Literature

Mikhal Dekel / Photo by Nina Subin Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (Norton, 2019), Mikhal Dekel’s outstanding book, is many things: a memoir, a family genealogy, a history of nationalisms, and an exploration of identity. We accompany the author as she researches and tracks her father’s experience as one of the Tehran Children. This

The Ugliest Babies in the World Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . The way we’ve been told, my girl cousins and I were born with broken faces. “You

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . Maxima in the dark. Half-lit by a Virgin Mary night-light and the glow of a screen saver, a slow-motion sweep of stars

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . First, a few key terms. Patriarchy is not, at the end of the day, defined by the gender of one’s leaders. It’s

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . In the 1990s I was a lonely, nerdy girl writer. Nobody else I knew was simultaneously obsessed with learning HTML and parsing

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . I’m willing to bet most of us have copy-and-pasted a phrase we don’t know into Google Translate, only to be confronted with

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . One of my most vivid childhood memories took place in an English bookshop in Causeway Bay, a short minibus ride from my

Tayari Jones is a New York Times best-selling author from Atlanta, Georgia. Her most recent novel, An American Marriage, won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Jones has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, and was inducted into the

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . The journey story, where the hero must venture out into the world for reasons not necessarily entirely of his/her own devising, is

I Married a Stranger to Be Left Alone Sayaka Murata Share article Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . An excerpt from Earthlings by Sayaka Murata I felt something

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . Douglas A. Martin’s novel Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother has been described as a “queer speculative biography.” In imagining the

Photo by Christopher T. Assaf World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, today announced Cynthia Leitich Smith as the winner of the 2021 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature. Awarded in alternating years with the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the biennial NSK Prize recognizes outstanding achievement

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . Our modern archetype of the vampire is as a man: Nosferatu, Dracula, Lestat, Edward. But some of the earliest vampires in literary

Safety Is Not Other People Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . Asylum The dependence of hunger gives way to a sharpened eye, a test subject unsure if it’s

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . Destiny O. Birdsong’s debut poetry collection, Negotiations, is exactly what it sounds like. The speakers in this collection negotiate their body—asking what

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . In Laura van den Berg’s collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, women are adrift in Florida, Iceland, Italy, in an

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . When I think mystery, my mind initially goes to the procedurals I watched with my elders as a kid—shows like Cagney and

Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here. . In “Little Fear of Lightning,” an episode of HBO’s Emmy-winning series Watchmen, several youth ministers travel in a yellow school bus from