Letter to… Read More Pushcart Prize Nominations

I “sat down” with flash-fiction writer, Jim Harrington, recently to answer some questions about how The Disappointed Housewife got started and what we’re looking for from writers. Pay Jim’s blog, “Six Questions For …”, a visit and have a look at our needs and wants. Best advice? Read our submission guidelines and stay offbeat! Six… Read More Q & A on what The Disappointed Housewife is looking for

Just over a year ago, I launched The Disappointed Housewife with an eye toward gathering nuggets of writing that perhaps couldn’t be found elsewhere. I had some particular kinds of works in mind, works that took the generally accepted rules of form and style and bent them into new shapes like literary balloon animals. I… Read More The Disappointed Housewife is One Year Old!

The Disappointed Housewife is delighted to announce our first payment to writers thanks to the generosity of the readers. Last month I created a “starving artists” fund, to which readers can make donations via PayPal. A convenient “donate” button is located in the sidebar to the right. And since the fund’s creation, we’ve collected a… Read More Dough!