Literature

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . Translated by Polly Barton Japanese folktales and tales of yore are riddled with female ghosts and spirits, and I’ve been fascinated by

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . Entering the odd and exquisitely nonlinear world Marie-Helene Bertino’s Parakeet dislocates over and over. The novel begins with the unnamed bride protagonist

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . A definitive fact: Tamora Pierce is the true heroine of early-2000s YA fantasy. I’m far from the only teenager to have benefitted

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . There’s no denying that this is a rough—if not catastrophic—year for many businesses, from mom-and-pop-run local eateries to huge corporations like Macy’s.

How to Sell a Bra in Five Minutes or Less Sari Rosenblatt  Share article Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . “Daughter of Retail” by Sari Rosenblatt Retail works

Illustrations by Eko / Courtesy of Penn State University Press Next week, Penn State University Press will release A Pre-Columbian Bestiary, which the Press describes as “an encyclopedic collaboration between award-winning Mexican American scholar Ilan Stavans and illustrator Eko. . . . [The book] features lively and informative descriptions of forty-six religious, mythical, and imaginary creatures from

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . One of my primary goals in writing Impersonation was to examine the many personae that we adopt in our lives, both in

Ari Larissa Heinrich / Photo by Tara Pixley Ari Larissa Heinrich is the translator of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre (New York Review Books) and Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). They are a professor of Chinese literature and media at Australian National University. Veronica Esposito: Although transgender activism in the

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . Black Americans have one hell of a story. It’s a horror story. The 400-year-long exile of Africans in America started with slavery

Mikhal Dekel / Photo by Nina Subin Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (Norton, 2019), Mikhal Dekel’s outstanding book, is many things: a memoir, a family genealogy, a history of nationalisms, and an exploration of identity. We accompany the author as she researches and tracks her father’s experience as one of the Tehran Children. This

The Ugliest Babies in the World Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . The way we’ve been told, my girl cousins and I were born with broken faces. “You

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . Maxima in the dark. Half-lit by a Virgin Mary night-light and the glow of a screen saver, a slow-motion sweep of stars

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . First, a few key terms. Patriarchy is not, at the end of the day, defined by the gender of one’s leaders. It’s

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . In the 1990s I was a lonely, nerdy girl writer. Nobody else I knew was simultaneously obsessed with learning HTML and parsing

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . I’m willing to bet most of us have copy-and-pasted a phrase we don’t know into Google Translate, only to be confronted with

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . One of my most vivid childhood memories took place in an English bookshop in Causeway Bay, a short minibus ride from my