Submission Guidelines

New Left Review welcomes the submission of articles, comments and book reviews on all the major issues facing us today. Authors should bear in mind that NLR is a journal of ideas, not an academic publication: lively, intelligent and thoughtful writing is highly valued—prose models would be Benjamin, Bloch or Marx rather than the average conference paper—and articles should be submitted with an educated and discerning general readership in mind.

Please note that NLR does not respond to article ‘pitches’, nor does it publish unsolicited poetry or artwork.

Reviewing procedures

In its intellectual range and coverage, NLR is a mixed-mode journal and as such avails itself of a variety of evaluation procedures and criteria. For example, translations of published work in other languages cannot be assessed in the same way as new, unpublished work in English. In many cases, the decision to publish is effectively based on peer review, thanks to the breadth of specialist knowledge on the editorial committee. A conventional peer-reviewing procedure may be used where this is judged appropriate or in cases where it is specifically requested by authors.

In the first instance, submitted texts will generally be circulated to members of the editorial committee for consideration. NLR aims to respond to authors within twelve weeks.

Word length

This should be guided by intellectual necessity; however, the majority of articles published in NLR are between 4,000 and 12,000 words long, while book reviews are around 2,000–3,000 words.

Footnote style

Footnotes are set at the bottom of the page, and are welcomed for their role in clarifying sources and suggesting parenthetical or tangential ideas. They should not be used to amass cumbersome apparatuses of unnecessary bibliographic information, and should never refer to works that authors have not yet read. Contributors are also encouraged to refrain from self-citation.

The general house-style for NLR footnotes is:

  1. Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington, DC 1995, pp. 28–9.
  2. Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, in Michael Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations, London 1999, p. 51.
  3. Lorna Sage, ‘The First Bacchante’, London Review of Books, 29 April 1999.
  4. Brenner, ‘The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: US Feminism Today’, NLR I/200, July–August 1993, pp. 156–7.

Please note that footnotes are not used in book reviews.

How to submit an article to NLR

Please click here to upload your submission. You will need a copy of your article as a Microsoft Word .doc or .docx file.

Sidecar submissions should be sent to sidecar@newleftreview.org.