Nightjar Press publishes limited edition single short-story chapbooks. Publisher/editor is Nicholas Royle, design by John Oakey. Royle and Oakey collaborated on Joel Lane’s The Earth Wire (1994), from British Fantasy Award-winning Egerton Press, which also published Darklands (1991) and Darklands 2 (1992). Nightjar was founded in 2009.

The nightjar – corpse fowl, goatsucker – is a nocturnal bird with an uncanny, supernatural reputation that flies at dusk or dawn as it hunts. It is more often heard than seen, its song a series of ghostly clicks known as a churring. Sylvia Plath, in ‘Goatsucker’, wrote that the ‘Devil-bird’ flies ‘on wings of witch cloth’; David Morley, in ‘Beethoven’s Yellowhammer’, calls it simply ‘Satanic’.

Submission guidelines: we publish individual short stories, previously unpublished, 2000–5000 words, with something of the uncanny or the gothic or the dark, strange, weird, wonderful and, increasingly, but not exclusively, experimental, about them. Word files are preferred. We welcome submissions from writers who have taken the trouble to find out what Nightjar stories are like and we try to respond quickly. 

‘A Nightjar might make you catch your breath. Make your heart flutter. Prickle the fine hairs on your neck. It will often make you scratch your head trying to work out what the fuck is going on. It will almost always give you nightmares. You need to have your head in the game to read them’ Matt Colbeck

‘Nightjar Press has the best running commentary on the public psychology of book fairs’ Jessica Bonder

Contact
email: [email protected]
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Nicholas Royle
Nicholas Royle, born in Manchester in 1963, is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, including The Director’s Cut, Antwerp and First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, which continues to publish original short stories in the form of limited-edition chapbooks. Forthcoming, from Confingo Publishing, is another short story collection, Paris Fantastique, and, from Salt, Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books.

Photographs: Nicholas Royle