Literature

Michael Berry is a professor of Asian languages and cultures and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He has published extensive works on addressing the richness and diversity of Chinese art and culture in sinophone communities. He is also an award-winning English translator of several Chinese literary works, including Yu Hua’s To

During quarantine, a poet, essayist, and aphorist returns to the aphorism, the “sushi of literature.” If life has placed you on probation, best to proceed with added caution. Art for art’s sake is a dead end; art for heart’s sake is the way out. A note to public scolds and angry activists: good intentions are

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. Baba Badji’s new poetry collection, Ghost Letters, begins in English, but quickly defies the category of “Western” or “American”: One by one,

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. The project of American Dirt was noble: make the migrant experience compelling and relatable for those who might otherwise turn away. The

Solving the Riddle of My Mother’s Secret Room If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. The Clown Room The clown room was off-limits. It lay behind a narrow door

On a visit to an Oklahoma City bookstore, Alex Crayon finds more than books. When I pulled into the snow-covered parking lot of Nappy Roots Books in northeast Oklahoma City, the first thing I noticed were the posters. Handwritten signs encouraging people to “Come in and Get Warm” and declaring “Masks Are Required Inside” hung

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. There’s nothing like pulling up a chair and settling yourself in for a good gossip with a friend whom you can always

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. The final frontier is an epithet famously attached to outer space.  Don’t strap on a spacesuit just yet, though: closer to hand,

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. The plink-plink of a tack piano gives way to the voice of Kristin Windbigler, executive director of The Western Folklife Center, asserting

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. I picked up Lydia Davis’s Almost No Memory again recently for the first time in years, and as I flipped through, one

Ismail Kadare has a remarkable quality of saying a great deal and with much clarity, but in an elusive, oblique, and allegorical way. Peter Constantine situates Kadare’s work in the long history of the Balkans and in the broader tradition of writers who practice their craft under the constraints of censorship. Anton Chekhov, in his

Some may live just a block away,even nearer: the Walmart clerkwho’d coolly hook a hot wireto your gonads, the grease monkeykeen on beheading, the cleaning ladywho’d fill her pail with eyeballs. And there’s the ousted Scoutmasterwho’d corral the kids, the engineerwho’d craft a more cost-effectiveabattoir for undesirables, the MBAwho’d plot the sweeping purgesand drive the

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. I wish I remembered exactly where my dad got the 1992 Royal Rumble tape. I imagine it was from the packaging factory

How to Survive Underground Te-Ping Chen Share article If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. “Gubeikou Spirit”by Te-Ping Chen Pan entered Gubeikou Station at top speed, hurtling through the

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. In Cherie Jones’s debut novel, How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, the fictional Barbadian town of Baxter Beach looks like paradise.

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. In the 2017 film Revenge (directed by Coralie Fargeat), the protagonist Jen is raped by a friend of her lover. Her lover,

The Infinite Doors at the Center of Myself If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. Differential Diagnosis There is a door at the center of myself. That door belies