Literature

Bullshitting Our Way Through a Long Beijing Summer Xu Zechen Share article On the Rooftop by Xu Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang My head throbbed and I felt a bright bird bursting from it. Having broken its metallic body free, it flapped its wings harder and harder, gleaming silver in the late afternoon sun. If

When I was very sick, using the bathroom 17 times a day and buckled over with abdominal pain, I never would have imagined writing a poem about my illness—much less an entire book. As a teenager I was so embarrassed and afraid of my body that I couldn’t even speak to my closest friends about

To say that Gina Apostol’s prose is pyrotechnical is to state the obvious: juggling an immense cast of characters, decades of political entanglements, and Apostol’s trademark brand of humor, La Tercera dazzles. I was floored by how the novel somersaulted between multiple languages, the personal and the national, overacted tragedy to heartbreaking history, the U.S.

Hawai’i has served as a backdrop to many a romance, comedy, and even a few thrillers, but most of these stories depict Hawai’i as a brief pit stop: a beachy honeymoon for an adventurous couple, or an instagrammable hotspot for some soul-searching college grad to eat-pray-love. It’s harder to find the local voices of Hawai’i—authors

It was a hot day on our first leg of the journey which would end in the kid switch-off ritual we participated in each summer and winter break. C and M were in the back seat, shoving the cooler back and forth, trying to bother the sibling in the other seat. When we finally pulled

My Boredom Has a Fish Mouth The Perimeter My excitement hurts, my daughter sulks at Columcille Megalith Park, where stones stack on stones upon a great big stone circling the sun. It’s mid-July, muggy, and my excitement hurts too, though somewhere along the line I lost the right to say so. Or the nerve. Or

Top row (left to right): Angie Cruz, Ananda Devi (credit: J.F. Paga (Grasset)), Jenny Erpenbeck (credit: Shevaun Williams)Middle row: Valeria Luiselli (credit: @DiegoBerruecos), Juan Felipe Herrera (credit: Carlos Puma), Maxine Hong Kingston (credit: Michael Lionstar)Bottom row: Shahrnush Parsipur, Chris Abani, Nona Fernández (credit: Daniel Corvillón) World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of

A profound and deeply funny examination of loneliness in many of its forms—romantic, familial, artistic—Courtney Sender’s book, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me, explores feminist millennial rage and the ways the trauma of the Holocaust has been passed-down through Jewish American families. Sender’s debut collection of linked short stories uses magic,

Suzanne Berne has received praise for her astute character studies of the psychological dramas underlying seemingly serene domestic settings. Her debut novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood, won Britain’s Orange Prize in 1999; A Perfect Arrangement, A Ghost at the Table, and The Dogs of Littlefield followed. Berne has also written Missing Lucile: Memories of

The pattern first appeared to me in the school uniforms of my cousins: crisp, clean lines of navy and evergreen intersecting at perfect right angles. These uniforms, like everything else about my cousins’ lives, I envied desperately. First and foremost, I envied the fact that there were three of them and only one of me,

Bombay, Mumbai—whatever you want to call it—is a kaleidoscope layered with complex charisma and frenetic energy. With its chaos and music, its sounds and smells, the city has been immortalized in many literary works, fiction and non-fiction alike.  My debut novel, Such Big Dreams, took me a good ten years to write. In that time,

The Webbed-Arm Man Never Wanted My Twin Rebecca Turkewitz Share article The Last Unmapped Places by Rebecca Turkewitz Imagine, please, a September storm hugging the coast as it sweeps northward. Dark, moody skies with clouds so thick they seem solid. The apple trees in our backyard thrashing. A heavy blue tarp, draped over whatever project

Imagine a world in which your life depended on your ability to kill. Your freedom contingent on another person’s destruction. All at the behest of state and corporate overseers for the entertainment of millions. This is the world of Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s masterful new novel, where incarcerated people can opt out of decades

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for Minda Honey’s highly anticipated debut memoir, The Heartbreak Years, which will be published by Little A this October.  In the car she’d had since high school, and with her boyfriend by her side, Minda Honey journeyed cross-country to Southern California. By the end of that year,

Showtime’s Yellowjackets was the unlikely sleeper hit of 2021 with its dark, off-kilter narrative and female characters who are messy, deeply flawed (and sometimes just downright sinister). The series follows a 1990s high school girls soccer team who, after dominating at the state championships, are on their way to nationals. But their plane goes down in

Jenny Fran Davis’ debut novel Dykette is indisputably, vibrantly, hilariously queer. Dykette follows three couples (and a charismatic pug) on a ten day, pressure-cooker trip to Hudson, New York. The oldest of the couple, Jules Todd (a news anchor who reads like a fictional Rachel Maddow) and her partner Miranda, a therapist who seems perpetually