Literature

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Secrets and Other Hobbies by Mary Hannah Terzino, which will be published on October 20, 2026 by Cornerstone Press. You can pre-order your copy here. In this collection of stories exploring the experiences of women—and sometimes men—of all ages, at pivotal moments in their lives, a

“Inborn” by Colleen Morrissey My daughter was born gasping. Throughout the first 14 hours of my labor, Nora was in the ideal position for birth: upside down and facing backwards, towards my spine. But as she entered the birth canal, she corkscrewed. As though she wanted one last look around the only home she’d ever

Dad Died and All I Got Was This Angry Alpaca A Report on the Alpaca One day the alpaca kicked and bit the man from Milwaukee who had moved to Tulum to open and operate an animal sanctuary. As the man was dying, the alpaca stopped biting his face, crouched, and sat on him. The

In January, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti near Port-Au-Prince, devastating the area and claiming over 100,000 lives. Amid the grief and chaos, conservative religious and political groups revived a dangerous narrative that many Haitians cling to: that this natural disaster was a punishment for the unnatural behavior of the people in Haiti who

Like so many others (including the Pulitzer Prize committee), I read Andrew Sean Greer’s Less in 2017 and was endlessly charmed by the singularity of Greer’s voice. Rollicking through vivid landscapes and madcap scenarios, Greer’s novels commit to comedy and eccentricity, standing out in an often muted literary landscape. His newest book, Villa Coco, set

Quarantining in Her Late Husband’s Apartment Is Making Her Horny Xu Xi Share article “Before” by Xu Xi Things were still fine, despite the dreams, until she forgot her grandson’s name. It happened on their weekly Zoom, when he was being his usual adorably talkative self. She was half listening to his digressively long tale

There is a particular feeling that accompanies loving something as you watch it disappear. It is not quite despair and not quite hope. It lives somewhere in between, in the place where grief and stubbornness meet. Literature feels particularly suited to capturing that emotional contradiction because novels can hold multiple truths at once. They can

“Swan Song for the Republic,” excerpted from Freedom by Zinzi Clemmons We are born into good times. “Dream big,” they tell us. “The sky’s the limit.” We are lied to. One day at school, I’m shepherded into the band practice room, the TV set rolled out of the closet and switched on. On the screen

The Policeman Finds Me Guilty of Joy The Body Is a Courtroom Where I Am Always on Trial Click to enlarge I Still Believe in My Country I still believe in my country, not because I am immune to disappointment nor because I’ve stopped counting the ways we fail each other, but because here, people

When I was a proto-embryonic critic, in my painfully awkward junior high school years, my reading was wildly incongruous. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine to Siddhartha to The Grapes of Wrath to cheap, used Harlequin Regency romances.  I had weird middle of the night reveries about what I might grow up to be. Becoming a

A Long-Lost Mother’s Embrace Is an Obliterative Fate Marlena Williams Share article “The Ominous Shaft” by Marlena Williams Cole set out early, when the fishermen of his hometown were just beginning to cast their nets into the sea. Claudia Bernard, the woman that Cole was journeying towards, had no idea that he was on his

Why is the act of painting one’s face so charged with gendered implications? How might makeup smear the lines drawn between “feminine” and “masculine”? And what can drag culture teach all of us about the role of artifice—and art—in constructing identity? Although our books differ in genre and scope, they shimmer with striking similarities. Montesanti’s

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of A Cow Gives Birth at Night by Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston, which will be published on January 26, 2027 by Pantheon Books. You can pre-order your copy here. From the celebrated author of Crossing, a finalist for the National Book Award, a piercing, candid

Original Oratory by James Davis In every speech kid, I see a version of myself that I love with frightening intensity: 14 years old, a closeted freshman at Liberty High School with long curly Weird Al Yankovic hair, thick glasses, blisteringly cheap dress shoes, and something to say.  It was the second week of the

I Store My Demons Next to the Pickled Beets Ball Jar Demon The demon lasted a good month, emitting low moans and sandpaper coughs into her ear, before Celia found an old Ball jar in the cellar, plucked the being off the cutting board with a pair of chopsticks where it had writhed since its

When I brought Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine to the women at the Ahmanson Senior Citizen Center’s writing class, many of them working on their own short stories about motherhood and family, they couldn’t stop talking about Lexie—the ambitious, young, single mother who refuses the provincial life laid out for her and

My Boyfriend Is a Wounded Animal I Want to Save Sarah Braunstein Share article “Porcupine” by Sarah Braunstein We met in a bookstore, the Strand. The late nineties. I was trying to decide between E. B. White’s books, the pig or the swan or the mouse. He saw me deliberating. For my sister’s kid, I

Sometimes you are reading a book—not even one by a well-known transphobic children’s author—and are struck, halfway through or near the end, by a bit of transphobia. Sometimes it’s load-bearing: Both Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan end with revelations that their villain characters are caricatures of trans masculinity