Seeking short fiction (10,000 to 20,000 words) with a contemporary urban setting for the Street Smart Series from Frayed Edge Press. 

For this series, we’re looking for manuscripts of 10,000 to 20,000 words – long enough to involve the reader in a good story, but brief enough to be read on a short train journey or long commute. This size manuscript is essentially a “novelette” – a work that is longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella. 

Your story should have a contemporary urban setting, well-drawn characters, and an engaging plot. Action, suspense, and even some sex and violence are great, but not mandatory. Humor is a plus and diverse characters are an expectation. We’re open to various genres as well as cross-over, multi-genre works. Some good models to think about are: hard-boiled detective stories, noir fiction, street lit, and urban fantasy. Elements of mystery, horror, SF, and/or some romance are also fine – but please, no “cozy” mysteries or anything that is primarily romance. Everything published in this series will have a dark underbelly and some grit to it.

See the Frayed Edge Press guidelines for fiction for more information: 
https://www.frayededgepress.com/fiction.html

We're pleased to announce the publication of A Nurse's Story: Medical Missionary in Korea and Siberia, 1915-1920, a memoir by Delia Battles Lewis. This is an unusual story of an early twentieth-century American woman, who left her small town in Ohio to train as a nurse in New York City and then went on an adventure of a lifetime. She found fulfillment in her work as a medical missionary in Korea, training native nurses at the mission hospital in another small town, Haeju. Her life of service there was interrupted by WWI, when she was called to be part of a Red Cross unit on the Eastern Front. She traveled on the Trans-Siberian railroad, encountered fleeing refugees in Harbin, and then worked in a typhus hospital and helped establish a Red Cross hospital in Omsk. At the end of the war, she returned to Korea to work in a hospital in Seoul, just in time to witness the first stirrings of the Korean Independence movement.

​Author Delia Battles Lewis (1888-1959) was an Ohio native who earned her nursing degree at the Presbyterian Hospital's School of Nursing in New York (now the Columbia University School of Nursing). Following her medical mission service in Korea and her Red Cross work during World War I, she returned to Ohio and married William A. Lewis of Ashtabula; they had two children. She later returned to private nursing and remained a staunch advocate for the nursing profession throughout her life.

Welcome to Frayed Edge Press, a new independent publisher located in Philadelphia. Our goal is to publish works that are "a bit on the fringe" -- books that express alternative viewpoints and/or that might find a less welcoming reception in the mainstream press. We will be publishing both fiction and poetry, as well as non-fiction works in history and political science.  We support diverse books and are particularly interested in, but not limited to, works expressing the viewpoints of women, people of color, ethnic and religious minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community. 

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