We are an independent publisher of literary horror, speculative novels, and short fiction. We read every submission. We pay our writers. We publish the work that doesn't quite fit anywhere else.
N°1 · 2026
Our inaugural annual — short fiction, novel excerpts, and prose miscellany from independent writers. Open to all submissions. No reading fees. We pay on acceptance.
Two novels and an annual — what we've published so far.
Three generations. Four thousand miles. One spectacular final hustle. A road-trip novel about the terrible grace of finally seeing your family clearly.
A psychological horror novel about a 24-hour VHS rental store that shouldn't exist, the insomniac it cures, and the price of every tape.
Our inaugural annual publication of short fiction and essays. Currently reading submissions through January 31.
Selected by the Times Book Review staff — titles we're reading, talking about, and pressing into people's hands.
Tayari Jones
A lush historical novel about sisterhood — Jones at the peak of her powers, weaving together three generations of Black women whose fates are bound by love, sacrifice, and the long reach of history.
Find it at BookshopDaniyal Mueenuddin
A sweeping family epic set across continents and decades — Mueenuddin's long-awaited debut novel delivers on every promise his stories made.
Find it at BookshopBen Lerner
A tender meditation on technology, memory, and the gaps between what we mean and what we say — Lerner's most accessible and affecting novel yet.
Find it at BookshopTana French
French's latest standalone draws her Dublin Murder Squad universe into sharper moral focus — a tightly wound crime novel that refuses easy answers.
Find it at BookshopCat Sebastian
A witty, warm-hearted romance with serious stakes — Sebastian continues her streak of writing love stories that feel genuinely earned.
Find it at BookshopCaro Claire Burke
A tradwife is flung back to the mid-19th century — Burke's debut is a darkly funny interrogation of nostalgia, gender, and the histories we think we want.
Find it at BookshopBelle Burden
The intimate story of an imploding marriage — Burden writes about love and its dissolution with terrifying honesty and structural precision.
Find it at BookshopAnand Gopal
A deeply human account of a revolution — Gopal embeds with ordinary people forging extraordinary change, and the result is essential journalism at its most literary.
Find it at BookshopPatrick Radden Keefe
A mysterious death in a gilded city, and a family's search for truth — Keefe applies his trademark rigor to a story equal parts social history and detective thriller.
Find it at BookshopNamwali Serpell
Serpell's critical study of Toni Morrison is an act of intellectual love — brilliant, rigorous, and alive to every register of Morrison's genius.
Find it at BookshopBookshop links support independent bookstores.
When I started Play, I knew the central image — a man entering a 24-hour video store that shouldn't exist — but I didn't know yet why he kept going back. The answer turned out to be older than any technology in the book, and it took three drafts to find it.
Read the essayThe decision to move from quarterly to annual wasn't about scaling back. It was about giving each issue room to mean something — and giving our writers more than ninety days of shelf life.
Continue readingOn grief, generational inheritance, and writing a conman with a conscience. We sat down with Furry the week before the paperback shipped to talk about the book's long road from short story to novel.
Continue readingContinue readingJack had given up on the word *tired*. The word had stopped meaning anything around month four, when sleep became less of an event and more of a rumor — something other people did, in other rooms, at appropriate hours.
What he had instead was a long grey corridor of time that started at eleven and ended whenever the light came back. He walked it. He read paperbacks he could no longer remember the next morning. He learned which floorboards in the apartment creaked and which ones lied.
It was on the long grey corridor — on the fourth or fifth or possibly hundredth night of it — that he walked past the storefront on Columbus Avenue and saw the neon sign humming, even though the building had been empty since spring.
The Lab. is our annual publication — short stories, novel excerpts, and prose miscellany from emerging and established independent writers. We read every submission. We pay our writers. We publish work that doesn't quite fit anywhere else.
Each year's issue is curated by our editorial team and produced as a print volume, with the full contents also available digitally to subscribers.
We publish writers whose work doesn't quite fit anywhere else — literary horror, speculative fiction, and short stories that earn their strangeness. We read every submission, and we pay our writers.
The Lab. Annual N°1 is open for submissions through January 31, 2026. We welcome short fiction, novel excerpts, and prose miscellany from independent and emerging writers.
Full manuscripts and book-length projects are accepted by query first. We respond to every submission. Simultaneous submissions are welcome — just let us know.
Our inaugural annual is open for submissions through January 31. Read the call and guidelines.
Submission callAn editor's note on why we're moving The Lab. from quarterly to annual, and what to expect.
Read the noteFurry's debut novel is available in paperback and eBook through major retailers and independent bookstores.
Order the book
