Literature

While reading a debut novel, oftentimes, there exists a momentary thrill of forgetting about craft. Instead, it can feel as if these writers grew up alongside their stories—in parallel lines and lives, naturally accumulating sentences with every inch they grew. There is a tender, literary innocence and a certain freedom from expectation that comes with

If you’re like me, maybe you don’t need another steam of ingestible content. Maybe you’re looking for a detox, a beach vacation, a new brand of coffee. You might be surprised to hear it, but all of these things go with one of the literary podcasts on this list like wine with cheese. Or beer

When I was a kid, we had this one book lying around—bottom rung of the bookcase, floor level: a glossy collection of ’80s food erotica. A woman with two tufts of whipped cream covering her nipples, cherries on top. A gently held guava, crotch-height. A mouth eating a banana. When I was home alone I’d

If there is a better-smelling vegetable than a tomato grown in dirt and ripened in the sun, I don’t know it. But I know I could almost conjure up that smell just from looking at my father’s old Super 8 video home movies. I think a tomato is my first sensory memory, though I’m sure

Growing up in Jamaica, my family and I went to the beach every Sunday, eating fried fish and fluffy, airy dumplings, swimming in water so crystal clear it looked like diamonds sparkled on it. We’d come home sunburned and windswept, and we’d sleep well that night, our energy completely sapped by the sun.  The next

“On the Pioneer Woman” by Krys Malcolm Belc Nearly twenty years after I first discover the Pioneer Woman, I sit naked in bed nursing my daughter, one hand holding my phone over her head, the other holding a burp cloth to catch the leaking milk on the other side, and watch again and again the

When I was a very little girl my mother used to take me over to the neighbor’s house down the street. Susan* (*not her real name), the neighbor was twenty or so years older than my mother and had a forty-year-old son who lived at home with her. He used to take me upstairs and

Please Delete All Memories Where I’m Not a Boy Show Me Tell us if there’s a specific date or date range that you’d rather not see in your memories. —Facebook I would rather not see November 18, 2008, the day I faceplanted on the sidewalk after school and snow surged up my kitten mittens and

Philadelphians are frequently thought of as pugilistic, mostly because of our reputation as a passionate sports town, and there is a pugnacious attitude in the city. Caught in the middle of the megapolis between New York City and Washington, D.C., Philly has been overlooked and ignored, more frequently thought of as the home of the

The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, a $25,000 prize honoring a book-length work of imaginative fiction, today announces the shortlist for the 2024 prize. The prize, created to continue Le Guin’s legacy, is given to a writer whose work reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work: hope, equity,

When I meet a fellow swimmer, there’s a kind of knowing connection. We have our favorite pools, we’re morning or evening swimmers, we started swimming at a particular, perhaps painful, point in our lives and now we can’t imagine our days without these bodies of water.  Often, it’s the moments before and after the pool

The Theory That Got Us Cancelled Might Win Us the Nobel Prize Thomas Dunn Share article The Idols by Thomas Dunn Just before the end, when we talked about those first text messages, we found that we’d all imagined the same—that the Ministry had been discussing the findings for weeks before they contacted us. In

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of The Rose by Ariana Reines, a poetry collection which will be published by Graywolf Press on April 15th 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. In The Rose, award-winning poet Ariana Reines explores the intersection of rage and surrender. Drawing on the lineage of medieval troubadours’ erotic

As a species, we are tortured by the notion of non-belonging: from an evolutionary standpoint, if we don’t fit in, we may just die. Many novels concentrated on the person who feels inferior and out of place—even if they aren’t novels we’d categorize as thriller or horror—result in someone’s murder. The stakes of being excluded

Maggie Nye hopes that her debut novel, The Curators, will “unsettl[e] the reader in a productive way.” I present this book to you as a reader unsettled. The Curators is set in 1915 Atlanta against the backdrop of the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old laborer at a pencil factory, and the subsequent trial, conviction,

There is a reason we consume content about love, and it’s not only because of its relatability. No, I’d argue that love makes us selfish. We are all trying to decipher lovers lost and found, past and present, hoping that someone else’s experience might shed light on our own. We hope that the question of,

Both/And, EL’s series of essays by trans writers of color, is going to be a book published by HarperOne—edited by our editor-in-chief, Denne Michele Norris! The anthology will feature new essays by acclaimed writers Tanaïs, Meredith Talusan, and J Wortham, alongside some of our community’s most beloved entertainers and activists, such as Peppermint and Raquel