Literature

Divorce Made Me Into A One-Armed Scissor Lidija Hilje Share article An excerpt from Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje Sometimes I stalk my ex-husband. I open his socials and sift through his photos. I know their sequence like I know the palm of my hand. Better even, because I can never memorize what

Readers, we are living in unprecedented times. Funding for the arts and education is being slashed, ICE agents infiltrate our communities, and our rights are constantly under attack. It is a dark time in America, but literature has always been a beacon of hope: Even in telling tragic stories, writers resist. We resist the impulse

When I was nine, I wanted to be Harriet the Spy. I stalked my neighbors with the same misplaced confidence Harriet brought to her rounds on the Upper East Side, clutching a Mead composition book and scribbling down whether Mrs. Pine smoked in the house (she did) and if the mailman liked cats (he didn’t).

When I think about reading, I think about a kind of hunger that only exists in my memory. As a child, I did not think about time or food or my physical body or even where I was, really, while reading. I devoured books in a way that now seems almost mythical, with a fullness

The Deer by Nandi Rose We make the slow crawl up the Taconic. It’s a late December evening at the tail end of 2021, and a fog has rolled in, wet and white. Z grips the wheel and steers us through it with grace, the skin pulled taut over the broken bones that never set

Foreclosure Gothic, Harris Lahti’s debut novel, is a chilling, absorbing, searingly memorable work of gothic fiction. Portents loom around every corner—vultures, scythes, unattributable screams—and nature is a “witch’s brew of mistrust” where hulking garbagemen roam alongside necrophiliac raccoons. While such spooky surrealism may occasionally skew the picture, don’t be fooled—Foreclosure Gothic is a deeply human,

This Coworking Space Runs on Sisterhood and Toxic Conformity The Parlor Every cell of the building’s interior oozes with pink. Shades of bubblegum. Rouge. Peach so ripe, you can feel its sun-beamed juice roll sloppily down your cheek. Millennial reminiscent of every Y2K-style skirt in your hometown H&M that you couldn’t afford to buy in

We are past the point of overwhelm. The knot in my stomach has achieved bodily tenure. Every day arrives as a fresh hell before the last one’s even had time to ripen. And yet, somehow, we’re all still clocking in, sorting our recycling, and trying to drink eight glasses of water a day—as if hydration

Science fiction has always been a genre of escape, one that especially speaks to those of us eagerly waiting to be abducted by aliens or dreaming of robot armies battling on undiscovered planets. We want adventure, some intrigue, and the novelty of the never before seen. While some readers may prefer a more dignified or

I was thrilled to get some time to talk to Anthony Thomas Lombardi about murmurations, mostly because I see things in this book that I’m so incredibly drawn to within my own work. Namely, there’s a comfort with obsession, a comfort with staying in one place and not seeking answers, or seeking a way out.

My Obscenity Deserves to Be Seen Genevieve Plunkett Share article The Cat Sitter by Genevieve Plunkett The couple showed up behind my apartment building on the hottest day of summer. I hadn’t heard their truck drive onto the lawn, hadn’t seen the blue and red of their tent going up outside my first-floor window. I

Sour Cherry, the debut novel from Natalia Theodoridou, is an immersive reinvention of Bluebeard, the French fairytale wherein a repugnant aristocrat murders his wives, one after another. In Sour Cherry, the chronology of a man’s life is narrated to the reader, from motherless childhood through blighted adulthood. Theodoridou explores the Bluebeard figure’s lethal touch through

Experimental fiction is more popular than you might expect. An impressive 37.6% of Americans prefer it to more traditional forms—that’s nearly 100 million people if you scale it to the current adult population. And of those who prefer their fiction to be formally adventurous, the experiments they most enjoy are abstract language and nonlinear plots.

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu, which will be published on March 3, 2026 by Tin House in the US and HarperCollins in Canada. You can pre-order your copy here. From the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century comes The Valley

Seven Words About Lemons by Megan Leonard Girl. The day my daughter decides to make a lemonade stand with her friends, her best friend announces loudly, casually, in the grocery store in front of the one-pound bags of sugar, that the tooth fairy isn’t real. She knows it’s just her mom. My daughter is nine.

Published during the illustrious Year of the Bisexual, Ursula Villarreal-Moura’s thoughtful debut novel Like Happiness popped up on Best of 2024 reading lists wherever you turned, from NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle to ELLE and Them. The two timelines in this novel trace a young woman’s complicated and troubling relationship with an older male

A Comparison of Canine and Human Existential Dread Dog Anxiety Series On the intersectionality of dog anxiety and owner anxiety With a dog and owner pair, there are 4 possible states of anxiety. 1. Dog anxious, owner not anxious. Involves everyday objects/situations that are fearful to the dog but not the owner. Rain for instance, or pigeons

In 2011, Heather Christle was about to release her second poetry book, The Trees The Trees. I saw online that she was doing a “Dial-A-Poem” promotion where people could call a Google voice number and Heather would answer and read to them. This coincided, conveniently, with a period where I was waiting tables at a