Approximately thirty years ago, Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author. But there was no funeral. No “author” was buried. And thus its inky body has been left lurking above ground, dotting our libraries, overshadowing the essence of Barthes proclamation: the birth of the text.

Until now.

The New Anonymous is an annual literary journal that not only publishes all work anonymously but also blindly screens and edits its submissions, i.e., the submission, editorial, and publishing process is anonymous from beginning to end. At The New Anonymous we celebrate the text. We are at once a literary journal and a literary act.

To that end, we endeavor to challenge writers (and editors)—both up-and-coming and well established—to question what it means to publish in a landscape in which, predominately, the writers are the readers. By freeing the prose and poetry from their nominal ties, we free writers from their own generative forms and creative dispositions. The New Anonymous is, in effect, a safehouse where writers can not only question the creative process, but also, in the words of Freud, “play.”