Electric Lit is committed to publishing—and paying writers—through the pandemic without any layoffs or pay cuts. Please consider supporting us during this difficult time. Donate here. . Lydia Millet has always fought for the environment. She has written many books that take the natural world as their subject, but her signature approach is refreshingly askew, shot
Literature
Electric Lit is committed to publishing—and paying writers—through the pandemic without any layoffs or pay cuts. Please consider supporting us during this difficult time. Donate here. . During these strange, pandemic times, desire has entered our lives on the heels of restriction. We are learning first-hand the spiraling madness that comes from obsessing over what we
Electric Lit is committed to publishing—and paying writers—through the pandemic without any layoffs or pay cuts. Please consider supporting us during this difficult time. Donate here. . A doctor who recognizes the first symptoms of an illness that threatens the population. Authorities who dismiss his warnings as fearmongering, until an epidemic is inevitable. A city that goes
Electric Lit is committed to publishing—and paying writers—through the pandemic without any layoffs or pay cuts. Please consider supporting us during this difficult time. Donate here. . The old internet has its familiar charms, from the screeching dial-up sound to the winsome screen names of its users. But what I find most fascinating about the internet,
Electric Lit is committed to publishing—and paying writers—through the pandemic without any layoffs or pay cuts. Please consider supporting us during this difficult time. Donate here. . When Jenny Zhang’s debut short story collection, Sour Heart, was published in 2017, I had been reading her poetry, short-fiction and essays for a few years and I felt
Top row (left to right): Laurie Halse Anderson, Eric Gansworth, Meg Medina. Middle row: Linda Sue Park, Mitali Perkins, Jason Reynolds. Bottom row: Cynthia Leitich Smith, Laurel Snyder, Alex Wheatle Finalists for the 2021 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, sponsored by World Literature Today, were announced today at the University of Oklahoma. The NSK
Electric Lit is committed to publishing—and paying writers—through the pandemic without any layoffs or pay cuts. Please consider supporting us during this difficult time. Donate here. . The absence of someone or something is as palpable as their presence. I’ve discovered this—quite painfully—in my own life as the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. Naturally, I’m drawn to
Carlos Estévez, Self-Fishing, 2006, collage on paper, 39½ x 27½ inches / Courtesy of the artist Now the beat(there is always a beat).Now the drumsand the darkness within.Now the dance.The standoff. Now the story about the jailerwho frees the future dictator out of pity.Now his lover (the invisible ink).Now the reports from the front.Now the
Electric Lit is committed to publishing—and paying writers—through the pandemic without any layoffs or pay cuts. Please consider supporting us during this difficult time. Donate here. . Amado Vazquez, a Mexican botanist, named an orchid after Joan Didion. While that was a chic gesture, I don’t think of her as an orchid. I think of her
Electric Lit is committed to publishing—and paying writers—through the pandemic without any layoffs or pay cuts. Please consider supporting us during this difficult time. Donate here. . It’s fitting—maybe even a little on-the-nose—that the last book I finished on my commute to work was Hilary Leichter’s Temporary. Now that my twice-daily train ride has been indefinitely
Cancer Is the Secret of This Company Town Leah Hampton Share article Electric Lit is committed to publishing—and paying writers—through the pandemic without any layoffs or pay cuts. Please consider supporting us during this difficult time. Donate here. . “Twitchell”by Leah Hampton For the first half of Margie Pifer’s pottery lecture at the Arts Council picnic,
Reading at the Edge of the Forest, by Marti Spencer / Courtesy of the artist The following talk was first presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Seattle, Washington, January 2020. Teaching the literature of American Indians is admittedly paradoxical. On one hand, it has to do with the fact that
View inland from the top of Zennor Hill / Courtesy of the author Walking his dogs through the Zennor moors, a writer in Cornwall contemplates the area’s literary history and discovers the ever-growing distance between the new reality brought by the pandemic and his family’s plans for a two-year stay on the Avenue Katherine Mansfield.
The recent collection of short stories by Neva Lukić, Endless Endings (Bokeh, 2018), originally written in Croatian and translated into English by Jeremy White, was published first in Croatia under a different title: More i zaustavljene priče (HDP, 2016) and then in Serbia (Treći trg, Srebrno drvo, 2018). It is not a debut book but
Marie Ross with one of the clarinets showcased on her Brahms recording. Clarinet photo by by Matthew Gregan. In this profile of clarinetist Maire Ross, Olga Zilberbourg explores how Ross, with her 2019 CD Brahms: Clarinet Sonatas and Trio, asserts her agency as an interpretive artist against the musical tradition. As a sixteen-year-old clarinet student at
Gulf Road and the Kuwait City skyline / Photo courtesy of the author Reflecting on the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the current pandemic, the author writes about wanting “to grab the future with both hands, to sing about survival, to believe, like my father did, that Kuwait is worth rebuilding from scratch.” In
Statue of Ramos at Ponta Verde beach, Maceió, Brazil / Wikipedia In her new translation of Graciliano Ramos’s São Bernardo, forthcoming early next month from New York Review Books, Padma Viswanathan reproduces the linguistic edges of Ramos’s quicksilver prose in hopes of raising Ramos’s profile in the anglophone world. Graciliano Ramos worked hard. Born in
Left: Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in Normal People (2020) / Courtesy of IMDB Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel is a meticulous observation, or even a study, of how one human being can have immense, intense power over another. (The following review contains spoilers.) The novel Normal People, which was first published in 2018, is the