Literature

Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 and writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation

Grandmother Knows All the Devil’s Pressure Points Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 and writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep

Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 and writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation

Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 and writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation

Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 and writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need you to contribute to keep it that way. Please make a donation

The Family Game I Never Wanted to Win Laird Barron Share article Donate to Keep Electric Literature Free! Electric Literature published over 500 and writers and nearly 600 articles in 2023—all of which are free for you to read. EL’s archives of thousands of essays, stories, poems, and reading lists are also free. We need

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the memoir Pretty by KB Brookins, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf on May 28, 2024. Preorder the book here. By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race. Even as it shines light on the

From classics like The Godfather and Jaws to modern marvels like The Notebook, Game of Thrones, and Crazy Rich Asians, many of history’s greatest films and TV shows began as novels. A well-written book provides the ultimate Hollywood source material, with complex characters and an engrossing plot that, when read, already plays like a movie

As a Palestinian in diaspora, nothing builds my connection to the land more than literature. It is not just the scenes detailed by our great poets that makes the ground feel realer under my feet, but the gravitational pull towards each other that gives me belief in that liberated homeland. In my work as a

I am a memoirist, a writer who juices the moments and characters in my life as a way to make sense of it all.  This proves challenging, however, when I consider that I have very few memories from before I turned twelve. There’s a deep blackness in that part of my hippocampus, where the brain

As an immigrant, I initially binged Norwegian literature to learn more of the language and the culture of my new home, but it soon felt more like an escapist pastime. Racism clouded most of my off-the-page interactions until I forged relationships with BIPOC Norwegians who empathized and shared their strategies. In my novella Sita in

I Turned My Lover Into a McRib The McDonald’s Boyfriend When I wake up, Kai has a hump jutting out of his back. Except, when I wipe the sleep from my face, I see the hump is a McDonald’s restaurant about the size of a backpack. He’s bent over in the snail position, naked except

The world within Nathan Hill’s newest novel Wellness reflects and refracts parts of our own: the firehose of Facebook posts veering toward conspiracy; the research studies that offer insight into the development of adolescents or how to sleep better or how to eat; belief in the power of manifestation; articles that beg us to click

The WGA had been on strike for months, with SAG-AFTRA joining the picket line fray just days earlier, when Bethenny Frankel, former star of Real Housewives of New York City, took to Instagram to say her piece: reality TV stars needed a union. It wasn’t fair that networks aired reruns of their shows for years

The short story is an entirely different pleasure than the novel. For writers, the form demands precision and intense scrutiny of craft choices. The short story is constrained by its brevity but remains limitless in the opportunities it presents to challenge notions of craft. The short story collection, then, is an art form in and

Brotherhood Is a Life Sentence Bill Cotter Share article Collision by Bill Cotter The two brothers met by chance near the ice machine in the hallway of the seventh floor of the Marriott Hotel on Liberty Avenue. Liberty, if followed north for eleven miles, led to a squat stone building, two hundred yards from the

My most transformative reading experiences have been ones in which I see the worst parts of myself in full display on the page. From the time I was a teenager, I’ve gravitated toward women characters and writers whose behaviors, addictions, and ailments were at odds with their “potential.” Esther in The Bell Jar, Edna St.

All wars have their own brutal logic, but only a few manage to make an entire country disappear. The former Yugoslavia was still a one-party socialist country under General Tito when I came to Macedonia from Australia in the 1980s to learn Balkan and Romany folk music. When I returned two decades later, this time