Title: The Cafe Irreal
Medium: Web. They have no print component though they have produced one bound reader. Standard editorial applies: Real magazines like real newspapers appear in print, not electronic media. Print predicates quality, ethics, and reliability. Social media is fun, it’s taking over, and it may be the future, but it is now and for the forseeable future a debasing force.
Literature Type: Fiction, exclusively of the “irreal” genre. See below for more on that.
URL: http://cafeirreal.alicewhittenburg.com/index.htm
Frequency: “…Irreal is a quarterly publication, publishing on February 1, May 1, August 1, and November 1 of each year.”
Recent Issue: Most recent is Issue 90, May 2024. The website states that “we will be on hiatus until February of 2025,” so hopefully it will be back.
Submissions: By email only, so no Submittable and no fee to submit.
Pay: Yes: an “honorarium of one cent U.S. per word,” so way, way, way below pro. Add to this the stipulation they “will consider up to 2,000 words” and we see $20 tops is at stake, so this is not an outlet for professional writers, rather for professional students or something. Standard editorial applies: publishers who do not pay a fair rate and writers who provide work without demanding a fair rate share equal guilt in the approaching extinction of writing as a profession.
Policies: “WE DON’T ACCEPT SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS” (sic). Considering how little market there is or this type of story, that’s not a big deal. But considering how little they pay, it’s still grating. Aside from that, the website is refreshingly free from policies about offensive content, need for social justice, and the usual woke claptrap.
Samples:
First, about that term irrealism. It’s been around since the 70s to describe painters as well as writers such as Donald Barthelme, Franz Kafka, John Barth, and Jorge Luis Borges. On the website it is defined thus:
The answer to the question “What is irrealism?” can probably be answered, if not fully, then at least most concisely, by a consideration of the physical laws that underlie the objects and events depicted in the irreal story or piece of art…not only is the physics underlying the story impossible…but it is also fundamentally and essentially unpredictable (in that it is not based on any traditional or scientific conception of physics) and unexplained. In a story like “Metamorphosis” there is no physical law, even a fantastic one such as a spell or a curse, which is put forward to explain Gregor Samsa’s transformation. It is simply an absurdity that has happened, an absurdity that places itself between him and his goals in life.
So surrealism with the use of a Freudian premise removed. Here are some sample openings from the most recent issue:
From “Hobbesian Hideaway” by Peter Cherches
I wanted an ice cream cone, but I didn’t understand the flavors at Ike’s Creamery. They didn’t have the standard flavors, like vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, but they also didn’t have understandable proprietary flavors. At least Ample Hills Creamery provided ingredients for their more fanciful flavor names, like It Came from Gowanus. But I could make neither head nor tail of flavor names like Hobbesian Hideaway, Smelted Copper Fantasy, A Trip to Pluto, and Gabriel’s Kazoo.
From “&” by Tadhg Wallace
The & had decided Earth was worth about nine universal bucks, and the Earthlings were, by and large, receptive to this estimate.
From “The Futility of Ideas” by Cassie Margalit
I am a pencil—and yet you deny me my structure, spindly fibers of wood pulled together taut, a raft crashing through a storm, the raft that kills the storm—the storm is I.
From “Spiraling” by Seth Wade
One night I see a man chasing himself down the street; over and over he loops.
From “Cminqe” by Tim Boiteau
Cminqe (true pronunciation unknown) is a species of colonial organism of debatable classification once thought to be a myth until the discovery of fossil evidence of its spiny sail in the 21st century in the Cminqe Mountains.
I’m giving this website an ink-stained thumbs up. In spite of its flaws, it has a rare virtue: stories I actually enjoy reading.
Jedediah Smith 