Literature

When writing about LA, people always assume you’re going to write about rich people at pools on the West Side. LA is not that. Los Angeles isn’t a stage set, and anyone who doesn’t know the difference hasn’t been in LA long enough or with enough hard-won intelligence. William Faulkner wrote, in Requiem for a

Three years ago I broke my brain. Or, I should say, my brain was broken by grief. That summer my graduate mentor, the writer Aurelie Sheehan, died after a swift and truncated battle with terminal brain cancer. I first learned of Aurelie’s illness in June of 2023, but as I understand it, she received her

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Distortion by Kathryn Bromwich, which will be published on March 9, 2027 by Two Dollar Radio. You can pre-order your copy here. A knife-sharp, deliciously sexy story about a young actress and the lengths she will go to fulfill her dream, under the guidance of a

To a Bird Watcher by Faith Palermo While I sit at my desk to write, you shine a laser pointer through my window. With a fluid motion of your hands, I become segmented. Concentrated green light outlines my chest, my throat, my eyes. I feel the slice, skin turning cold, distanced. You act, and I

Now Welcoming All Bees Onboard the Flight “Bees have congregated on the tip of the wing” says the pilot, voice sizzling over the speaker like . . . well, bees.So we wait in our recycled air, each of us singing silentlyinside our minds, a buzzing round, a silent, synchronous prayerto break loose the colony or

At age 12, Sara Nović went deaf, but not all at once. First, she lost the wind, then the dripping of a leaky faucet, and then certain consonants. She writes in her memoir, “What is a mother tongue, and how do you get one? What if your mother has no tongue? What if you have

I read Sarah Wang’s debut novel New Skin while still contemplating my own escape from postpartum depression. I call it escape because the mental gymnastics I had to perform to endure the asylum that was my mind—which involved blocking my own mother’s capricious “care”—in order to survive my ordeal was nothing short of miraculous. Like

The year 2022 gave us #feralgirlsummer, which morphed into #bratgirlsummer in 2024 and then #messygirlsummer by 2025—all howls against the curated perfection of a hot girl summer. Chaos. Freedom. Truth with its crop top unbuttoned. Going beyond hashtags, these eras represent a refusal to be domesticated by societal expectations. Feral girlhood is a state of mind

His Girlfriend’s Love Is as Poisonous as a Mushroom Jess Gibson Share article “Wild Food” by Jess Gibson Sebastian saw Emily’s internet search history on the afternoon before the dinner party. When he’d checked his email on the desktop in their home study, the browser had been open. He always closed it himself, which cleared

I first encountered M Lin’s writing during our second year of graduate school in the MFA program at Brooklyn College. Her stories were, on my first reading, luminous and unpretentious, chronicling the often conflicting sexual, emotional, and political desires of women from China’s millennial One-Child Generation. Her debut collection, The Memory Museum, is a nostalgic

Avigayl Sharp’s Offseason is a deeply internal debut, charting the bounds of a violent, unpredictable world through its truth-seeking (and perpetually dishonest) narrator. The novel follows an unnamed woman during her year as an instructor at a remote all girls school, where she’s filling in for an older male teacher on leave for an unspecified

We are living in a moment when the presence of migrant workers is more visible than ever, yet their inner lives remain unevenly told. There are still not enough works of literary fiction centered on women as migrant workers—especially domestic workers. These stories do exist, but they are often older, or they appear only in

Reality TV has always prompted discourse. From its earliest days, critics have decried it as the downfall of civilization even as viewers tuned in in droves for the interpersonal drama, the competitions, and the bizarrely artificial setups. Decades into the genre’s formation, critics and fans still abound, and we’re still asking the ever-titillating question: How

Minor Meats by Billy Lezra The right one weighs 568 grams, the left one, 547, over two pounds off my chest. For five days, two tubes drain the incisions. Ruby, then amber, fluids pool into translucent bulbs pinned to my white compression vest. It’s Christmas.  I am the tree; the blood bulbs, ornaments.  Inside the

Being a student of Monica Ferrell’s was a singularly influential time in my life. Immediately upon meeting her, I wanted to be like her: to enter a room with the same serious allure, the same unassuming self-possession. And when I first read her poems—fierce, sophisticated, sensual in every sense of the word—I didn’t want to

The Delicious Hell of a New Jersey Sex Dungeon Dark Horse Portal for Deb Portal is a video gamewhere you wield a gun that shoots holes. One you go into, one you comeout of, each end delicately placed on the wall,facing one another in Escherian drama.In this portal, Mommy is a robot,and the robot puts

Eve J. Chung’s sophomore novel, The Young Will Remember, turns its gaze to a lesser-known corner of twentieth-century history—the Korean War and its aftershocks. At its center is Ellie, an American journalist whose plane crashes in enemy territory. She’s rescued by Emma, a North Korean woman searching for her daughter who was taken years earlier

Families, whether given or chosen, are chimeric creatures. They’re difficult to describe in full, laden with temperaments, textures, and histories. I can’t recall the last time I spoke to someone who described their family as anything other than dysfunctional.  Of course, perspective matters. The story of a family is dictated by whomever undertakes the task