Literature

The premise of Andrea Uptmor’s debut novel, The New People, is both gloriously simple and fraught with tension. Newlyweds Emma and Rachel move into a recently foreclosed house in a Midwestern campus town in 2008, but unbeknownst to them, the evicted former owners Charlotte and Dirk are still living in the attic in a form

Wealth Can’t Absolve the Families of the Disappeared Patricia Grace King Share article “Already Gone” by Patricia Grace King To disappear meant to die. In those days, in that place, almost everyone knew. Ester was six when she learned. Her parents had been disappeared, a new way of using the word. Disappearing was no longer

I’ve always been captivated by artists’ sketchbooks. They’re wonderful places for experimentation: random drawings, collages, taped notes, found objects, and whatever else helps make sense of an idea before it’s fully formed. Memory has always felt much the same way to me: a collection of fragments, fleeting images, and moments that seem random, but rarely

This is the third essay in a series. Read “Blue Spark,” Part One here and “Blue Spark,” Part Two here. “Blue Spark,” Part Three by Nelly Reifler Chapter III 1.  That smell. Back in the city after two weeks at the farm, I couldn’t believe the smell. I don’t have to tell you what it

People Who Live Near Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Shade Picture This It was a mild winter when the vacant lot across the street from Bea and Foster finally sold and the new neighbor, a nondescript man about their age, thirty-eightish, began showing up mornings in a black puffer to poke little orange construction flags into

Valeria Luiselli is no stranger to incorporating tangible records of the world in her writing. In The Story of My Teeth, she exchanged audio recordings with a group of Grupo Jumex workers at a juice factory in Mexico. In Tell Me How It Ends, she listened to, transcribed, and interpreted the testimonies of undocumented children.

The Children of This Village Delight in Wildfire and Death Zhang Guixing Share article “Father’s Feet” from The Crossing of the Boars by Zhang Guixing, translated by Christopher G Rea and Julie Ming Wang Guan Ah-fung hanged himself from a jackfruit tree one sundown as wildfire whirled through fields of lalang grass, spewing a dirty

Literature from India’s Northeast is an under discussed literary body from a highly contested and racialized region in India. It is widely considered different from Indian Writing in English (IWE) since it comes from a unique region in South Asia that has traditionally been politically, culturally, and racially otherized from the Indian mainland. Northeast Indian

This is the second essay in a series. Read part one of “Blue Spark” here. “Blue Spark,” Part Two by Nelly Reifler Chapter II 1.  Noah and I got married on August 25, 2001. My stepmother’s immediate family was in a gruesome car crash on the way to my wedding. We found out seconds after

Even Good Boys Get a Little Bloody Sometimes Fallen Deer by the Dam The dog is eating the deer.He’s a good boy. He’s got a collar.He’s going to go home bell-troddenand lick his human’s arm with a gentle tongueor so we assume. The deer doesn’t have her belly.That’s as close as we can look at

For the spring edition of our debut craft series, three debut authors—Alexa Yasemin Brahme, Sonia Feldman, and Vincent Yu—discuss in detail their journeys through writing about imaginary lives. One may argue that all fiction is rooted in imaginary lives, but these novels especially feel centered around the stakes of these imaginary lives as the protagonists

There’s a Better Version of Myself in These Woods Rebecca Turkewitz Share article “Darkness Like a Seam” by Rebecca Turkewitz When I was a child, my grandparents lived in a squat scab-colored house that sat in a clearing carved into the New Hampshire woods. Everything inside their house was a shade of beige or muted

When I was an infant, my mother abandoned our family and disappeared without a trace. Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, I heard the same questions again and again: What happened to your mother? Did she die? How can a mother leave her children? I had no answers and no frame of reference. I knew

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of I Can Feel It All Over by Ebonya Lia, which will be published on March 16, 2027 by Amistad Books. You can pre-order your copy here. In this radiant and incisive debut novel in the tradition of works by ZZ Packer and Toni Cade Bambara, a Black woman

An introduction from the author “Blue Spark” came about when the incredible writer and editor Jennifer Kabat asked me to contribute to a nonfiction publication she’d started with three other great writers: Janet Steen, Greg Olear, and Sean Beaudoin. I was terrified. I said yes. I ran a subject by her, and we decided on a

My Sex Appeal Can Kill a Man at 10 Paces We Should Go Out! We should go! We should go out! We should go out in our shiny firework tops, sleek and constructed like architectural wonders in leather pants and compass-drawn brows. We should go out and blind the crowds with our crackling white-hot sex

Julie Buntin and I first met when Electric Literature shared an office with Catapult in the mid-2010s. She was a book editor and the director of Catapult’s beloved educational program; I had recently become Electric Literature’s Executive Director. I was an aspiring writer with a few short stories; Julie was about to publish her debut

The latest target of book banning and censorship is Vinita Prabhakar, an English professor who dared to assign her students Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself.” Prabhakar, who taught the story for years, was fired from her position at South Florida State College after one of her English students said the story made them “a