Literature

From a young age, I’ve been a collector and trader of cards: Topps movie tie-ins, the Garbage Pail Kids, Yo! MTV Raps, TGIF Laffs, and Starline’s Hollywood Walk of Fame, among many others. There was a real boom in the ’80s and ’90s where it seemed every last tendril of the shared cultural experience—from American

With March Madness and the Super Bowl recently crowning champions and the Grammys and Oscars awarding music and movies, it’s finally time for the literary world to have its own big moment in the sun. And that can only mean one thing: It’s Pulitzer time! While there are many book awards that highlight some of

The most compelling horror novels are those that resent the very rules of their own genre. These books throw their elbows around and demand more space, pushing against the parameters, which quickly become elastic, until the novels defy easy categorization. To call them horror, then, is a disservice, but so would calling them “cross-genre.” They

“Mars the Father” by Eryn Sunnolia Now that Quinn was in front of me, on their knees, ass in the air, I realized spanking might be more complicated than I’d thought. Like, where was I even supposed to spank? All over? Upper cheeks, middle cheeks, lower cheeks? How fast? How hard? Was I supposed to

In Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s revised essay collection Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, we encounter a narrator who is compelled to serve as witness. These varied acts of witnessing are how she builds a vocabulary for herself as a daughter, teacher, friend, and writer. Artists are this narrator’s intimate companions—Prince, Richard Diebenkorn, Kiese Laymon, her father.

My Best Friend Keeps My Heart In Its Cage eager years i love you forever because / i saved you / i wanted your life / more than you did / and like spring / gave it back / when you wanted it / once more / we shared jeans / a notebook like a

There’s a video that made the rounds online a few years ago: in Chechnya, a mother films her son pulling a sheep free from the drainage ditch it wedged itself into. Three glorious seconds of freedom follow for the liberated sheep, at which point it leaps majestically and comically back into the drainage ditch, stuck

The film opens with a view of London’s skyline; doused in a deep blue evening sky. Lights of the city blink. The onset of night reveals a man standing behind a window, translucent, looking down. He is shirtless; his arms are crossed; his expression is still and pensive. As he comes into focus, a pale

I have always loved the versatility of the short story, how it can so easily take on the forms of other things. There are playlist short stories, recipe short stories, diary and epistolary-style short stories. There are flash fiction stories, short short stories, and long short stories that invite you to argue for them as

All Writing Is About Death Scott Cheshire Share article Death in Fiction by Scott Cheshire I saw Steven Baxter the day before he died. I was ten years old. It was 1983. He was in his middle twenties, and walked toward me on the block where my family lived. His home was not far from

Poets for generations have contended with the indeterminable, fluid relationship between the speaker and the self. We all know the dictum to write what you know, but I find more possibility and permission in Eudora Welty’s way: “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.” In my debut collection of poems, Theophanies, I explored matrilineage, motherhood, and

I suspect many writers spend hours and hours at their local library and, if they’re anything like me, they can often feel like they’re swallowed up in a grandiose, if not downright mythological reservoir of knowledge. I remember living in Los Angeles, going to the Los Angeles Public Library, sitting at long tables and reading

When Kristine S. Ervin was eight years old, her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was violently abducted from a shopping mall parking lot in Oklahoma and murdered. Though Ervin’s debut memoir, Rabbit Heart, does include an eventual resolution to the case in which Kyle Eckardt was convicted, the narrative is not categorizable as true crime, and

Horror has always been deeply personal to me. Our obsessions can often come to structure and shape our inner lives while at the same time rendering the most intimate parts of ourselves illegible to those who don’t share them, and my love of horror as a child was a kind of closet where I could

This spring has been a glorious and bountiful season for books. To find out which new and forthcoming releases we should be reading, we reached out to indie booksellers across America. Their recommendations cover a broad range of genres, countries, and subject matters. Whether it’s a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, a cyberpunk space thriller, a

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Homeseeking, the highly-anticipated debut novel by Karissa Chen, which will be published by Putnam on January 7th, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese

“Authenticity Games” by Laura M. Martin I discovered Connection Games in 2021, after moving out of the townhome I shared with a man I’d met in my MFA program. I left the relationship and the confines of the small conservative town I worked in (though I kept the job, academic work is hard to come

Often in illness narratives, the diagnosis marks a moment of triumph. There’s an a-ha moment and the main character rejoices, finally having a name for their symptoms. A medication or course of treatment available that might bring the patient to their former body. There is a sense of restoration, the turbulence of symptoms smoothed over