Letter Books announces an open call for Letters as Characters: An Anthology of Short Stories. We are seeking short fiction where letters, language, typography, or writing systems are central to the narrative.

The stories may be poetic, speculative, surreal, humorous, or grounded in everyday life, or something else entirely. The call is genre-agnostic: fiction, creative non-fiction, research-based storytelling, horror, romance, sci-fi, or anything in between.

Writers have long explored this idea: from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, where a single embroidered character becomes a living symbol, to Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel, imagining a universe built from every possible combination of letters; from Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea, where an island’s language collapses letter by letter, to Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, where sentences grow like living organisms along the walls of the Tower, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, where forgotten books and their words alter human fate.

We invite contributors to continue this tradition and imagine new short stories in which alphabets, words, and characters transform the world around them, stories where language itself takes part in the narrative, begins to behave and misbehave, and bends lives in unexpected directions.

Your story might follow the visual aspects of characters: a book serif that falls in love with a condensed sans, a mysterious word flickering in a broken street sign, a letterform eroding like stone, a sentence tattooed into skin, or a shapeshifting typeface that resists every attempt to be set.

Or perhaps your story takes place in the spaces where letters live: books, billboards, business cards, menus, monuments, mobile devices, inboxes, search bars, prompt boxes, group chats, or illuminated keyboards, each a stage where meaning shifts as words are printed, posted, or spoken aloud.

We’re drawn to stories that notice the everyday presence of letters in the lives of designers, typographers, linguists, editors, writers, and readers – people who move through language as others move through space. Inspiration might also come from small moments: an algorithm finishing your sentence, a message typed and unsent, initials carved into a tree, words moved pixel by pixel late at night, researching an ancient language no one understands, tracing a worn inscription, discovering a new emoji whose meaning is lost to you, drawing invisible words on a fogged window, watching AI turn language into images, or reviving a typeface from a long-forgotten specimen.

We’re excited to read stories that reinterpret this theme through your own lens. You may submit new work or something you’ve already written that you feel fits or expands the theme. No prior writing experience is required. Selected contributors will work with an editor to refine their texts.