ABOUT
The Fifth Corner Literary Society
The Fifth Corner Literary Society is a nonprofit literary organization based in British Columbia, Canada. It publishes The Fifth Corner, an independent digital journal dedicated to original dark, speculative, and cross-genre fiction.
The Journal
The Fifth Corner publishes four curated issues annually—March, June, September, and December. Each story is paired with commissioned visual artwork created in direct response to the text. Artists and writers receive honoraria for commissioned and published work.
The Fifth Corner is a quarterly literary journal publishing dark fiction paired with commissioned artwork.
Founded in 2026, the journal presents fiction that explores the unsettled edges of human experience through psychological depth, formal experimentation, and atmospheric storytelling.
We publish work that is daring, deliberate, and artistically ambitious.
One Poet. One Poem.
Each issue features a single poet.
One poem, selected with the same attention to voice, atmosphere, and resonance that defines the journal. The Coda.
Coda
Derived from the musical term for a concluding passage, and from the Latin cauda, meaning tail, the Coda is a final movement that lingers after the main body has ended.
In each issue of The Fifth Corner, the Coda appears as a single concluding poem, extending beyond the stories themselves.
In 2026, this commitment expanded with the creation of CODA, an annual poetry volume collecting the winning and shortlisted poems of the Coda Poet Prize. The inaugural volume, CODA 2026, will be published in January 2027 and will feature the winning poem alongside the shortlisted works selected from the first year of the prize.
While the Coda concludes each issue, CODA serves as an annual record of the year’s most distinguished poetry submissions.
The Press
The Fifth Corner includes The Fifth Corner Press, a selective publishing arm devoted to book-length works in dark literary fiction, horror, and the uncanny. Established as an extension of the journal’s editorial vision, the press focuses on a small number of titles each year, chosen for their atmosphere, psychological depth, and formal precision.
While the journal presents short fiction in quarterly issues, the press is dedicated to longer forms: novellas, novels, and story collections that sustain and deepen the aesthetic concerns of The Fifth Corner. Each work is approached with the same attention to curation, design, and permanence that defines the journal.
Editorial Focus
The Fifth Corner is interested in fiction that challenges convention and resists formula. We foreground voice, mood, and emotional resonance.
We welcome both emerging and established writers.
As a digital and print publication, we are committed to careful editorial curation and accessibility.
Editorial Statement
Each issue of The Fifth Corner is curated as a single composition. The order of stories is deliberate; tone, atmosphere, and narrative pressure are considered in relation to what precedes and follows. We are interested not only in individual works, but in the resonance created between them.
Commissioned artwork is central to this approach. Each piece is created in direct response to the text it accompanies, extending the emotional and psychological field of the story. We are drawn to fiction that inhabits the unsettled edges of experience—work attentive to mood, interiority, and the uncanny currents that move beneath the visible surface of things.
Community and Literary Advocacy
The Fifth Corner Literary Society supports PEN Canada and The Writers’ Trust of Canada in their advocacy for writers, freedom of expression, literary culture, and support for Canadian authors.
The Fifth Corner is committed to supporting writers beyond its own pages. A portion of proceeds is directed toward literary organizations, writer-support initiatives, and freedom of expression efforts.
The journal also recognizes that financial barriers can limit access to literary spaces. A limited number of complimentary submissions and fee waivers are therefore made available to writers experiencing financial hardship.
The Fifth Corner was launched with seed funding and in-kind support from its founding editor.