Literature

For a country that isn’t much larger than a thumbnail on most globes, Britain has an outsized cultural footprint. This is, of course, in part because the footprint used to be a big clobbering boot, kicking in the doors of other people’s countries without even wiping the blood and mud off on the mat. When

“A Salad-Eating Competition” by Billy Lezra THEY SAY NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS, BUTAfter Kate Baer have you tried duck-egg soaked brioche French toast, golden crisp edges doused in caramelized maple syrup? have you licked a spatula coated in vanilla bean whipped cream? have you soaked up oceanic Pinot Grigio brine with toasted

My mother tells me stories of a woman on the moon. When she first heard the story, she was a little girl in China, sleeping at her aunt’s house beside the river, banana trees thrashing with night storms. When I first heard the story, I was in my parents’ bedroom in the American midwest, the

How Clara Schumann Got Her Groove Back River, Love “What will become of my work?” – Clara Schumann, after learning she’s pregnant with her fifth child I.Her hands on the piano are birds she cannot name. It’s April 1854 in Düsseldorf, rain and rain and flooded streets. Whenever Clara leaves the house to shop, she wades

Football (or soccer) has always been a significant part of Ellen van Neerven’s life; they grew up playing the game, advanced to become an amateur player, and has always been what they call an “armchair enthusiast” of the sport. But EvN, the author of Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity, who presently lives in Brisbane, Australia,

When I first decided to write my novel, Their Divine Fires, I knew I wanted to draw on and honor the stories of my grandmother and mother. In the early 1900s, my grandmother’s uncles joined the Communist Party and fought to protect their country against warlords and Japanese soldiers. Decades later, my mother witnessed the

I thought it would be easy to compile a list of books where women live alone. And it was, but what is considerably less easy it to think about books where women live alone and don’t fall into, or emerge from, a completely deranged state. I asked friends, and one replied, “the first thing that

The End of the World Feels Like Nothing Billy Chew Share article A Brief, Inevitable Exchange by Billy Chew Zack listens to his playlist Apocalypse Daze. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” comes up on shuffle as he arrives to Mason and Sandro’s cookout. Whether the song is a good omen or a bad omen, or

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Greater Ghost by Christian Collier which will be published by Four Way Books on September 15, 2024. “Wholly. / The way a famished fire washes over a building’s flesh & marrow,” Christian J. Collier writes of the consuming revelations of death and love. In his debut poetry

I have spent nearly all my adult life living in foreign countries. That includes working, dating, marrying, and now—parenting abroad. Aside from the potential challenges of language and geography, what it means for a woman to be in a foreign land is to understand and navigate the joys and threats of womanhood particular to another

K-Ming Chang keeps redefining what we consider “reality.” Her latest three books—which she views as a “mythic triptych” (Bestiary, Gods of Want, and Organ Meats)—all inhabit surreal worlds where temporalities, species, and folkloric myths collide. In Bestiary, a Taiwanese American daughter wakes up with a tiger tail and finds herself swept into folktales and family

If you give birth to a baby during a global pandemic and that baby is born with a birth defect that requires neurosurgery, the splitting open of a tiny, hairless head at ten weeks old; if you are reminded of this daily by the giant, astronaut-like helmet he must wear afterward, barely supported by his

The poet’s journey from writing verse to lyric essays to memoir is now a veritable pipeline, with more and more poets turning away from lines and stanzas to incorporate poetic techniques into prose. Poetry can often be rooted in memory already, using imagery and figurative language to explore the history of the self—or a “speaker”

“It begins like this” by Ala Fox The year I turn twelve, Mom and I talk a lot about death. Ever since my older sister, Shira, learned about the concept of infinity in school, she’s been scaring me with ideas about the universe and what happens when you die. I get terrified thinking about it,

The rise in productivity culture over the past ten years has resulted in success being defined by individual efficiency and labor. We’ve turned people into robots, optimized to the very last second. We’re more than our jobs and our value shouldn’t be tied to our contribution to the economy or the hours we’ve spent at

Will the Real Mary Please Stand Up? Androgynous Mary Self Portrait (in robe with masks attached), Claude Cahun, 1928 I’m seeing it now, my ghost, and telling it to behave as if it were me, which leaves me to wonder what it will do.I walk, it walks; I sit, it sits. The chair is covered

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s smartly interior debut novel But the Girl appears to follow the path of a bildungsroman. Our protagonist, simply named Girl, is on a flight out of Australia for an artist’s residency in the lush Scottish countryside. She is leaving behind her tight-knit Malaysian family and her PhD dissertation on Sylvia Plath,

As we move out of winter and into spring, the days are becoming longer, but a chill still lingers in the air. In this reading list, monsters are made real, queer love blooms in spite of oppression, and friendships are both nourished and torn apart. Spanning Cameroon to Scotland, these indie authors reinvent the coming