Note: if your work is accepted, wait until it is published before submitting again.

Kinpaurak was born from the union of Dadaism, Dark Transcendentalism, Southern Gothicism, and Absurdist philosophy.

It comes from Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque grace, Camus’ sun-stroked nihilism, Bataille’s ecstatic horror, and whatever the hell Kafka was going through when he wrote about a guy turning into a bug.

What are we? An institute? A cult? A literary magazine? A fever dream? A thinly veiled excuse to put the words “esoteric,” “sublime,” and “existential dread” in one place? We’re still figuring it out. It’s a space for writing that digs beneath the polite and the presentable, that loves the absurd, the grotesque, the holy, and the unholy.

We like pieces that wrestle with faith and works that interrogate identity. If you’ve ever read something and thought, “this is good, but what if it were weirder, sharper, and a little more likely to be banned in a Catholic school?”—you’re probably in the right place.