Literature

Ask Your Doctor If Drinking Me Is Right for You Electric Literature must raise $35,000 to fund our next chapter. EL’s incoming Executive Director and Publisher, Denne Michele Norris, plans to grow EL’s reach and influence by every measure, while maintaining our sharp, independent spirit. We need your help to ensure our continued success. Donate

Electric Literature must raise $35,000 to fund our next chapter. EL’s incoming Executive Director and Publisher, Denne Michele Norris, plans to grow EL’s reach and influence by every measure, while maintaining our sharp, independent spirit. We need your help to ensure our continued success. Donate now to join us in building EL’s future. The social

Electric Literature must raise $35,000 to fund our next chapter. EL’s incoming Executive Director and Publisher, Denne Michele Norris, plans to grow EL’s reach and influence by every measure, while maintaining our sharp, independent spirit. We need your help to ensure our continued success. Donate now to join us in building EL’s future. Dear Reader,

How can we cope with despair? I grew up in Northern Ireland in the 80s, when continuous sectarian hatred and state-sponsored violence seemed inevitable. The world was falling apart, so we joked about it. At funerals. In school. How could we not? I read Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth—An Béal Bocht in Irish—and found my

Her Drama Is Tolerable When It’s Performed Onstage Beryl Bainbridge Share article An excerpt from An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge At first it had been Uncle Vernon’s ambition, not Stella’s. He thought he understood her; from the moment she could toddle he had watched her lurching towards the limelight. Stella herself had shown

For many writers right now, the hardest question isn’t how to respond to the world, but how to keep writing at all without losing the joy that made the work possible. The pressure to address crisis—to be timely, responsive, morally legible—has begun to attach itself not just to what artists make, but to how they

The drama of The Complex, Karan Mahajan’s new novel, is set off by a sexual assault. Gita, who has recently married into the esteemed Chopra family, travels back to Delhi from the United States to visit family and attend a wedding of one of her husband’s relatives. There, she runs into her husband’s uncle, Laxman,

Author AI Scams Bingo The post Author AI Scams Bingo appeared first on Electric Literature. Read the original article here

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Staying Still by Hieu Minh Nguyen, which will be published September 1, 2026 by Tin House/Zando. You can pre-order your copy here! The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Stegner and NEA Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still centers on the question of how:

Aftereffects by Kalpana Narayanan When I meet Arun’s parents for the first time that September, I bring flowers. On the drive down, he tells me not to worry: his parents will love me. I am an actual woman that he is dating. His mother will probably want to give me some of her jewelry, he

The book begins on a boat to an island: a woman running from the man who abused her as a child, a chance meeting with a stranger who promises to kill him—and then, days later, the murder. Whidbey’s opening pages offer spare information and a heightened sense of threat, evoking the everyday experience of people

Human Dignity Is Contraband in This Camp In January, the Pond Freezes I look at the cold floor. Tap my loafer on top. It holds.I slide to the middle and laugh. A horse made of fog runs out of my face.The ice is the kind you find in Antarctica. We walk back.Satoru and I take

In his essay entitled “Shipping Out,” David Foster Wallace writes about being subjected to 1,500 professional smiles in a single week. He confides that the greatest lie the luxury cruise industry tells is “that enough pleasure and enough pampering will quiet [the] discontented part of you . . . when in fact, all it does

One could argue that Gregory Maguire’s novel, Wicked, and its Broadway adaptation are entirely different stories. Alongside the stage musical’s revision of key character personalities, relationships, and even fates, it also softens the novel’s highly adult themes for a more diverse audience. But what binds the two together is an understanding that Wicked is more

For the late winter (practically spring) edition of our debut craft series, I spoke with three authors who, each in their own way, wrote about refraction and distorted reflections of self in their first novels. The novels feature complicated introspective characters and compelling relationships ranging from a late mother and her twenty-two-year-old almost-graduate daughter in

This Cocky Stranger Is Offering to Kill for Me T Kira Māhealani Madden Share article An excerpt from Whidbey by T Kira Māhealani Madden I didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when I chose it, only that it was far. Only that it would take a great deal of work to get there, and more

Melissa Faliveno’s debut, Hemlock, is a queer, atmospheric novel about addiction, memory, and the ways family history embeds itself in the body. The book follows Sam, a woman in her late thirties who leaves her life in Brooklyn to spend time alone at her family’s remote cabin in the Wisconsin Northwoods. The trip is meant

An elegy, D. A. Powell writes in an essay titled “Structures of the Elegy,” is a “paradise of remembering.” Twelve years after my mother passed, as I began work on my book, Fifty Mothers, I kept asking myself, how could I converse with her through poems? How could I remember her, not just to mourn,