Literature

Useful Bad Advice for First Responders 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 EMT School The instructor told us to get ready. As if you can get ready

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. . Science journalist and debut author Angela Chen remembers the first time she saw the word “asexuality”—online, on the Asexual Visibility and Education

Sheep’s Head Lighthouse / Photo by John Finn / Flickr Author’s note: For about seven years now, Kwame Dawes and I have been writing long poem-dialogues that have so far appeared as four books with Peepal Tree Press, most recently In the Names of Our Families. The following extract is from our work in progress

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. . Is there such a thing as too much love and desire? Is it possible to negotiate intimate relationships with multiple partners at

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. . Odie Lindsey has once again emailed me about a dead bird.  I get these emails every couple months. Birds, squirrels, chipmunks, possums—these

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. . Ayad Akhtar’s new novel, Homeland Elegies, is a song to and about America, subverting the idea of the so-called “American Dream.” The

Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut collection of flash, Death, Desire, and Other Destinations (Okay Donkey Press, 2020), is a journey through desire’s relationship with the body: the exhaustion after desire courses through us, and the surprising places—both hidden and public—desire centers itself, like some wily, ethereal character peeking around the corner, reminding us of its omniscience.

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 order to fit more texts into my Asian American literature course, I sometimes assign the play adaptation of Jessica Hagedorn’s novel

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 1742, the Italian engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi fell ill. Malaria, a seasonal epidemic that killed thousands of Italians every year until

The Secret Lives of Yoga Instructors Jenny Bhatt Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, and literary critic. 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. . “Pros 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. . Three decades ago, Walter Mosley published Devil in a Blue Dress, his first novel, a mystery featuring the now-famous private investigator Easy

Cynthia Weill is director of the Center for Children’s Literature at the Bank Street College of Education. She is trained as an art historian and has worked as an educator and in humanitarian assistance. She holds a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. She completed her dissertation work in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she worked closely

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 Rona Jaffe Foundation has been recognizing outstanding emerging women writers since 1995—past recipients include Elif Batuman, Chelsea Bieker, Eula Biss, Rivka

Everything Is Filthy and I Am All Chores 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. . A Clean Story I was taking a bath in the old clawfoot tub and

Harlan Margaret Van Cao and Lan Cao / Courtesy of Penguin Random House Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter (Viking, 2020) is a memoir written in alternating narrative chapters between Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao. Coming to the United States from Vietnam in 1975 as a thirteen-year-old refugee, Lan

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 pleasures of sex, like life, are temporary. Love is perhaps more complicated, but if we are being honest with ourselves, I

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. . Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel, What Are You Going Through?, explores the rich interior life of a narrator whose name we never learn.