Literature

I have thought a lot, over my decade-plus of drinking and working in bars, about what makes any one establishment stand out over another. Why are there places we love and return to, and others we leave with indifference, ambivalence, even disappointment? On the one hand, if there was an easy answer, opening a bar

My God Has the Head of a Vulture Ornithology After Theodore Roethke To find the owl I must follow the crow who says my ears and eyes better behave; it’s hard for me to learn what the crow knows unable to refuse the blueish glow nor the shiny trinkets my wingtips save. To find an

In Lillian Fishman’s debut novel, Acts of Service, a queer barista is struggling to craft a meaningful, real life that balances her ethics with her desires. Despite being in love with her long-term girlfriend, Romi, Eve ends up in a sexual relationship with Nathan and Olivia. She is equal parts compelled and disturbed: Olivia is

The best literary fiction is in some ways a simple character study. It is a roadmap into the interiority of a specific character: the way they think, how their identity impacts their relationships, and what decisions get made in response to the socio-political pressures shaping their lives. But literary fiction about young women too often

We hold onto things more tightly when we feel they are in danger. We cling to a relationship as it falls apart; we know we must leave home, so we keep finding reasons not to. You see the same in pop culture trends. Consider the true crime boom of the last several years: as people

Chelsea T. Hicks’s A Calm and Normal Heart is a brilliant and breathtaking debut story collection. While it appears straightforward as a twelve-story collection, these stories and their characters impress upon the reader something longer: a legacy, one that simultaneously stretches back and forward. In “Tsexope,” between a breakup and a shackup, the main character

Fairytales, myths, folklore, urban legends, all of those compact, strange stories that we pass from person to person and between generations—they’re the first stories we encounter, a medium for transmitting ideas and expectations, a window into our individual and our collective imaginations. All of this, and they still have to be entertaining enough to hold

To all the versions of myself who haven’t made it to a bathhouse, here’s what to expect. Start with the obscured visibility of a club. Add the purposeful disorientation of a haunted house. Multiply all of that by the atmospheric arousal of scrolling through Pornhub, as most everyone is wearing just a towel. Divide everything

Mom Has Her Boyfriend, I Have Her Cigarettes Morgan Talty Share article Smokes Last by Morgan Talty At the kitchen table, Frick fidgeted with a bag of pork rinds. Mom scrubbed dishes while the oiled pan on the stove got hot enough for her to lay down spoonfuls of batter in it. The sideboard was

I get more email in a day than I can keep up with, let alone respond to.  Most of us do. Collectively, we sent an estimated 319 billion emails each day in 2021. I’d love to know the breakdown of these messages. How many chains of rambling updates between old friends? How many are notes

Dear Readers, Happy Pride! It’s been a minute since I’ve written an editorial letter, but I’m doing so now to bring your attention to a special project that I’ve been working on at EL. I’m writing to introduce Both/And, a new limited essay series by trans and gender nonconforming writers of color—the first of its

It’s fitting that two of the first three essays in this roundup are centered on examining the Black American experience as one of horror. In a year when radical right-wing activists are truly leaning in, we’ve already seen record numbers of anti-LGBTQ legislation, the very real possibility of the end of Roe v. Wade, and

A Hoagie by Any Other Name Makes Me Just as Hungry Tonya  We want a hoagie. We want a fucking hoagie as soon as we wake up. Danny’s has the best in town. Right down the street. So here’s what we do. We drop Barb off down the T so she can ride into town

Delusion, when used as a literary device, is just another word for truth-seeking. Facts are not truth. Characters with irrational thinking have usually given the facts a try, and are frankly unimpressed. Instead, they develop an extreme conviction that, held up against the traditionally accepted facts or reality, seems ludicrous. Even dangerous.  Yet I would

In South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, Imani Perry, an Alabama native, returns to the South and meets with Southerners to chronicle their stories, past and present—from Henry Bibb, an enslaved man from New Orleans forced to rub salt brine into the bleeding back of

Pankaj Mishra’s return to fiction, Run and Hide, depicts the emotional and social costs exacted by the relentless drive for self-advancement and material progress on the inner lives of individuals as well as nations. The novel traces the intertwined trajectories of Arun, Aseem and Virendra—three students of the premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), described