for Vishnu Khare How to convey one’s well-being over the phone,It’s going all right,All that is there is good or nothing is good.The main thing to say is, time,Where does it go, one hardly knowsHow the day gets extinguished in the night’s vast ashtray.This week as well, like a quarryDisappeared into the jaws of the
Literature
Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary Discuss Their Suicides Pauline Melville 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. “Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary Discuss Their Suicides” by Pauline
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. As a college student, I traveled to China for the first time in my life. Growing up, I frequently visited relatives in
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 kept a tally on the wall calendar in my bedroom: four bars and a strikethrough for the days I prayed all
Why Don’t You Keep Your True Nature to Yourself 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. Ode to Boy Boy’s a murder of boys circling overhead, black feathers fluttering
Ying Li. Photo from WEIBO. The emergence of “girl power” literally saved the show in Chinese stand-up comedy, while at the same time forming a concerted feminist voice. In this essay—punch lines included—Ping Zhu explains how women comedians in China not only saved the show but stole it. The female stand-up comedian Yang Li has
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. For the first time in the agency’s 74-year history, women dominate the upper ranks of the CIA. Since 2018, Gina Haspel has been
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 Aimee Bender’s new novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, Francie reflects on a journey from Portland to Los Angeles she took as a
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 first time I saw a picture of the girls in the Manson family, I was in college, I think, and was
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 would be lying if I say my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.” In Avni Doshi’s debut novel, Burnt Sugar,
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 first pages of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, the novel’s titular narrator is almost carried away by three converging tides. Plunged into
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. “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” goes the old, though sadly still relevant joke. Political conflicts have always had a
A still image from the film White Tiger (Netflix, 2021). After watching White Tiger, a writer contemplates the film alongside revolution in Egypt, Black Lives Matter protests, the film Parasite, and literary “complicated works of conscience.” Born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, I felt a familiar sorrow watching the deprivations and heartache depicted in Netflix’s The White
The Life Destroying Magic of Parking Lot Sex Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi writes dreampop speculative fictions and darkwave minimalist poetry that can be enjoyed on a bus ride or in line for coffee. He is the author of Disintegration Made Plain and Easy (forthcoming, 1913 Press) and The Book of Kane and Margaret (forthcoming, FC2).
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. Despite a lifetime of being compulsively apologetic and avoiding conflict, my favorite fictional characters are just the opposite. I’m drawn to 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 traditional folklore, villainous women wield more power than their lawful good contemporaries. The sea witches and evil queens of European fairy
A doctor on his village rounds confronts the same symptoms again and again, including uncontrollable laughter. The first patient of the day is an old woman. The doctor hears her laughter as he walks through the doorless entryway of the small house. Today it is a quiet, throaty laugh, measured but sustained, coming from a