Literature

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. . For years, we’ve been taught that racism is rooted in ignorance and can be combated by education. That’s not exactly true. Racism

John Feinstein, when he wrote The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season (Doubleday, 2020), probably expected his chronicle of the 2018–19 college basketball season to arrive just in time for this year’s March Madness tournament. But with the Covid-19 pandemic bringing the season to a screeching

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 read Octavia E. Butler’s short story collection Bloodchild and Other Stories in the last year of my father’s life. He was

Our Family History, Packed in Mom’s Garage Kelli Jo Ford Author of Crooked Hallelujah  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. . “You’ll Be Honest, You’ll Be Brave”by Kelli

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. . Welcome to Read Like a Writer, a series that examines a different element of the craft of fiction writing in each installment, using

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. . There’s no doubt COVID-19 has forever changed the world as we know it. A small slice of life that had to shift

Photo by John Fisher Manoomin. It is the first Ojibwe word I will learn. It means wild rice, or “food that grows on water.” The sound of it is fitting. Less sibilant than rice. A water word. Mikwendan. Remember. Mashkiki. Medicine. Dibaajimowin. Story. Kimberly Blaeser’s Copper Yearning (Holy Cow Press, 2020) has few footnotes and

Everybody Ejaculates If you read almost any pre-WWI novel, you’ll find liberal use of the word “ejaculated” in moments of intense dialogue. Prior to the early 1900s, authors often used it to denote an exclamation; in the words of the OED, to ejaculate can mean “to utter suddenly.” This literary supercut repurposes these sudden utterances

Karl Marx may be famous for his thorough, analytic attack on capitalism (see: all three volumes and the 1000-plus pages of Das Kapital), but let’s be real: it’s not the most exciting to read. What if, just as a thought experiment, our works that reimagined current structures of power also had robots? Speculative fiction immerses

Photo courtesy of the author for Rachelle 4/27/2020 Our moms were widows before they met our fathers.Their hair blue-black, their hands already chapped, caressedby Inglis die-cast tooling  Bren light machine guns, Mauserammunition, or Browning  Hi-Power handguns, torpedo warheadcasings, or reining sorrels’ leather when they made mountains home.Their first loves shot, stabbed,  or lost in war. While our fathers

Amidst nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism in policing, the role of crime writers in shaping public perceptions of the police has also been called into question. Police procedurals are among the most ubiquitous programming on television and almost always center the perspectives of the cops, often depicting acts of brutality as the

I braved the dating scene for nearly five years in New York, but it was a friend breakup that hurt me the most during those tumultuous early-20s. It felt so sudden, so cataclysmic, so altogether unexplainable. I found myself wanting so badly a chance to have another conversation—to get some sort of closure. A years-long

Rishi Reddi takes “epic” to the next level with this untold PoC history of California. Passage West is a novel of California, of the U.S.-Mexico border, and of America, that you probably had no idea you needed in your life. The novel begins with Karak Singh on his deathbed in a Los Angeles hospital in

Times like this come every few years. The summer begins, and so do the Black deaths due to state-sanctioned violence. But this time, the corporations and publications say they want to change. They finally admit—if they hadn’t already done so in the past—that Black Lives Matter, and so do Black writers.  At a time where

I’ve been to many a tertulia in my life. In Costa Rica, these informal literary, artistic, or intellectual gatherings are as common and important as Sunday mass, and just as enlightening. Recently, thanks to Vincent Toro, I’ve experienced two types of tertulias I hadn’t thought possible—the first, his unforgettable new collection titled Tertulia, and the

In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re talking to Sharlene Teo, who’s teaching a six-week workshop on building and maintaining emotional suspense in fiction—a technique she uses to great effect in her novel Ponti.

Corona Avenue, Queens / Photos by David Rohlfing (1) On the longest day of the longest year, I did not sleep. I stood as witness with the maximum tilt of the Arctic Circle toward the sun. (2) I live with my husband in Queens, the storied borough of New York City frequently cited as the