It’s another month and another open window. This time we have managed to secure the excellent services of Mark Burrow! Author of the brilliant Coo. A hilarious blend of surrealism and dirty realism packed into one novella. Mark was also one of our contributors for The Hunger anthology and here at UPP we have become big fans of his work. We’re really looking forward to reading his picks this month.
This call-out window is dedicated to the fixated, the obsessed and the chained. The addiction might be chemical, but not necessarily. Some are addicted to money, sugar, rubber, horror films—the person with blue eyes and a heart tattoo who works on checkout. Prose only for this one — a minimum of 850 to a max of 2,000 words. This window opens on the 21st October and slams closed on the 21st November. We are not interested in reading Halloween subs. There are plenty of windows open for that genre at the moment.
If you’d like Mark to consider your work please include a short third-person bio, author photo (optional) and attach your work in a word compatible format (Word.doc works best). Please also include social links so we can share and tag you. Send submissions to urbanpigsguest@outlook.com with the subject Addiction.
We are not accepting poetry at this current time unless it is story based. We will not tolerate any hate speech whether homophobic, racism or any other form.
Urban Pigs Press (zine) is currently a not-for-profit entity and therefore we can’t offer any form of payment for submissions. We respectfully ask that successful applicants do not share the accepted piece on any other platform for at least two months. We do not accept previously published work. Simultaneous submissions are fine but please let us know if they are accepted elsewhere.
We aim to respond to all queries as soon as possible. If you haven’t heard from us within two weeks of submitting and have followed all of the guidelines then please feel free to message us via email.
If you believe you meet all of the above and would like to send us your fiction for consideration then please do so via the email address below. We will not respond to emails that haven’t followed the guidelines.
urbanpigsguest@outlook.com
By submitting your work you confirm that your submission is owned and controlled by you. Agree that Urban Pigs Press have the right to publish your work online.
Please support us by subscribing to the newsletter on the home page of our site.
We look forward to reading your work!
Bam and James.
Who is this Mark Burrow?
Mark Burrow has published a novella, Coo, which is about an alcoholic transforming into a pigeon in a world where people are turning into birds (Alien Buddha Press). His short stories have appeared in a range of titles, such as Bubble, Literally Stories, Cerasus, Flight of the Dragonfly and Paragraph Planet. He is currently close to finishing the first draft of a novel, which will include Torture Origami. He lives in Brighton in the UK and can be found on social @markburrow20 and @markburrow.bsky.social.
OUT NOW!
Driver
Rick Malone is dying, but not before one last ride. Travel with him through the seedy underworld of pimps, crooked cops, and broken dreams in this transgressive noir novella. Driver should appeal to fans of James Sallis (Drive), as well as Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Deeply introspective, Vice drags the rotting carcass of the American Dream into the sunlight. Dark. Brutal. And unapologetically honest.
“Driver is a poetic, fast, and painful embrace, like a beating heart wrapped in the cool skin of the dead. A tremendous read.”
Coy Hall, author of Colossus with a Poison Tongue
“Fans of Vice’s fiction already know to fasten their seatbelts. In this one, he’s firing on all cylinders. A warning, however: the twists and turns in DRIVER may cause whiplash. This is one you do not want to miss!”
Brian Bowyer, Splatterpunk Award-nominated and Godless Award-winning author of OLD TOO SOON and METRO KINETIC.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all.” Keats wrote that. Vice doesn’t do beauty. He vivisects it with a rusty scalpel and holds it up under the nose of the reader in all of its bloody ugliness. No. No, Beauty in what 2024 would call beauty. However Vice does do truth and there’s an absolute abundance of it here in DRIVER, if you can stomach it. It’s a mad, bad, relentless and completely unapologetic joyride into darkness. Get in, Vice is driving like his life depends on it.”
Stephen J. Golds, The Gone series
Urban Pigs Press 
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