Literature

Philadelphians are frequently thought of as pugilistic, mostly because of our reputation as a passionate sports town, and there is a pugnacious attitude in the city. Caught in the middle of the megapolis between New York City and Washington, D.C., Philly has been overlooked and ignored, more frequently thought of as the home of the

The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, a $25,000 prize honoring a book-length work of imaginative fiction, today announces the shortlist for the 2024 prize. The prize, created to continue Le Guin’s legacy, is given to a writer whose work reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work: hope, equity,

When I meet a fellow swimmer, there’s a kind of knowing connection. We have our favorite pools, we’re morning or evening swimmers, we started swimming at a particular, perhaps painful, point in our lives and now we can’t imagine our days without these bodies of water.  Often, it’s the moments before and after the pool

The Theory That Got Us Cancelled Might Win Us the Nobel Prize Thomas Dunn Share article The Idols by Thomas Dunn Just before the end, when we talked about those first text messages, we found that we’d all imagined the same—that the Ministry had been discussing the findings for weeks before they contacted us. In

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of The Rose by Ariana Reines, a poetry collection which will be published by Graywolf Press on April 15th 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. In The Rose, award-winning poet Ariana Reines explores the intersection of rage and surrender. Drawing on the lineage of medieval troubadours’ erotic

As a species, we are tortured by the notion of non-belonging: from an evolutionary standpoint, if we don’t fit in, we may just die. Many novels concentrated on the person who feels inferior and out of place—even if they aren’t novels we’d categorize as thriller or horror—result in someone’s murder. The stakes of being excluded

Maggie Nye hopes that her debut novel, The Curators, will “unsettl[e] the reader in a productive way.” I present this book to you as a reader unsettled. The Curators is set in 1915 Atlanta against the backdrop of the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old laborer at a pencil factory, and the subsequent trial, conviction,

There is a reason we consume content about love, and it’s not only because of its relatability. No, I’d argue that love makes us selfish. We are all trying to decipher lovers lost and found, past and present, hoping that someone else’s experience might shed light on our own. We hope that the question of,

Both/And, EL’s series of essays by trans writers of color, is going to be a book published by HarperOne—edited by our editor-in-chief, Denne Michele Norris! The anthology will feature new essays by acclaimed writers Tanaïs, Meredith Talusan, and J Wortham, alongside some of our community’s most beloved entertainers and activists, such as Peppermint and Raquel

“Boomerang” by Asha Dore I was the worst mother in the world that Tuesday night when Maggie was two months old. She was exactly the weight—pounds and ounces—she’d been the moment she was born. I boiled water for Lise’s butter noodles and wore Maggie strapped to my chest in a baby wrap, the fabric stretchy,

Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel, The Anthropologists, is a breathtaking excavation of the wonders and intricacies involved in making a modern life in a new city, of feeling both young and adult, and of growing up while settling down.  Through afternoon walks, late-night conversations, and a series of apartment tours, The Anthropologists follows Asya and her

Darling, I Always Leave a Mark Hard-Hearted Villanelle You like it when I hurt you in the dark. Hot wax, sharp slap, blindfold, belt and bite.I’m good at being bad. I play the partof angry boss, disgusted teacher, hard-hearted lover. You live to lose the fight.You like it. When I hurt you in the dark,I’m

Laura van den Berg’s latest novel, her fifth, State of Paradise, is set in a time and place both familiar and wildly unsettling: Florida during a period of pandemic and social unease. The unnamed narrator, a ghost-writer, weathers the pandemic at her mother’s house with her husband, a historian and avid runner. Her sister lives

Everything we live through shapes how we understand and engage with institutions and social connections. There are so many examples in history and in books of young people reckoning with institutions and dominant cultures, forcing—catalyzing—change through their actions. The beauty of so much literature is that it continues to find ways to remind us how

There’s this song that I love that I listened to quite a bit in the Fall of 2021. It became a kind of North Star lyric as I was rewriting my novel, Lo Fi, as it encompassed a feeling my narrator was dealing with, fresh off a too-long situationship, trying to forget someone. I wasn’t

Improbable Midnight Errands in a Starless City Atsuhiro Yoshida Share article An excerpt from Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida The clock struck 1:00 A.M. It must have been wound a little faster than the others, as the timepiece that Mitsuki was carrying sounded ahead of the countless others kept in the warehouse. A few moments

Nina Sharma is a woman in love. In her debut memoir, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love In Black And Brown, she reflects on the powerful love and solidarity of Afro-Asian allyship through the lens of her own interracial relationship as an Indian woman married to a Black man. Beginning in the suburbs of