Literature

Editor’s note: This essay deals with topics of childhood sexual assault, rape, and incest. “Hush” by Torie Rose Wiley The Armless Maiden, or in some retellings, The Maiden Without Hands, is an ancient folktale that has been passed down throughout different cultures and generations. In the older versions, a young girl lives alone with her

Growing up in Caracas in the ‘90s, I remember seeing a series of posters advertising Venezuela’s most important tourist destinations, such as El Salto Ángel, Canaima National Park, and the Los Roques archipelago. The caption “Venezuela, el secreto mejor guardado del Caribe”—“the best kept secret of the Caribbean”—was written beneath each picture. The message was

We Are Silent Skin Waiting to Sing Red Fruit Nobody ever begins from where it hurts. Overcome with ache, have we not lived our lives thinking ourselves whole? Have we not thought the echoes our hymn of being complete? Look at the flowers. How they waitpatiently in the morning for the red sun.Listen to their

“Go West, young man!”—a phrase that looms large in the United States’s history of westward expansion. It’s a history dominated by the displacement of Indigenous peoples, the exploitation and destruction of land, and a drive to claim more, more, always more: more resources, more gold, and more land, but also more control of the stories

From ride-hailing to door-to-door delivery apps, labor platforms have created a shining new way for millions across the globe to make a living, offering flexibility, autonomy, and low-entry barriers. These forms of gig work have experienced rapid growth while raising questions around worker protections, job security, loneliness, and the role of technology.  Gig work can be

A raven, poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin told me, is one of the few birds that will look at you as it sings. Ornithology has shown that birdsong patterns are passed down through generations, much like human language; they contain sounds that no longer have a source. Birdsong, in a sense, is an archive of the

At Least My Best Friend Stabbed Me in the Front Gina Frangello Share article “Slut Lullabies” by Gina Frangello I found out my mother was a slut from my best friend, at a bar with my secret Greek boyfriend who was possibly a homosexual and his uptight brother who pretended to know nothing of our

In Tracing the Ether: Contemporary Poetry from Saudi Arabia, theorist and translator Dr. Moneera Al-Ghadeer gathers sixty-two poems by twenty-six poets who have inherited both the ruins of pre-Islamic longing and the blue light of a world digitally mapped and endlessly refreshed. Tracing the Ether is one of the first English-language anthologies to present Saudi

When our taekwondo master spars with us, it’s slow, instructive. He’s demonstrating a drill we’re about to do in pairs or walking through possible attacks or counters with a student to show them their own tendencies. I hadn’t seen him spar for real until a former student, a heavyweight finance bro who used to spar

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of The Emilys by Heather Abel, which will be published on June 16th, 2026 by Penguin Random House. You can pre-order your copy here! Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she’s frustrated,

“No More Cows,” an excerpt from Mega Milk by Megan Milks Most evenings I drank a tall glass of 2% milk while being watched by cows. Boxy Holsteins grazed on pastoral landscapes above the kitchen cabinets. On the counters beneath them, one cow leered with wooden spoons and rubber turners sprouting from her back. Another

I met David Ryan in his faculty office at Sarah Lawrence College, about an hour before he was to give a reading from his new short story collection, Alligator, published by a recently-founded small press, Cash 4 Gold Books (the creation of Harris Lahti, Jon Lindsey, and Nathan Dragon). After I finished checking out the

He’d Rather Fight a Dragon Than His Wife Tom vs. Dragon Every sunset Tom hunts the dragon in his backyard. On an unknown day in the recent past, the dragon climbed from the canal on the eastern perimeter of Tom’s property and made a home in his lake, where it eats the koi fish Tom

Elaine Castillo’s fiction brings the Filipino diaspora into sharp focus. She populates her novels with the working Filipino (perpetually) underclass, whose precarious labor under capitalism reveals more than a century of intertwined histories between the United States and the Philippines.  In Moderation, Castillo’s sophomore novel, the main character, Girlie Delmundo, descends from a long line

In 1975, 90 percent of Icelandic women went on strike, though they did not call it that. They called it Kvennafrídagurinn, or Women’s Day Off. A day off from factory work, from housework, from care work, from all kinds of vital work that often goes unacknowledged and unpaid to this day. In the fifty years since

Writing about the South is difficult; it requires perceiving truth where truth has been obfuscated and redacted, and it requires research—whether personal, communal, or historical—to capture a region that is more rooted in its specific “placeness” than most places are. In his essay entitled “Southings,” Thomas Dai writes that “Southern identity is perceived by most

There Is No Privacy on Open Water Edgard Telles Ribeiro Share article “Albatross” by Edgard Telles Ribeiro The letter, on top-quality paper bearing a letterhead, came from a notary public in a small rural town. The name of the town meant nothing to him. The contents of the letter, however, were so unexpected that he

For writers and readers, time is an essential commodity. As our world shifts ever further toward optimization and productivity, taking that time back can be vital work in maintaining a creative practice. When there’s no time to spare, where can we look to find fulfillment in the world of writing around us? For writers of