Literature

Photo courtesy of the author Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and spending time in her backyard—a “precious contained universe, teeming with life”—a writer ponders whether we’ll emerge from the current pandemic with a paradigm shift. The sound of the pandemic in suburban Texas is lawn mowers. The baritone clip of a rough patch. The ping

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. It’s well-worn advice by now that you shouldn’t go into debt for an MFA. But how can you avoid it? Every year,

All These Houses Full of Opinions 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 doves were moaning crying cooing calling The doves were moaning crying cooing calling Inside their

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 me, reading Torrey Peters’ debut novel Detransition, Baby is akin to listening to your favorite hometown band headlining their first stadium

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 have a confession to make: with nearly half a century behind me, I still read children’s books. The best are truly

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. Before the crisis, I dined at a bistro on England’s coast with a septuagenarian white man and woman with whom I am

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. Imagine a postcard of rural New England at the peak of fall foliage, the forest alight with color so bright your mouth

After 140 days at home, one person wants more space; the other, more plants. I wanted a room of my own, so I talked my husband into moving into a larger house. Now that both of us worked from home, I needed my own workspace. That was my sales pitch. But what I really wanted

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. George Orwell’s 1984 is one of those ubiquitous books that you know about just from existing in the world. It’s been referenced

The Occupational Hazards of Hardboiled Eggs Eley Williams 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. “A is for artful (adj.),” Chapter 1 of The Liar’s Dictionary by

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 don’t need  to say that poetry got us through 2020, because poets get us through everything.  I don’t say this to

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 world will come between you,” writes Marcos Gonsalez in the prologue of his memoir Pedro’s Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land. 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 first read Nadia Owusu’s debut memoir Aftershocks in June, as the United States—led by the white nationalist backed Republican administration—was several

Hot Vinyasa Flow for Crushing Self-Doubt 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. Corpse Pose The position has to assume you, like a fever, or a favor, or a

If Serbian poet and novelist Zvonko Karanović were a painter, he would be a surrealist. In the forty-one dark prose poems of Sleepwalkers on a Picnic, in English and Serbian parallel texts translated by Biljana D. Obradović (Diálogos Books, 2020), he depicts a dreamlike urban existence in which nameless men fend off angst and emptiness

Barbara Epler started working at New Directions after graduating from college in 1984, and she has been its president and publisher since 2011. In 2015 Poets & Writers awarded Epler their Editor’s Prize, and in 2016 Words Without Borders gave her the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. Veronica Esposito: You became editor-in-chief

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. Truth be told, I loathe re-imaginings of myths. The impulse feels reformist rather than revolutionary. I find these renderings on the whole

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. It’s a truism that historical fiction reveals more about its own age it than the one it portrays. We can’t escape or