Literature

The year 2022 gave us #feralgirlsummer, which morphed into #bratgirlsummer in 2024 and then #messygirlsummer by 2025—all howls against the curated perfection of a hot girl summer. Chaos. Freedom. Truth with its crop top unbuttoned. Going beyond hashtags, these eras represent a refusal to be domesticated by societal expectations. Feral girlhood is a state of mind

His Girlfriend’s Love Is as Poisonous as a Mushroom Jess Gibson Share article “Wild Food” by Jess Gibson Sebastian saw Emily’s internet search history on the afternoon before the dinner party. When he’d checked his email on the desktop in their home study, the browser had been open. He always closed it himself, which cleared

I first encountered M Lin’s writing during our second year of graduate school in the MFA program at Brooklyn College. Her stories were, on my first reading, luminous and unpretentious, chronicling the often conflicting sexual, emotional, and political desires of women from China’s millennial One-Child Generation. Her debut collection, The Memory Museum, is a nostalgic

Avigayl Sharp’s Offseason is a deeply internal debut, charting the bounds of a violent, unpredictable world through its truth-seeking (and perpetually dishonest) narrator. The novel follows an unnamed woman during her year as an instructor at a remote all girls school, where she’s filling in for an older male teacher on leave for an unspecified

We are living in a moment when the presence of migrant workers is more visible than ever, yet their inner lives remain unevenly told. There are still not enough works of literary fiction centered on women as migrant workers—especially domestic workers. These stories do exist, but they are often older, or they appear only in

Reality TV has always prompted discourse. From its earliest days, critics have decried it as the downfall of civilization even as viewers tuned in in droves for the interpersonal drama, the competitions, and the bizarrely artificial setups. Decades into the genre’s formation, critics and fans still abound, and we’re still asking the ever-titillating question: How

Minor Meats by Billy Lezra The right one weighs 568 grams, the left one, 547, over two pounds off my chest. For five days, two tubes drain the incisions. Ruby, then amber, fluids pool into translucent bulbs pinned to my white compression vest. It’s Christmas.  I am the tree; the blood bulbs, ornaments.  Inside the

Being a student of Monica Ferrell’s was a singularly influential time in my life. Immediately upon meeting her, I wanted to be like her: to enter a room with the same serious allure, the same unassuming self-possession. And when I first read her poems—fierce, sophisticated, sensual in every sense of the word—I didn’t want to

The Delicious Hell of a New Jersey Sex Dungeon Dark Horse Portal for Deb Portal is a video gamewhere you wield a gun that shoots holes. One you go into, one you comeout of, each end delicately placed on the wall,facing one another in Escherian drama.In this portal, Mommy is a robot,and the robot puts

Eve J. Chung’s sophomore novel, The Young Will Remember, turns its gaze to a lesser-known corner of twentieth-century history—the Korean War and its aftershocks. At its center is Ellie, an American journalist whose plane crashes in enemy territory. She’s rescued by Emma, a North Korean woman searching for her daughter who was taken years earlier

Families, whether given or chosen, are chimeric creatures. They’re difficult to describe in full, laden with temperaments, textures, and histories. I can’t recall the last time I spoke to someone who described their family as anything other than dysfunctional.  Of course, perspective matters. The story of a family is dictated by whomever undertakes the task

I grew up with a surprising amount of family archives. Photographs, scrapbooks, and even my Japanese grandparents’ passports, once nestled in old fruit packing boxes in closets and basements, now occupy space in my own home. As a third-generation Japanese American, the fact that I have so many of my family members’ materials is both

A New Mother Hungry for the World on Her Plate Adrienne Celt Adrienne Celt is the author of three novels, including End of the World House (S&S 2022), Invitation to a Bonfire, and The Daughters, as well as a collection of comics, Apocalypse How? an Existential Bestiary. Share article “Oh No” by Adrienne Celt Longtime

Hasan Dudar’s debut collection, Carryout, follows a Palestinian-Lebanese family through their years in the shifting landscape of Toledo, Ohio. Dudar places the migrant experience at the heart of his book and offers a poignant examination of displacement and belonging in the Arab American community. When Ziad Idilbi, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, meets Salma, a

It feels good to type these next few words: The Pulitzer Prize announcement is nigh! On Monday, May 4th, at 3:00 p.m. EST, we’ll find out which book takes home one of the literary world’s most celebrated prizes. Live stream the announcement here! To be honest, it’s nice to be able to celebrate something. The

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of The Volcano Keeper by Bradley Sides, which will be published on October 20th, 2026 by Regal House Publishing. You can pre-order your copy here. When a volcano suddenly emerges in the middle of his family’s Alabama cattle pasture, young Charlie Melvin is confronted with a promise

Altered Remains by Aleina Grace Edwards For six weeks, every painting on the wall is brown. Pretty, stoic deer stand and stare with wide wet eyes; slick panthers stalk across the frames; and dawn breaks over some craggy mountain tops. Entire galaxies churn, the panels bursting with starfields that could be anywhere, in our corner

Montreal is a surging literary city with its own unique idiosyncrasies and marks of character. Compared with, say, Toronto, Montreal literature sits alongside a wider cultural scene arising from the bilingual locale with many universities, countless cultural festivals, and publishing hotspots, including the legendary indie darling Drawn & Quarterly, which specializes in graphic novels. All