Issue 64 Cover:  © M.C. Escher, Butterflies, wood engraving, June 1950. Image courtesy WikiArt.

All the butterflies in Escher’s Butterflies are butterflies but a close inspection reveals that no two are alike. The artist’s signature interest in transformation and trajectory finds inspiration in Nature’s signature exemplar of creative destruction: the butterfly.

The Bombay Literary Magazine publishes original fiction, poetry, translations, essays, photo-essays, and graphic fiction from around the world in the months of April, August and December. Our approach is cosmopolitan, our taste eclectic, and our chosen folly is to view each and every one of our readers as a provisional or prospective writer.

Our current issue is Issue 64 (August 2026).  We will start accepting submissions for Issue 65 (December 2026) from September 01 through September 30, 2026.

Banner image: Community Library, Kigwema, Nagaland. A community library bears the same relation to a regular library that the lungi does to a pair of trousers. They’re comfortable, dear reader. Your comfort that is, not the librarian’s. Look at that kid. We know the kid is going to reach into their pocket at some point, extract a candy bar, unwrap, chew, crumbs everywhere, and then with the same sticky fingers turn the page. It’s a timeless story. Mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers.