Literature

There’s an old Talmudic injunction: “Your friend has a friend, and your friend’s friend has a friend; be discreet.” Living through a primitive age, when gossip was limited by oral transmission, the rabbinical sages feared loose talk—unkind words about neighbors, confessions of forbidden desire. Had those sages laid down one night and dreamed up modern

Take Me to the Island of Escaped Parrots Island of Escaped Parrots When I was a girl I had a plethora of aunts – too many even to keep track of. I thought of them as one person, moving en masse toward the dreaded cheek pinch or a stern yet loving scolding, a cloud of

When people think about Colombia, there’s one thing that comes to mind: The memory of the dark, violent past starring Pablo Escobar and drug cartels. Talking to Colombians, it doesn’t take long until they tell you how exhausted they are by this memory, and how they wish people would know more about the country and

I learned about suicide in real time, like discovering the existence of airtravel by spotting a jet arcing across the sky. The thirteen-year-old was dead, but how? In her own bedroom, covered in pink and posters? You said she did it by herself? On purpose? I was a few grades below her, and barely capable

As a young child, I’d wake in my bed, certain I was somewhere I didn’t belong, crying desperately to go home. And so, my relationship with the uncanny began. In Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” the basic definition of the term is, in-of-itself, a contradiction. For the uncanny, Freud uses the word unheimlich, from

A Billionaire Bender to Save the Fucking World Ryan Chapman Ryan Chapman is a Sri Lankan-American writer originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work has appeared online at The New Yorker, GQ, McSweeney’s, BookForum, BOMB, Guernica, and The Believer. A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and the Millay Colony for the Arts, he lives

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the poetry collection Ominous Music Intensifying by Alexandra Teague, which will be published by Persea Books on October 1, 2024. Preorder the book here. In poems that swirl together traditional American patriotic music with current horrors—from gun violence to climate change—and in which Yeats’ famous apocalyptic figure of the

Alvina Chamberland’s debut novel, Love the World or Get Killed Trying, is an explosive work of autofiction that combines playful and poetic prose, zingy social commentary, and razor-sharp gallows humor. The novel is structured as a stream-of-consciousness travelogue where we journey around Europe with the novel’s protagonist, an opinionated trans woman coming up to her

Is an identity crisis just par for the course as human beings? Does it happen to everybody? I wondered this to myself as a friend told me that her brother-in-law had decided, in his late thirties, to hit the pause button on his life. He was going to Bali for two months, she said, to

Before Geraldine DeRuiter first went viral in 2018 for her essay, “I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter,” she felt well-known food publications never wanted her work. And then, she made the cinnamon rolls. From that moment on, DeRuiter was thrust into the culinary spotlight. She won a James

“Erotic Bodywork” by Mark Bessen Standing in line at the H-E-B checkout, I’m mindlessly deleting emails when a photo of a naked, pornographically hot beefcake stretched out on a massage table illuminates my screen. I recoil and quickly pull the front of my jacket around the phone, worried I’ll scandalize a wayward shopper, or worse,

Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel Headshot takes place in the confines of a boxing ring in Reno, Nevada, over two days of championship matches to determine the winner of the 12th Annual Women’s 18 & Under Daughters of America Cup. Her protagonists, eight teenage girls, fight each other in a series of face-offs for the title

This Is Not a Drill or Maybe It Is You Take a Covid Test Then Take a Picture of your covid test then take two subways to work. You turn your time card, take your mask off to drink tea. You take attendance and teach The Poet X. You teach The Joy Luck Club. You

I was excited when I RSVP’d. It would be a lovely way to end the tour, I thought, maybe even comforting— a balm for the months of nightly performances, all the new faces. I secretly love weddings despite the bitter hopelessness loudly knocking on the door to my temperamental heart. I get to dress up,

I feel the thing people love the most about witnessing messy moments is the ability to look someone in the eye and see the humanity behind them. It’s the recognition; When someone screws up, it can sometimes make us feel like we don’t have to be so perfect either; that our humanness goes beyond social

The process of writing, when it’s going well, feels like psychic channeling. You start typing and who knows what’s going to pour out or where it’s coming from? I’ve always felt a little psychic, a little witch— writing things that end up coming true, sensing the truth of a situation before I consciously understand it.

My Worst Experiences Haunt Me From the Memory Cloud Gina Chung Share article Presence by Gina Chung After Leo left, I had trouble keeping track of myself. I had just moved into a new apartment, and I felt like I was existing in an endless twilight. I would drift off for a nap in the

In the Biblical parable of the prodigal son, a son asks his father for an early inheritance, leaves home, and quickly spends it all on “riotous living.” Destitute, the son resolves to return home, where he figures he might beg his father for a job. Instead, much to his surprise, the prodigal son is met