Literature

How to Pray in Female Femininity as Wish-Fulfillment Sara teach me how to girl my fingers pale against your stomach your boyfriend’s bike jolts us toward al-anṣariyyah mountains in the distance house lights flicker like christmas you find an old roof you kiss a boy and i watch a stolen cousin a lesson brewing running

1998. Lido Cineplex. Cold air, soft seats, the smell of popcorn. My friend Alice and I are both 17 years old and this is the quietest we’ve ever been together. The audience too has been silent for the last ninety minutes. No whispers, no beeping pagers, no awkward laughter at inappropriate moments. The air is

Of all the lies contemporary society runs on, the fiction of the meritocracy may be the most insidious and inescapable. Even those cynical about its promises have no choice but to place their trust in its precepts. If you’re born with the odds stacked against you—whether because of your class, race, gender, or place of

In Saltburn, the backdrops are as mesmerizing and as essential to the plot as the delicate portrayal of the central relationship between Oliver and Felix. The settings are both tight and enclosed, the campus and the country house. These are my favorite settings for novels—discrete locations with groups defined by their relationship to the space: Benefactor,

His Drunk Excuses Only Last the Night Megan Nolan Share article An excerpt from Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan While Carmel was falling in love with Derek O’Toole, Richie was twenty-one and ready to begin his life. Somehow three years had passed since he had left school and to his surprise nobody had made

Every five weeks or so, I look over at her and whine, “I think I wanna go on T.” Usually, we’re in the car; I’m driving. Sometimes we’re walking out of the grocery store. Occasionally she finds me in the bathroom, stuck in front of the sink, squinting at my chin. A year ago, this

In the U.S., immigrant and citizen migrant farm laborers work behind the scenes every day to ensure the planting, harvest, and shipment of the food and other agricultural products we rely on. Their work is an essential part of our daily lives—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—but their voices don’t usually get a seat at our tables. 

Be a Woman, Be Yourself, Be Miserable B Back at his place, he showed me pictures of his ex-girlfriend, and I talked to him about Lars. Back home, I just lay in my room alone and masturbated, content with my mediocrity. Bad metaphor, humans as machines. Bah. Bakery in Berlin. Basically it’s a crazy year,

I was a reader in a family of runners. With pre-teen grumbles, I reluctantly participated in summer track leagues, always bringing up the rear, always slowing things down, until one day under the blazing Tennessee sun I got my legs moving and earned my first ribbon. My dad puffed me up saying, “You were so

Across her three books, Donna Hemans’ characters range from Jamaica to America and back again, often in the same story; the men and women who populate her novels, taking children with them or leaving them behind, are immigrants simply trying to make a better life. But there’s always a cost, and many make mistakes along

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the novel The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, which will be published by Riverhead on Sep 24, 2024. Preorder the book here. The newest masterwork from the Nobel Prize winner takes place in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probing the horrors that lie beneath our

Kiley Reid’s sophomore novel, Come and Get It, centers around the fictional Belgrade dormitory at the University of Arkansas. Millie comes back to be a resident’s advisor for a group of transfer and scholarship students, including the problematic suite of Tyler, Peyton, and Kennedy. Kennedy, who transferred from Iowa after a traumatic incident, seeks the

“The Great Blue” by Kim Drew Wright I’m gliding on my back atop a paddleboard, up the silent creek that swindles away from the Chesapeake Bay, becoming smaller, muddier, filled with creatures I can’t see but hear rustling in the marsh grass, slinking into the water with trepidatious splunks. Herons fly overhead, their great necks

Growing up, I often thought of my mother as a collector of people. She collected people the way other people collect things. So it was never just us five—my parents and their three girls. Instead, people appeared, staying for various periods and disappearing: the live-in helpers; teens and young women my mother helped through some

The first page of Hisham Matar’s latest novel is so emotionally perplexing, so masterfully crafted that I promptly screenshot and sent it to several reader friends. My Friends begins with the end. Two old friends are parting ways, and we are left wondering about the weight on their chests, all the unsaid. Khaled, the narrator,

Around 15 years ago my friend Erik interrupted me while I was talking about my workday to say, “Stop being boring.” He was always a bit brash and maybe my feelings were a little hurt, but it became lore, a story I told about him. With time and distance, I can see that he was

Her Baby Is a Stranger She Doesn’t Want to Know Mario Giannone Share article The Box Where Baby Slept by Mario Giannone Mirna caught Piss Pants hanging around her car when she returned from the superstore. His pants were soaked as usual, but it was hard to tell if the stains were old or from