The Esthetic Apostle

On the Name

On the 14th of February, 1882, Oscar Wilde stood before two thousand Chicagoans at Central Music Hall and called the city's celebrated Water-Works Tower a "castellated monstrosity." The Chicago Tribune, gentle and weary in equal measure, christened him in the next morning's column The Esthetic Apostle — an epithet half-mocking, half-admiring, and entirely correct. We thought we'd take the title off the paper's hands, since the paper plainly had no further use for it.

"Oscar Wilde was announced to lecture last evening at Central Hall, and the great esthete had obtained so much free advertising hitherto that he was greeted with a crowded house."

Mission

The Esthetic Apostle exists for the writers, photographers, painters, and other unreasonable people who refuse to accept the world as they find it. We publish poetry, fiction, essays, art, and photography that risk something — wit, beauty, embarrassment, or all three at once. We are uninterested in the beige, and almost as uninterested in the merely shocking. The middle ground we keep is the one our namesake insisted on: that art ought to be as honest as it is well-dressed.

Editorial Focus

• Poetry that earns its line breaks.
• Fiction with a pulse — and, where possible, a sense of humor about it.
• Essays that have nothing in common except that they could not have been written by anyone else.
• Art & Photography that refuses to apologize for its own beauty.

We accept previously published work, simultaneous submissions, pen names, and almost anyone who will write us a sufficiently interesting cover letter. See the submission guidelines for the rest.

Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief & Founder

Samuel Griffin

Poetry Editor

Helena Marsh

Fiction Editor

Theo Castellan

Essays Editor

Ines Wren

Art & Photography Editor

August Voss

Correspondence

Submissions go through Submittable; everything else lands at team@estheticapostle.org. Press, partnerships, the occasional grievance — we read it all, usually with a cup of something dark.

We have nothing to declare except our standards.