Nightjar Press is an independent press specialising in limited edition single short-story chapbooks. The publisher and editor is Nicholas Royle (see below); design is by John Oakey. Royle and Oakey previously worked together 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 Press was founded in 2009.

The nightjar – aka corpse fowl or goatsucker – is a nocturnal bird with an uncanny, supernatural reputation that flies silently at dusk or dawn as it hunts for food. The nightjar is more often heard than seen, its song a series of ghostly clicks known as a churring. In her poem ‘Goatsucker’, Sylvia Plath wrote that the ‘Devil-bird’ flies ‘on wings of witch cloth’.

Submission guidelines: we publish individual short stories, previously unpublished, between 2000 and 5000 words, that have something of the uncanny or the gothic or the dark, strange, weird, wonderful and, increasingly, but not exclusively,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

‘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