About

Welcome to Half Sour!

Half Sour Magazine is a publication for all the wonderful and wonky pieces you believe in but can’t find a home for—the writing you know is really quite good but has been languishing in your Submittable inbox for months. It’s a little sweet, a little sour. Bitchy–but in a fun aunt way, or a “your friend from high school who doesn’t necessarily share your values anymore but will hold you hair back if you throw up” way. Critical but compassionate. Snarky, but with a heart of gold. Like a restaurant critic in a movie who writes that a fancy Caesar salad is “limp,” but he’s really just a lonely man looking for love in all the wrong places. 

We’re three friends who wanted to reproduce together but since that isn’t possible quite yet, Half Sour is our freaky little baby. We hope you love her.

Half Sour is

Eleanor

a lactose-tolerant Jewess living in Bulgaria. Her work has been published in The Southern Humanities Review, the Tahoma Literary Review, in addition to various other places that didn’t pay her. 

Jonah

a writer and editor based in Eastern Europe. He’s been published in Artforum, Hyperallergic, and several other places. And there’s a space between his last names—don’t you dare use a hyphen.

Mitali

a girl with brown hair and glasses based in New York City. She was a fiction contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2017 and her work has appeared in Rookie, 4×4, the Columbia Current and on the Racist Sandwich Podcast. She’s so pretty it hurts.

Submissions

We accept fiction, poetry (but like, be careful, you know?), essays, criticism, lists (only funny, please), and multimedia work. We’re just starting out, so we’re not currently able to pay right now. But, since asking people to write for free is truly obnoxious, we’re trying to soften the blow by offering our top-tier editing services in exchange for your work.

For each accepted submission we will provide either structural or copy edits on one (1) piece of your writing. This can be a fiction piece that you’re looking to refine, a pitch that you’re working on, or a grad school app that you want to polish. Really, anything within reason and under 10 pages.

We await your submissions at editors@halfsourmag.com.