Month: March 2023

It’s not entirely right to say that literature is starved for complex, chaotic, endearing LGTBQIA+ characters. Starved in the mainstream, sure. We are just now emerging into a post-Love, Simon popular universe in which young queer people of today do just a little bit more than come out to their Oscar-Award-Winning-Actor-Portrayed parent and embark on

Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of

Family and place make us. Whether the relationship to where, and who, we come from is complicated or not, all poets must reckon with these two fundamental things that shape who we are, our worldviews, and how we learn to love. For Chicanx poet José Olivarez, Chicago and his Mexican family are his bedrocks and

Whether or not you’ve watched season 2 of The White Lotus, Mike White’s anthology series, you’ve witnessed Jennifer Coolidge’s frenzied intonations onboard a yacht: “These gays, they’re trying to murder me!” Coolidge plays Tanya, a wealthy woman who finds herself at the center of a conspiracy to murder her for her money. The executors of

Let’s face it: half of our favorite stories wouldn’t exist if the characters just went to therapy. The Trojan War would’ve lasted nine years, and Bruce Wayne would own a normal basement with a ping pong table.  Part of the reason so many stories resist therapy is that 1) mental illness has been unrecognized and

You Can’t Come Back If Your Memories Are Missing Chloe N. Clark Share article Accidental Girls by Chloe N. Clark When I see Halley in a bar, years and years past when she disappeared, I know it’s her so quickly and completely that it makes me gasp. The Halley of her thirties is leaner than

A century ago, Robert Lopez’s grandfather Sixto left Puerto Rico for Brooklyn. Puerto Rico would have been a U.S. territory for decades at that point. “In theory, Sixto wasn’t an immigrant,” Lopez writes in his new book Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure, “but of course he was.”  Dispatches from

This essay, by Addie Tsai, is the first in Electric Literature’s new limited essay series, Both/And, which centers the voices of trans and gender nonconforming writers of color. For the next fifteen weeks, on Thursday, EL will publish an installment of Both/And, with the series running through spring and into Pride Month. At a time

There has been plenty of handwringing among some over whether it’s too soon to write pandemic literature, but these five books answer that question with a firm no. Each is set in the lockdown days while being about so much more than the pandemic. Louise Erdrich The Sentence Harper, 2021 Louise Erdrich’s most recent novel

As a reviewer who is fluent in both English and Russian, I approach the reading of such works as Alexander Veytsman’s «Демография дремлющих душ» / A Succession of Somnolent Souls (‎Im Press/M-Graphics, 2022), translated by Laurence Bogoslaw, as if in stereo, considering the Russian original and the English translation as independent, but related, works of

Photo by Lava Lavanda / Unsplash First Language Not sure what to make of the title            (titles can be misleading, like                        Chinatown or Popiół i diament or that blue–white–red trilogy            by Krzysztof K.) we microwaved                        a bottomless bucket of buttered popcorn and ignoring the subtitles watched            człowiek of sixty in a tattered bathrobe                        spread faded