Literature

Perhaps no living Bangladeshi will ever forget the afternoon of August 5, 2024. How none of us had slept the previous night, our icons glowing like candles throughout a night vigil on social media. How morning crept in with the fear and determination of thousands of Bangladeshis striding from across the country toward the capital.

Excavating My Sexual History as a Party Trick Charlie Sorrenson Share article Circles, Triangles, Squares by Charlie Sorrenson At some point in the conversation we had migrated to the kitchen floor, arranging our bodies into a loose, humanoid square: me leaning against the island, Lisa against the stove, MJ against the sink, and Farouk’s former

“how lonely it can be / to be a certain type of character. singular purpose. looped dialogue,” writes Summer Farah in her poetry chapbook I could die today and live again, published by Game Over Books in 2024. The collection, which explores empire, intimacy, grief, and play amidst the backdrop of The Legend of Zelda,

Several months ago I was lucky enough to meet a Riverhead publicist at a mixer for Black folks who work in book publishing. We started chatting, and she mentioned that she was working on Danzy Senna’s soon to be released novel, Colored Television. I felt, in that moment, like a chasm in the earth had

Naomi Cohn’s memoir focuses on her progressive vision loss and her embrace of braille as an act of reclaiming her love of reading and writing, along with an expanded sensory and sensual existence in the world. Intertwined with this focus are themes braided and bountiful, including a history of Louis Braille and his writing and

If we’re lucky enough to reach old age, our lives will continue to surprise us—in ways that are as varied and utterly transformative as our youth. In speaking to friends and elders, I got to see the range of experiences that someone can have later in life, on their path to deeper self-discovery: uplifting, sad,

Electric Literature turned 15 years old and to commemorate, we put a birthday hat on our patron saint Edgar Allan Poe and threw ourselves the campiest party we could imagine. On October 18th, our community of readers, writers, and staff gathered for the Masquerade of the Neon Death at Littlefield in Brooklyn to dance, party,

Grief is perhaps the most universal experience we share. It transcends everything that categorizes us—culture, class, religion, gender, even species. Yet for something with such ubiquitous reach, it is an entirely individual process. There’s no road map for when and how those five key stages will manifest, or for the infinite secondary stages one encounters. 

An Excerpt from Women Surrounded by Water by Patricia Coral Marriage Addictions I I remember how you cried when I walked towards you and took your hand in my hand. After the wedding, we danced all night in Casa de España to our favorite songs, to our friends’ joy, to our love. My feet were

When asked in an interview about her relationship to her home state, Maine novelist Elizabeth Strout balked. “That’s like asking me what’s my relationship with my own body,” she said. “It’s just my DNA.” That’s how I feel too—that Maine, where I was born and lived until my mid-20s, is so central to my selfhood

When I tell my therapist I put the ‘bi’ in Bipolar she asks to see me twice a week Click to enlarge sales lady says stop romanticizing the struggle Click to enlarge The post I Told My Therapist I Put the Bi In Bipolar appeared first on Electric Literature. Read the original article here

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers, which will be published by BOA Editions on April 8, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual. These unforgettable love

When the ominous appears in fiction, it increases anticipation and deepens empathy. As readers watch a character struggle with a feeling of unease caused by people or events, it offers them the pleasure of intimacy. Like the character, they have, in their own lives, questioned if something that urges wariness is real or imagined. As the matter

Do you remember it? When you changed? Or, stranger still, when you were between one thing and another? I do. When my breasts started to show beneath my T-shirt—buds, they called them, but it never felt like a flowering. In the dictionary under buds, it explains: in certain limbless lizards and snakes a limb bud

Raising Sons In a Forest Full of Fascists Julian Zabalbeascoa Share article Adela by Julian Zabalbeascoa Añon de Moncayo, June 1938 David and Marco, my two youngest, walk into the forest and return with wounded animals, branches that resemble people, leaves in the perfect shape of a star, colorful rocks for which they invent fantastical

“You’re Desi and gay–what’s that like?” This question was asked sometimes with a touch of fascination, that someone born and raised in the subcontinent can also be queer, or, more often, with concern: what it means to be queer in a country where the current conservative regime denied marriage equality in 2023 and where the

Zara Chowdhary’s The Lucky Ones is a devastating, timely memoir about survival, reclamation and what it means to exist on the margins of society and within your own familial unit. Zara speaks to us, raw and unfiltered, about growing up as a young muslim girl in Ahmedabad, India, in the aftermath of a train being

Early in noam keim’s debut collection of lyrical nonfiction, The Land is Holy, they awake panicked from a dream where they are running away from disaster, carrying only what is in their pack. They realize they have been called to do ancestral work, to unearth their family’s lineages, even as they are now estranged and