Literature

Tracy O’Neill’s Woman of Interest is a quest memoir: a voyage there and back, out and in. The book recounts the author’s search for her birth mother during the frightening heights of covid, “a pandemic that had miniaturized life.” Enlisting the help of a PI named Joe, a former CIA operative, O’Neill embarks on a

Nigerian literature possesses a remarkable ability to create female characters who defy the ordinary. These women don’t just exist within their stories; they embody a resilience that transcends the page. They redefine what it means to navigate the complexities of motherhood, societal pressures, and personal battles in a world that often seems intent on testing

Twenty-five years ago, Jhumpa Lahiri began publishing stories that offered America a rare glimpse into South Asian American lives. But Interpreter of Maladies and Lahiri’s other well-known early work represent only an opening into South Asian American stories. Lahiri and her contemporaries, including Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Bharati Mukherjee, were formative for spotlighting the community’s

Men on the verge have dominated literature for decades. Raskalnikov wandered the streets of Moscow, driven to murder by philosophy; Holden Caulfield let us know we’re all goddamn phonies. Gatsby held parties as an act of passive aggression; Humbert Humbert absconded with a young teen. All the while, women protagonists were either absent entirely or

The World Wasn’t Made Straight Up and Down by Heather Lanier The cherry tomatoes look like little planets on their vines, their centimeter-sized axes tilted this way and that way in the sun. It’s September. Will they ripen enough for next week’s salad? Will they sweeten into October? I don’t know. I’m a clueless, newbie

It began, for me, with Xena. I was ten years old, living in South Africa. Home alone after school, seeking a snack, perhaps. I heard the haunting melody of Bulgarian Bagpipes lilting from the lounge. I followed the melody. There, on the TV, a warrior woman rode a palomino horse out of the mists, stripped

My Chili Tastes Like Failure and Death Grocery Shopping Click to enlarge and scroll Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing

At the beginning of Khuê Phạm’s debut novel Brothers and Ghosts, translated by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey, the narrator makes a confession: “I don’t know how to pronounce my own name.” It’s not something you hear often and something unimaginable for many. But for Kiều, the young Vietnamese German writer at the center of

“Whose story is this?” workshop critiquers often ask when a character in a manuscript seems to be narrating someone else’s experience or when a different character might be more intimately related to the story than the one the writer chose. But sometimes a story belongs to more than one person.  My mother is one of

Flash fiction is a form that often skirts the line between narrative poetry and short fiction, offering a depth of narrative and poetic expression. When I think about books that have had the most palpable impact on me, I realize that many of them use innovative forms. And many of the most memorable flash fiction

The Bedtime Story That Keeps Him Awake Brian Evenson Share article Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson I. “There is a saying,” his mother had told him several times, just before sleep, when he was still quite young, “always three graves.” She had taken the saying from a book, he discovered years later in

Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel Misinterpretation opens with the unnamed narrator, a translator from Albania, accepting an assignment to interpret for a Kosovar torture survivor named Alfred. Elements of Alfred’s story map onto her own family’s experience, and the narrator becomes all-consumed by his case. As personal and professional boundaries start to blur, the narrator is

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Sky Daddy by Kate Folk, which will be published by Random House on April 08, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. Cross the jet bridge with Linda, a frequent flyer with a dangerous obsession, in this hilarious and provocative debut novel by the acclaimed author of Out

The lights go out. And in the darkness two friends banter—until one sees something. A portal into another realm? The friends are frozen and a figure appears announcing they tell stories here. It doesn’t matter if the friends want no part of this, the monsters’ greed is bottomless. That’s the prelude to Gianni Washington’s debut

Who are the women who shaped the middle ages? Can you remember? Were you ever even told about them? So many of their names are barely remembered today. Often their histories are ignored, their stories silenced or simply lost to time. Why? Maybe it’s because they were seen as dangerous. Often they were not the

We’re celebrating our 15th birthday, which makes us about as old as Poe would have been in literary magazine years. In honor of this glorious milestone, we’re throwing a party! Join our esteemed hosts, Emma Copley Eisenberg, Vanessa Chan, Deesha Philyaw, and Clare Sestanovich, as well as EL editors and authors, for an evening of

“We all belong to the sea between us,” wrote the Cuban American poet Richard Blanco. Our global ocean, the least accessible yet most critical set of ecosystems on Earth, has seemingly always been a source of spiritual and creative inspiration. The sea is the setting of dreams, of trauma, peace, beauty, curiosity, cleansing, aspirations, new life,

A Study of Labor and Fire: On Being a Queer Educator in the Second Lavender Scare by J. Bonanni I It is December 2022 and I am reading A Raisin in the Sun with my four classes of 8th grade students at a middle school on Cape Cod. Desks are arranged in a circle so