Fins Like Arms is a journal of short stories focused on deconstructing the boundary between “literary” and “genre” fiction. Our belief is that literary fiction is not a coherent category and that we should stop using the term “literary” altogether. Rather, we should discuss works of literature in terms of aesthetic merit. Works of all kinds have high aesthetic merit, including those that feature what would traditionally be called genre elements. Likewise, many works have low aesthetic merit, including stories often called literary. For every god-awful Jack Reacher novel, there’s also a boring and self-indulgent book like Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You. (Sorry, Ms. Lockwood, because Priestdaddy and No One Is Talking About This are both great.)

Our mission is to publish stories that offer the aesthetic inventiveness associated with great literature but which also eschew the monotony and tedium that modern high-brow fiction often wears as a badge. Too frequently, high-brow writers like to focus on prose style, forgetting that stories need to have tension, conflict, and thematic weight. (We’d say low-brow writers do the opposite, except they neglect both prose style and conflict by rehashing plots and hacking out sentences without any real thought.) Writers should focus on writing good prose, but stories aren’t only constructed of good prose. Something weighty or important should probably happen, too.

Here’s a list of works we think are great. If you like these stories, try submitting. If you don’t like these stories but have a piece that you think would fit our mission, try submitting too.