The Gorko Gazette

It is that time of the year again, ladies and grunts, when the leaves are off the trees and the pages of our favorite literary websites are making that dry shucking pdf player sound in the cold gusts of wind. The scent of Santa and big game bubbas cradling rifles and smoking aromatic tobacco out of pipes in tree stands, and the smell of blood and viscera of disemboweled deer lying in heaps in the holler, is in the air. Snowflakes are falling somewhere over Iowa, and melting. Little boys and little girls in Peoria are on their best behavior, knowing better than to make Raddy Krampus mad so close to Christmas. And once again the Gorko staff has cast its colored beans into the disconnected air fryer in Rambo’s corner of the basement to determine the Top 5 Literary Websites Of This World.

What is that, the smell of pine needles and strings of popcorn and loops of mistletoe? No, it is this year’s freshly garlanded winners of the Literary Websites Of This World competition. Some of them did not even know they were in the running. Below is the complete list.

Literary Websites Of This World 2025

Judges: Raddy (Founder and EIG of The Gorko Gazette, Three-time Pushcart Ploughsman Award nominee, one-time Best of the Neck Vampyre Slop Fiction nominee, author of the highly touted novel She Rang, Rang Rang (U Rang U Tang? Books) and an acclaimed book of poetry wizened oaks, their withered boughs (lowercase press).

Oh, and also his friends Lemon Reilly, Life Doctor, and Gorko Chef Rambo Bolillo.

Criteria: They have published Raddy.

Stats: 8,235 literary magazines assessed, of which 5 met the above criteria.

5. Flash Friction Magazine

This delightfully frictive magazine, run by sassy EIC Shirley (with a smiley face) publishes only one piece of flash friction PER day. Flash friction is defined as ‘fiction under 10,000 words, that is erotica’. Rub-a-dub-dub! Founded in 1976 by the original Shirley (this Shirley is the twelfth), Flash Friction also does its best to take advantage of aspiring authors using many of the traditonal literary scams: they host multiple annual contests with exorbitant entrance fees, run an exclusive Frictive Authors Club ($180 annual membership, which includes full manuscript feedback from Shirley herself), A Friction Collective in which you can pay to be part of a book club, workshops at $55 a pop, or you can even volunteer to read submissions: you make nothing, but if you reject enough $3 submissions, you may eventually earn a Fictive Reader Badge, which costs $17.99.

Flash Friction Magazine published Raddy in February 2025, featuring his flash friction erotica ‘Wobbly Dick, Asthmatic Annie’. In 2024-25 Raddy spent $450 submitting to FFM.

4. The Ciseaux Review

The Ciseaux Review, not to be mistaken for the French-language rag La Gazette des Ciseaux, proudly features poems and vignettes inspired by French impressionist painter Claude Monet. ‘Vee are NAUGHT zee Gazette des Ciseaux,’ The Cizeaux Review EIC Filipe Manzanagirth told Gorko reporters by telephone. ‘Makee eSHURGGGH you reader know zees.’

The Ciseaux Review published Raddy’s poem ‘1 Day at Giverny’ in October of this year, and ‘Ciseaux, Where Art Mine Ciseaux / Hangnail’ in 2024. Or, shoot, was that put out by La Gazette?

3. Beneath Ruthless Remainders

Not to be mistaken for the Brooklyn alt-lit magazine Blithe Ruthless Reindeers, which is an entirely different publication, Beneath Ruthless Remainders (ISSN 555-4712) is a non-profit, pro-rate online ‘literary’ magazine that publishes high fantasy fan fiction trash written by your mom. They did, however, also publish Raddy’s unfinished 27,000-word sword-and-sandal half epic Borbagel and the Dragon Fleece People in its entirety. Number 3 baby!

2. Okay McFeely

Although their logo sports a large cartoon rendering of Mr. McFeely of the 1980s daytime children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Okay McFeely is in fact a literary magazine that glories in (in their own words) ‘the surreal, the fictive, the unreal and surreal and imaginary, the fictional, the rhubarbed and unskeined, the raspberry clouds of the beyond, the terrifying and automative [sic], the experimental and non-traditional, the magical realism in the everyday bric-a-brac of the cubist, the Cuban and anti-fascist, we are on Native American stolen land, the dada and the da-do!’

Da-do mind if I do!

Raddy has been published multiple times in this literary trash heap, his most recent being the ‘trad wife’ prose poem ‘between sheba and me there am i’ in July 2025.

1. scaffold

The only real literary magazine in this year’s list, in the words of its own editor steve gergley, ‘scaffold is an online literary magazine of micro writings. we publish micro fiction, prose poetry, and other tiny grotesqueries,’ and do NOT capitalize any damn thing. They seek ‘miniature worlds that are sharp, shimmering, skeletal, surreal, strange,’ and yet ‘sanguinary’.

They have not yet published Raddy, but they are Raddy’s number one dream mag. Make Raddy Krampus’s dreams come true this Christmas, steve, or at any other time, baby! Raddy is literarily (ha ha, literarily get it) begging you.

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Image: Helen Hunt Jackson (The Magazine of Poetry and Literary Review, 1893).png

Second image: Isabella Wilson McConihe (The Magazine of Poetry and Literary Review, 1893).png