Tag: Power

Call for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Mother Monster/Father Fiend

Mandy Webster

Elderfly Press is now accepting submissions for Mother Monster/Father Fiend, a new anthology exploring the shadowed edges of parenthood. We’re looking for short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and black-and-white artwork that reveal the monstrous, misunderstood, or mythic aspects of motherhood and fatherhood.

This anthology invites you to challenge the cultural scripts of what a “good” parent looks like. Sometimes the monster is real—a parent whose choices hurt, haunt, or unravel the lives of those in their care. Other times, the monster is only a mask placed by society:

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Listen by Sacha Bronwasser explores who gets seen—and who gets silenced

Mandy Webster

Sacha Bronwasser’s Listen is a quiet, unsettling novel that stares straight into the power imbalance between those who look and those who are looked at—and asks what happens when the powerless finally start to speak. Translated from Dutch, Listen unfolds slowly, like a photograph coming into focus, until the image becomes both vivid and painful.

Get your copy of Listen from my independent online bookstore today!

The novel moves between Paris and the Netherlands, between 1989 and 2015, tracing two women—Eloise and Marie—whose lives briefly overlap through the same family and the same Paris apartment. Both arrive as au pairs, both nearly invisible to the family they serve, and both find themselves noticed at last only when that attention becomes dangerous.

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Call for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Be My Weird/Wyrd Valentine

Mandy Webster

Love has always had a dark side—and we want to see yours. Elderfly Press is now accepting submissions for Be My Weird/Wyrd Valentine (working title), an anthology exploring the uncanny, unsettling, and sometimes downright horrifying side of romantic relationships.

We’re looking for stories, poems, essays, and black-and-white art that dive into the strange corners of love and desire—where passion turns perilous, intimacy hums with unease, and devotion blurs the line between beauty and terror. Whether it’s romance that defies reality, affection tinged with dread, or longing that transforms into something unrecognizable, we want work that lingers in the mind and twists the heart. Let the strange, the eerie, and the passionate collide—show us the love that frightens, bewilders, and enthralls.

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Call for Submissions

Now accepting book-length submissions

Mandy Webster

At Elderfly Press, we are committed to publishing bold, literary works that unsettle, provoke, and linger long after the final page. We seek book-length fiction and creative nonfiction that confronts the hidden violence of the world—psychological, social, or supernatural—and gives voice to stories that challenge the patriarchal status quo.

We are especially drawn to:

  • Literary thrillers and suspense novels with a sharp edge.
  • Horror fiction that unsettles through atmosphere, voice, or psychological depth.
  • Creative nonfiction—including memoirs—that could be read with the intensity of a thriller or horror novel.
  • Works that expose the dark underbelly of the patriarchy, pulling back the veil on power, violence, and survival.
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