Literature

When submitting to an agent or editor, you will need a query letter. The purpose of a query letter is to briefly introduce yourself and your work to the editor or agent, with the hope they’ll be intrigued enough to want to read more.  Here is a rather typical method I’ve used. Most query letters contain three

You Look Like a Skoo and You Smell Like One, Too Skoo Once upon a time, I had a terrible marriage. We couldn’t stop fighting. We fought all night. We fought so loudly the neighbors complained. We threw things and called each other “prick” and “cunt.” Of course it was a very lonely time. The

The new memoir in essays Sex With a Brain Injury from Annie Liontas, author of the novel Let Me Explain You, is a highly formally and thematically risky work of nonfiction exploring traumatic brain injury (TBI), queerness, addiction, mass incarceration, and chronic illness. Weaving “history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of

Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of

Solstice has come and gone, but in addition to the returning of the light, we can also herald another excellent small press publishing season. What I love about these titles is the richness of imagination and inquiry, leading to inventive plots in fiction and deep emotional honesty in non-fiction. There is such a striking contrast

Humans Are the Most Alien Creatures Marie-Helene Bertino Author of the novel Parakeet (FSG, June 2020) Share article An excerpt from Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino In the beginning there is Adina and her Earth mother. Adina (in utero), listening to the advancing yeses of her mother’s heart and her mother in the labor room, vitals plunging.

For those of us who love literary fiction, we have the written word and we have the narrated audiobook. But what about fiction that bridges the gap between?  As a writer, I’m often thinking about new ways to tell stories. I’m also a podcaster, so I include audio in my thoughts. And as I considered

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the poetry collection […] by Fady Joudah, which will be published by Milkweed Editions in March 2024. Preorder the book here. Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, […] speaks

Amy Jo Burns’ second novel, Mercury, is a heartfelt portrait of a working-class family set in an unsuspecting industrial town in Pennsylvania in the 1990s that follows the lives of the Josephs—Mick, Elise, Baylor, Waylon, and Shay—and the light in their darkness, Marley West. The novel opens with Marley, the wife every man wants, coaching

In the six years since I began writing the Unfinished Business column here at Electric Literature, I’ve explored the incomplete works of fifteen authors, but these have, until now, always been novels lost decades ago—some over a century gone. That gulf of time tends to soften the loss of the author themselves. While I might

How many stories does it take to get to know a place?  Lifelong residents may write confidently of their homeland, but among the travelogs and novels and poems and memoirs that give shape to a city, I’m partial to books written from the perspective of those still calibrating their relationship to a place. These include

In America, I Am Whole Wheat Bread My America Is Bagels My America is skin. Hide. The red hair periodically in my mustache. The sun’s inability to burn me past the color of bread, whole wheat. My America is Guatemala. El salvador. My America is Chile. My America is unsure whether to pronounce Chile like

I find the idea of starting something new thrilling. I have learned to embrace the fear that comes along with it. Every time I sit down to begin a project, I always think about those people who go to Coney Island on New Year’s Day—the members of the Polar Bear Club—for a swim. In the

A confession: I very nearly quit putting this list together.  Throughout the year I keep a running list, adding new names whenever I learn about an upcoming queer book—from Tweets, publicist pitches, endless NetGalley scrolls—and I usually start writing the blurbs for each book a few months before the list is due. Let me also

The FamilyMart on the corner of Yingchun Road and Changliu Road, right across from my middle school in Shanghai, was no larger than 25 square feet, but had all the necessities swarms of middle-schoolers needed to self-soothe after marathon test prep: fish balls on skewers bathing in a perpetually bubbling brown broth, mini Taiwanese sausages

Perfection Sketches Easily for the Young Eileen Chang Share article Young at the Time by Eileen Chang When Pan Ruliang was studying, he had a bad habit: the pencil in his hand would not stay still—right there in the margins of his book, it was always sketching a little person. He’d never studied drawing and

As the bombs continue to fall in Gaza and violence tears through the West Bank, the areas of historic Palestine that are occupied by Israel, it is easy to get lost in the complicated geopolitical histories, statistics, and competing media narratives. That is part of why journalist Nathan Thrall, whose earlier work with the International