Literature

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! I love writing in the wintertime, but what I love even more is when that winter is sunny and brisk, no snow or polar vortices, and I can take walks to

Artists of different styles often collaborate in the creation of their work. When words and images intersect, they can come together to produce something beneficial for both learning and inspiration. As children, many of us experience this in the form of reading picture books, but throughout our adulthood we are often not provided with the

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Take a kaleidoscope, peer inside its lens and turn the dial: the jeweled-mosaic pattern within deforms and reforms anew. Asako Serizawa mirrored her debut short story collection Inheritors after this complex

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! The world of children, aburst with animal energy, strikes only children like me as strange and perhaps a bit vulgar. So we observe. Our lack of siblings makes us unlike our

Stay Forever in the Office of the Mind Leland Cheuk Share article Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! “Office of the Mind” by Leland Cheuk On the first day of work, I sat at my desk in

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Sally Rooney breaks new ground for herself in her recent release Beautiful World, Where Are You, when two queer characters finally have sex on-page. Famous novelist Alice and warehouse worker Felix,

If reading Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg’s Robot (Penguin Classics, 2021), translated by Tomasz Mirkowicz, makes you think about Stanislaw Lem’s work, you’re not alone. Indeed, both Robot and Lem’s His Master’s Voice (published in Polish just a few years apart) take up the fascinating but insoluble problem of whether or not we’re alone in the universe. One

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! In O Beautiful, Elinor is a 42-year-old ex-model from North Dakota on assignment in the Bakken, a career-making offer that comes unexpectedly from her grad school mentor and former lover. Though

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! For a very brief period of time, I wanted to be a doctor. My medical aspirations were not, however, borne of so noble a desire as to ease suffering—frankly, what I

Mitchell River National Park, Victoria, Australia / Photo by Zac Porter / Unsplash While the landmark anthology Guwayu – For All Times: A Collection of First Nations Poems (Magabala Books, 2020), edited by Jeanine Leane, refuses the “voyeuristic obsession with tragedy and trauma as the ultimate and only contribution of Aboriginal writing to Australian literary

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! In American fiction, when immigrants and first-gen characters encounter the U.S., they’re often in New York. Or Miami. Or at Harvard. I love many of those stories—works by Jhumpa Lahiri and

Hootie & the Blowfish Killed My Rock and Roll Dreams Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! The death of college rock: September 5, 1995 I’m drunk on a Tuesday at the old Knitting Factory and stumble into

Series editor’s note: Sometimes it is good to go back to our old rituals; sometimes even conversations slim with anxiety are welcomed into a home, into a body, into a tree. So does the speaker in Adrienne Christian’s poem, basking in the joy and glory that small things bring, like coffee with more sugar and

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of heated discourse surrounding a trend in book covers in which many new releases opt for variations of the same colorful abstractions:

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! As a child, the worst mean-big-sister trick I ever played on my little brother was to convince him that I could transform at will into an evil entity named Madame Ruby. The

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! To hear Weng Pixin tell it, Let’s Not Talk Anymore started out as a kind of “fuck you” move after a particularly bad fight with her mom but—as these things tend

Dacheng Flour Factory, Shekou, Shenzhen / Photo by Chris / Flickr Every day, educated youth of the erstwhile industrial zoneride the sightseeing elevator, up and down, crowdinginto the skylark that used to bellow card-punching sonatas.Through the rain-drenched amber-tinted glass, the worldlooks like a philosophical hanging bell.With each strokeof its radical pendulum, the sunlightsqueezes itself into

I Joined a Cult, But I Still Feel Alone Tyler Barton Share article Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! “Once Nothing, Twice Shatter” by Tyler Barton Luther buys cars. It’s what he does, and it’s what his