Literature

Ery Shin’s Spring on the Peninsula encompasses two winters of grieving: Kai, a white-collar worker in contemporary South Korea, struggles to process his breakup. We follow Kai’s inner musings, from his various sexual conquests to solo mountain pilgrimages. But alongside heartbreak, Shin’s debut novel explores the aesthetics of fatigue; the novel depicts generations of Koreans

Alive She Was Mythic, Dead She Is Larger Than Life Joanna Pearson Share article An excerpt from Bright and Tender Dark by Joanna Pearson From LoveandLegacy.com: Karlie Richards (July 13, 1980–January 8, 2000) Margaret Karla “Karlie” Richards of Sycamore Grove, NC, darling daughter, sister, and friend, went to meet her Heavenly Father in the early

Translators are an incredibly vital part of the literary ecosystem—not only because they carry books from one language into another, but also because they are generally the ones who find and champion writers in other languages. They contribute to the circulation of ideas and narratives, as well as the formation of what we call “world

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the poetry collection Find Me When You’re Ready by Perry Janes, which will be published by Northwestern University Press in Sept 15, 2024. Preorder the book here. In Find Me When You’re Ready, Perry Janes traces a sweeping coming-of-age journey from Detroit to Los Angeles. As he leaves home and forges toward California,

Katya Apekina, author of critically acclaimed The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, opens her newest novel, Mother Doll, with a nesting set of characters linked by familial ties and the weight of generational inheritance. Zhenia, a medical translator in Los Angeles, finds herself pregnant. Meanwhile, her beloved grandmother is dying. And, her deceased

Islands live comfortably in the literary imagination. Cut off from the mainland and often small or negligible in population, they place characters in inescapable situations, amplify drama, and often suspend the normal rules of mainland society. And islands, as Rachel Carson points out in The Sea Around Us, are geologically transient, altering shapes and even disappearing completely;

Growing up as a Chinese Indonesian, I never thought a person who looked like me would have a place in literature. My dream of being a writer seemed impossible. To this day, a Google search for “Chinese Indonesian poets” yields no results. The lack of Chinese Indonesian voices, especially in poetry, mirrors a long history

“Palcoholics” by Jake Maynard My bro Brian used to tell me he loved me. Throughout our twenties he’d say it every year or two, unprovoked, unexpected, and always at night—just like a leopard attack. Brian still lives in our hometown, so for years when I’d visit my family, we’d get drunk together. We met at

Revenge of the Mall Escalators Escalator Mechanic For Pablo Katchadjian “For weeks I haven’t been able to focus on even the most trivial thing, because all I can think about is the shape of my right foot,” the escalator technician confessed to me. He was clocking out of work. “Look at those escalators I was

For years I thought myself in competition with another writer—a writer, I should say, whom I’d never met. I first became acquainted with this writer nearly a decade ago when I joined a Facebook group for people applying to MFA programs in creative writing. Ostensibly, the purpose of the group was to exchange information and

In this most recent memoir, Kao Kalia Yang takes on the voice of her mother, Tswb Muas, to tell the heart-wrenching (or rather “liver-wrenching” if you’re Hmong) story of a woman who made an impossible decision in the jungle of Laos that would shape the rest of her life. Where Rivers Part transports us to

I have a soft spot for stories from Japan written about the time when all the conveniences of today’s society didn’t rule our lives. Growing up in the suburbs of Tokyo in ‘80s and ‘90s, we had so much freedom. I was three when I was allowed to play with my friends at the park

One summer, my brother found a half-dead opossum on the side of the road in our neighborhood and he called me to handle it. “Well, is it dead?” I asked. “I don’t know. That’s why I called you.” And as much as I didn’t want to be the girl who dropped everything to go and

I Aspire to Urinate as Powerfully as My Boss K-Ming Chang Share article An excerpt from Cecilia by K-Ming Chang I saw Cecilia again when I turned twenty-four and switched jobs for the third time that year. In the laundry room of the chiropractor’s office, I folded four types of towels and three sizes of

Early sobriety is a very unique, specific flavor of life in which you suddenly have yet to catch up with the exterior world. You’re a skinned grape rolling around among others who’ve grown safe, comfortable exoskeletons in the time you spent drinking. How did they do it? How do they do it? How do I

Click to enlarge The post For This Mexican Writer, Magical Realism Is a Craft Tool for Dissecting the Drug Wars  appeared first on Electric Literature. Read the original article here

In the Summer of 2017, I went to see the European premiere of the Braden Jacobs-Jenkins play An Octoroon. Based on the 1859 melodrama by the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, it was staged at the Orange Tree Theatre in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. A truly bombastic production that lampooned the tropes of

After its massively successful streaming release last November, Emerald Fennell’s film Saltburn dominated cinematic discourse for months. A 2006-set period piece that starts as a 21st-century Brideshead Revisited and morphs into an ironic erotic thriller, its carefully honed aesthetic, plot twists, and off-kilter sexuality divided critics and audiences. Some lambasted the film for lacking subtlety;