The Best Literary Magazine Rankings for Writers (A Roundup)
You could spend an entire afternoon clicking through literary magazine websites, trying to figure out if your story is a good fit, if the journal is even still active, if the reading period you found on Submittable is current or two years old. You could do that. People do.
Or you could start with a list someone else already built.
There are hundreds of literary magazines accepting submissions right now. A few dozen of them would genuinely move the needle on your writing career. The gap between those two facts is where most writers lose weeks, and where a good ranking list saves you. The better news: the best lists don't all use the same methodology, which means they complement each other in ways that are actually useful. Here's what each one measures and when to reach for it.
The Best Literary Magazine Rankings for Writers (A Roundup)
Erika Krouse’s Ranking of 500-ish Literary Magazines for Short Fiction
This is the one. If you only bookmark one list, make it this one. Novelist and writing teacher Erika Krouse built and maintains a five-tier ranking of over 500 literary magazines for short fiction, scored by a combination of prize wins (Best American Short Stories, Pushcart, O. Henry), circulation, and payment rates. It's updated annually—the 2026 edition is live—and she offers a downloadable Excel spreadsheet if you want to filter and sort by what matters most to you personally.
What makes Krouse's list particularly useful is her editorial honesty. She flags journals with predatory or confusing submission rights language, notes which markets are on hiatus, and calls out Narrative Magazine's $26 submission fee directly. Genre writers also get a dedicated sidebar covering speculative, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, and fairy tale markets that don't typically win mainstream prizes. The tier system (Tier 1 being the elite glossies, Tier 5 being smaller but still reputable markets) makes it easy to build a submission strategy at any career stage.
Best for: Fiction writers who want a comprehensive, data-driven, regularly updated starting point.
Erika Krouse’s Ranking of 500ish Literary Mags for Short Fiction
Brecht’s Top 1,000 Literary Magazines (Fiction & Creative Nonfiction)
If Krouse goes 500 deep, Brecht goes all the way to 1,000, with a scoring system ambitious enough to match. Rather than relying on a single prize, it pulls from data sources spanning fiction, nonfiction, flash, and micro: Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Pushcart Fiction and Nonfiction, O. Henry, PEN DAU Short Story Prize, Best of the Net (fiction and nonfiction separately), Wigleaf Top 50, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. Each prize is weighted by recency, with 2024 wins counting ten times more than 2015 wins. For journals that don't appear in any of those anthologies, which at the long tail of 1,000 markets, many won't, Twitter/X follower count is used as a tiebreaker.
That multi-signal approach makes this list genuinely useful for writers across the full prestige spectrum. Because it scores Best American Essays and Pushcart Nonfiction alongside the fiction prizes, it's also one of the only ranked lists that's actually useful for CNF and essay writers. Brecht is transparent about the limits: the ranking is US-centered, so international journals are at a structural disadvantage, and not all aspects of journal quality can be measured by prizes.
Best for: Fiction and CNF writers who want the widest possible ranked list, who write across multiple genres or forms, or who are building out submission lists deep into mid- and lower-tier markets.
Brecht’s Top 1,000 Lit Magazines (Fiction & Creative Nonfiction)
Brecht’s Top Poetry Magazines
The poetry counterpart to the fiction spreadsheet above, this one covers 400 ranked poetry markets using three poetry-specific prizes: Best American Poetry, Pushcart Poetry, and Best of the Net Poetry, all spanning 2016–2024 with the same recency weighting.
What makes this genuinely different from just googling "best poetry magazines" is the scoring granularity. A journal that consistently places poems in Best of the Net but never cracks BAP still shows up and ranks accordingly, which surfaces a whole tier of online-first journals (Blackbird, Waxwing, dialogist, Split This Rock) that prize-based lists centered only on print anthologies tend to undercount. Like the fiction sheet, it's transparent about its limits: US-centric by design, so UK and Irish journals like the London Review of Books or Southword rank lower than their actual reputation warrants.
Best for: Poets who want a ranked list built specifically on poetry prizes rather than fiction metrics, and who want to see how online and smaller journals stack up against the prestige print titles on a consistent scoring system.
John Fox’s Ranking of the 100 Best Literary Magazines (Fiction)
John Fox (Bookfox) takes a narrower but methodologically transparent approach: his fiction list ranks journals by how many times they've appeared in Best American Short Stories (BASS) over the past eleven years, weighted by selections vs. special mentions. The result is a leaner, more focused top 100 that's especially useful for writers who care specifically about BASS as a prestige signal.
Fox is refreshingly upfront about the limits of this approach—BASS reflects the taste of a rotating guest editor, so a journal's absence in a given year doesn't mean it's declined in quality. His list also notes defunct journals with an asterisk, so you won't waste time considering submitting to Tin House or Glimmer Train (RIP to both). Updated annually each October.
Best for: Writers who want to understand which journals are consistently recognized by the BASS editorial ecosystem specifically, rather than prizes broadly.
John Fox’s Best Lit Mags (Fiction)
John Fox’s Best Lit Magazines (Nonfiction)
The essay and CNF companion to the fiction list above. Fox uses the same prize-based methodology here, pulling from Best American Essays rather than BASS. One notable difference: the nonfiction list is considerably more democratic than the fiction one, the BAE editors spread recognition across a much wider pool of publications, which means this list surfaces some genuinely overlooked journals worth paying attention to. River Teeth, Southwest Review, and The Normal School all rank surprisingly high, and Fox calls them out specifically as worth your attention.
If you write personal essays, reported pieces, or hybrid CNF, this list is a genuinely useful complement to the more fiction-focused resources above.
Best for: Essayists and CNF writers who want a prize-backed ranking of nonfiction markets.
John Fox’s Best Lit Mags (Nonfiction)
How to Use These Lists
The lit mag landscape is big and kind of overwhelming and nobody tells you how to navigate it when you're starting out. These lists don't solve that entirely, but they give you a framework—something to push against and a way to make the submission process feel less like throwing your work into a void and more like building something deliberate. That's worth a lot, even when the rejections keep coming.
I recommend using Krouse to set your targets, Brecht to build your list, and Fox to cross-check. Start at the top of your Krouse tier and work down based on where you are in your career. There's no shame in beginning at Tier 3 or 4, and there's real strategy in it. When you've exhausted that runway, open Brecht and go wider.
If you write poetry, Brecht's poetry sheet is its own ecosystem and a genuinely good place to start. If you write essays or hybrid work, Fox's nonfiction list will surface journals that most fiction-first resources miss entirely, and the Brecht sheet scores CNF prizes right alongside fiction ones so you're not working from someone else's map.
Dante had Virgil. You have a spreadsheet. Honestly the spreadsheet might be more useful. Now go descend.
