Literature

Which Hedge Fund Owns the Sea? We Are in the Future Now! I dreamt I was baking an apple pie and in the dream I woke up and you said: Your dreams are so good I can smell them.They shot some _____ last night. No one knows howmany _____ died. We are saddened by this

This summer, find comfort in the power of chosen family and friendship, laugh at the absurdities of the patriarchy, and weep at a story of heartbreak and redemption. Themes often present in literature—and in life—like the search for belonging and reconciliation, the fight against oppression, healing from trauma, and grieving the past and lost loves

Dinaw Mengestu’s novel Someone Like Us is about grief, about attempting to comprehend loss because of exile, because of physical and emotional distances that often fracture our ability to truly understand our loved ones. The novel’s narrator, lovingly called Mamush by his family, returns home to Washington D.C. and finds that a beloved father-figure, Samuel,

Italy is a place that has ignited literary inspiration in foreigners for thousands of years. Since the time of Homer, who set big portions of The Odyssey in what is today Calabria and Sicily, the narrative of the expatriate wandering through the landscape-, art-, and food-rich Italian countryside has developed into a classic form. These

Once upon a time in a land far, far away. Once upon a time there was a castle. A prince. A girl.  Once upon a time, a story starts. A fairytale starts. But all fairytales don’t start that way. All fairytales don’t have happy endings either. Not even the originals, especially not the originals.  And

The Mudmen Want My Sister More Than I Do Lena Valencia Lena Valencia is a Los Angeles-born writer who lives in Brooklyn. Share article Trogloxene by Lena Valencia Max was home. It had been ten days of sleepless nights punctuated by nightmares, ten days of television news crews in the front yard, ten days of

The post Language is a Power Broker in the Hong Kong Thriller “Tongueless” appeared first on Electric Literature. Read the original article here

If Sarah Manguso’s new novel, Liars, can be categorized in any genre, it is probably best characterized as a horror story. It tells the intimate, blistering story of a marriage that seemingly begins as a fulfilling partnership between John and Jane, who ostensibly share artistic aspirations and mutual ambitions, but quickly devolves into a relationship

Novels-in-stories contain their own specific joys. One is the sense of partnership they can foster between the reader and the book. In the “off-camera” time between story-chapters, the reader gets to fill in what transpires. As a writer, it takes trust to leave that space—a kind of trust the reader can feel. In writing my

I occupy a corner of the internet where I’m largely secluded from a cis audience’s reaction to I Saw the TV Glow, the second feature from director Jane Schoenbrun. Instead, I see trans people dunk on fellow viewers who — with varying degrees of innocence — are unable to put their finger on the film’s

For me, queerness has always been related to imagination. Like many of us, I grew up without a blueprint for a queer life. In the evangelical household I was raised in, I had to dream my queerness into existence, conjure a life that was forbidden to me, claim it because no one was ever going

Dialing In by Heidi Diehl Remembering this time feels as though I’m listening to one of the callers, to a message from a stranger who is also me. At the start of summer 2001, I responded to a Craigslist ad for “Phone Actors.” I’d just turned 20, and I needed extra income to supplement my

Because athleticism is often regarded as the antithesis of intellectualism (the jock/nerd dichotomy remains commonplace), books about sport get overlooked as being non-serious, non-literary, or unimportant. People think they’re just fun. And they are fun. Sports are fun, so why wouldn’t the associated novels be? And they’re usually wonderfully structured—the training camp, the game, the

Hell, Michigan Click to enlarge How to Steal From the Gods During the Commercial Break Click to enlarge The post God Only Exists in Hell, Michigan appeared first on Electric Literature. Read the original article here

Suzanne Scanlon’s book, Committed: A Memoir of Finding Meaning in Madness, is a memoir unlike any I’ve read. Scanlon returns to the landscape of the past, reflecting on her experience of being committed in the New York State Psychiatric Hospital while a student at Barnard in the late 1990s. Scanlon explores her own history with

It begins with a desire to escape. Travel is an elixir, Shirley Hazzard wrote, a talisman. And what is the act of opening a book, if not an act of travel, of transportation? If not, something alchemical? A charmed amulet.  When I wrote my debut novel, The Nude, set on a fictionalized island off the

We look at our faces so often we hardly notice them changing. I remember the shock of my first fine line, a thin crease between my eyebrows that is deepest in the morning because I grimace in my sleep. It bothered me how much it bothered me. But I was in my mid-twenties, and this

Not All Men Are Wolves But Some Are Elizabeth Garver Jordan Share article The Cry of the Pack by Elizabeth Garver Jordan Mr. Nestor Hurd, our “feature” editor, was in a bad humor. We all knew he was, and everybody knew why, except Mr. Nestor Hurd himself. He thought it was because he had not