Contribute to The Anvil Review

The Anvil Review started as an experiment. How do we, as anarchists*, engage with the world outside of ourselves. How do we present ourselves to the world or engage with the world’s presentation of us. We started The Anvil Review with the hope of addressing this broad question of engagement through the form of the review essay.

Writing reviews is hard. Few places publish them any more, particularly in the anarchist* milieu, but more broadly as well. A review essay is a particular form of review that isn’t constrained by the material being reviewed but takes a broader view, one that includes the questions asked by that material, as well as how others have addressed those questions (a genealogical review, if you will). If a review is hard to write then a review essay is even more so. As a result of this difficulty The Anvil Review is going to start including a wider variety of reviews, some essays, and some fiction.

If you’ve made it this far, than we would like to invite you to submit your reviews of anarchist, radical, interesting, and popular material. It can be longer (1000-3000 words) and used on the website and paper editions. It can also be shorter (<500 words) and used for our sister project The Hammer.

In addition we are looking to share complex cultural material. While our emphasis will be on the written word, we do have the capacity for any form of digital media. We are looking specifically for fiction, short plays, or other material that portrays the time period we are living in. Any submitted material will undergo an editorial process.

We are now preparing issue #4 to be released in March of 2013. If you would like to share something with us, the deadline is December 31st 2012. We look forward to hearing from you.

How to contribute:

By email – submissions@theanvilreview.org
By snail mail – PO Box 3549, Berkeley CA 94703

* by anarchist we mean something both broader and more narrow than the term is usually used. We use the term anarchist as a short cut for ourselves but do not need authors, our friends, or anyone to use the term. We understand the criticism of political terms and this term is as problematic as others. In addition we are not necessarily interested in all anarchist material. To put it bluntly we are looking for anarchic imagination not anarchist orthodoxy.