Literature

When Ijeoma Oluo began writing Be A Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World— and How You Can Too, she was burnt out. Her first book, So You Want To Talk About Race?, delved into her personal encounters with and understanding of racism, while her subsequent work, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy

I’ve lived in Alabama my entire life, and if I’m being honest, I doubt I’ll ever leave. It’s my home—my beautiful, strange, complicated home.  My new speculative/magical realism short story collection, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, has a particular fascination with the American South. In my latest batch of stories, there is an enormous

Pregnancy Is Turning Her Childfree Marriage Into a Russian Folktale Katya Apekina Share article An excerpt from Mother Doll by Katya Apekina It was ironic that Zhenia and Ben would come home from spending time with people who had kids and be so giddy with relief and self-righteousness over their decision not to have any

From one girl’s aspiration to Olympic gymnastics glory, to a boy’s stint living in the Idaho wilderness in hopes of fixing his unruly behavior, something that remains a guiding principle in Black storytelling is the breadth of our lives. These stories, a collection of some of EL’s most-loved fiction by Black writers, all published in

Latin American literature—translated into English, authored by members of diasporic communities, unpacked by scholars, or written by next generation children of immigrants—has never experienced such widespread, mainstream popularity.* More easily than ever, readers can encounter writers and artists from so many Latin American countries, including Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Colombia, Argentina, El

Several months before my short story collection Sex Romp Gone Wrong was published, I started joking that my new book was already banned in Florida and Iowa. It wasn’t entirely a joke. Both states had recently passed legislation requiring any materials depicting sex to be removed from school libraries. The laws also said schools couldn’t

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the book Unsex Me Here by Aurora Mattia, which will be published by Coffee House Press on September 24, 2024. Preorder the book here. “These are stories about attempting to outrun time; about trying to remember transfemme pasts; about magic touching everything except the possibility of lasting love.” From

Hey, girl, it’s me. The book at the bottom of your “To Be Read” pile. I thought maybe tonight we could hang out. You can slip me out from under this stack, slide between my pages, and get to know me better.  We deserve some quality time, just you and me, away from the eight

“This Is How the Story Changes, This Is How the Body Remembers” by Raennah Lorne One day, when I tell my story, I will remember how my body led me to believe it. I will say I slept with you the second time we met, seeking a force strong enough to break the physical magnetism

A California Towhee bounced across the deck, its brown feathers tufted like a baby chick’s, proud and naive-looking all at once. I sat very still, fingers poised on my keyboard, silently watching, not wanting to spook it away. I knew its name—towhee—because I had recently become obsessed with birds, despite growing up in New York

We Deserve Applause for Normal Things One of Many Possible Configurations Born, 1968. Misunderstood everything, ‘72 to ‘86. Started pulling it together after that. Eventually I became the first in my family to lie in a field of clover and speak earnestly to cows. Then I fell in love and got married. When she asks

South Asian stories are often tales rich in culture and folklore, encapsulating the nuances and intricacies of a long, rich, and complex history. Historical details peppered in with social commentary is often a common thread in many South Asian stories, and this list is no different. We see the impacts of colonialism, social hierarchy, and

Translated literature is no longer the forgotten, othered cousin of the Anglo-American literary scene. At Electric Literature, we have long been enamored by international frontiers, the global writers who write in their native (or acquired) tongues, and the translators who coax each word into English.  This year’s crop of forthcoming translations is bountiful. To cease

My major takeaway when I saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a kid, with its documentary-style intercuts of cattle and the slaughterhouse, that brutal heat, the hick-grotesques: Texas was a scary place. That’s when I fell in love with horror—with any fiction, really—that elevates the world we live in from simple backdrop to an entity

Compulsively Trying to Please People Who Never Liked Me Jessi Jezewska Stevens Share article A New Book of Grotesques by Jessi Jezewska Stevens How had we turned out this way? My friend and I were plumbing disappointments over slices of cake. That was one of the best things about this country—people regularly ate Kuchen. It

Not very long ago, a description of our current moment would have read like a dystopian premise: a planet afflicted with deadly weather events, with rising oceans and global migration crises, with animal species rapidly going extinct, all while a rabid conservative movement flourishes worldwide, distorting facts and profiting off our downfall. Perhaps that is

In his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky coined the term “defamiliarization” as a goal of the artist. To “defamiliarize,” simply stated, means to make the familiar appear strange or new. In other words, art should help us “re-see” our ordinary, mundane surroundings in a different way. In Bradley Sides’ new story