AboutFounded in 1970, The Mekong Quarterly was established to publish fiction, essays, and poetry of unusual distinction, with particular regard for work shaped by borderlands, crossings, dislocations, and the persistent instability of place. Though its editorial interests remain international, the journal has long been drawn to writing touched by river cities, colonial afterlives, vanished itineraries, forgotten outposts, and those private acts of reinvention by which one life is exchanged for another. From the beginning, the Quarterly has favored work that is formally composed, intellectually serious, and resistant to fashion.
Over the decades, The Mekong Quarterly has maintained a quiet reputation among readers and contributors who value literature not merely as self-expression, but as a mode of witness, inquiry, and risk. Its pages have made room for the reflective essay, the unsettling story, the travel-worn lyric, and the account—part recollection, part invention—that declines to separate experience too neatly from atmosphere. While never bound to any one school or region, the journal has been especially hospitable to writers whose work bears the marks of distance: humid ports, inland capitals, border ferries, consular waiting rooms, guesthouses, riverboats, monsoon streets, and the odd moral weather of expatriate life. If a certain air of old intrigue has gathered around the Quarterly over the years, the editors have made no particular effort to dispel it.
The current editors remain committed to the founder’s view that literature should enlarge the known world rather than merely decorate it. We seek writing that is lucid, shapely, and durable; writing alert to history, power, absurdity, longing, and the comedy of displacement. We continue to prefer the singular over the programmatic, the memorable over the timely, and the genuinely venturesome over the merely well-behaved.SubmissionsWe are not seeking submissions at this time, but check back for our 2027 issue announcement.The Mekong Quarterly welcomes unsolicited submissions of fiction, essays, poetry, translations, and formally indeterminate work that may not sit comfortably within a single category. We are especially interested in writing with imaginative risk.We accept submissions year-round. Please submit only one prose piece at a time, or up to five poems in a single document. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, provided you notify us promptly if the work is accepted elsewhere. We ask that all submissions be previously unpublished. Response times vary, though we aim to reply within twelve weeks.Subscriptions
Annual subscriptions to The Mekong Quarterly include access to all current issues and archived selections published during the subscription term. Subscribers sustain the magazine’s independence and help support new work that might otherwise remain uncollected, unseen, or unclassifiable.
For subscription inquiries, institutional rates, or questions regarding back issues, please contact the editors through the journal’s main page.