Literature

Growing up, I often thought of my mother as a collector of people. She collected people the way other people collect things. So it was never just us five—my parents and their three girls. Instead, people appeared, staying for various periods and disappearing: the live-in helpers; teens and young women my mother helped through some

The first page of Hisham Matar’s latest novel is so emotionally perplexing, so masterfully crafted that I promptly screenshot and sent it to several reader friends. My Friends begins with the end. Two old friends are parting ways, and we are left wondering about the weight on their chests, all the unsaid. Khaled, the narrator,

Around 15 years ago my friend Erik interrupted me while I was talking about my workday to say, “Stop being boring.” He was always a bit brash and maybe my feelings were a little hurt, but it became lore, a story I told about him. With time and distance, I can see that he was

Her Baby Is a Stranger She Doesn’t Want to Know Mario Giannone Share article The Box Where Baby Slept by Mario Giannone Mirna caught Piss Pants hanging around her car when she returned from the superstore. His pants were soaked as usual, but it was hard to tell if the stains were old or from

In January 2020, Bookshop.org was created as an online retail alternative to Amazon. Since then, the platform has raised more than $29 million for local bookstores. The books we feature on the site link directly to Bookshop, with 10% of the profit from each sale going to support our mission as a literary nonprofit.  In

Every five weeks or so, I look over at her and whine, “I think I wanna go on T.” Usually, we’re in the car; I’m driving. Sometimes we’re walking out of the grocery store. Occasionally she finds me in the bathroom, stuck in front of the sink, squinting at my chin. A year ago, this

In the U.S., immigrant and citizen migrant farm laborers work behind the scenes every day to ensure the planting, harvest, and shipment of the food and other agricultural products we rely on. Their work is an essential part of our daily lives—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—but their voices don’t usually get a seat at our tables. 

Be a Woman, Be Yourself, Be Miserable B Back at his place, he showed me pictures of his ex-girlfriend, and I talked to him about Lars. Back home, I just lay in my room alone and masturbated, content with my mediocrity. Bad metaphor, humans as machines. Bah. Bakery in Berlin. Basically it’s a crazy year,

Kiley Reid’s sophomore novel, Come and Get It, centers around the fictional Belgrade dormitory at the University of Arkansas. Millie comes back to be a resident’s advisor for a group of transfer and scholarship students, including the problematic suite of Tyler, Peyton, and Kennedy. Kennedy, who transferred from Iowa after a traumatic incident, seeks the

“The Great Blue” by Kim Drew Wright I’m gliding on my back atop a paddleboard, up the silent creek that swindles away from the Chesapeake Bay, becoming smaller, muddier, filled with creatures I can’t see but hear rustling in the marsh grass, slinking into the water with trepidatious splunks. Herons fly overhead, their great necks

When I heard Venita Blackburn had a novel coming out, my desire to read it was palpable, a hunger. Her work is distinctive—it’s sharp, smart, and imaginative, often pushing voice and form—and her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is no exception.  The novel follows Coral, a lonely author of a dystopian novel who

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

“When you are in the throes of illness,” Jacqueline Alnes writes in her debut The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour, “there is something comforting about distilling the world into dichotomies: sick or well, bad or good, off-limits or completely nutritious. When so much seems unknowable about the very body you live

After my father died, my older sister and I stayed with my mother for a while. I couldn’t stop thinking of Grey Gardens, minus the fabulous headscarves; Big and Little Edie Beale kept winding their way through my head. It was a cruel comparison—as a trio of single women, I could have easily renamed us

Winter in the northeast follows a predictable pattern. The season is rushed in the beginning, with snow-frosted holiday advertising out in full force before we even need to grab for the pair of gloves stuck in our coat pockets. Then, by February, the shine of the new year has worn off, and the novelty of

Not All of His Problems Are a Performance Kaveh Akbar Share article An excerpt from Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar Cyrus ShamsKeady University, 2015 Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the short story collection “The Goodbye Process” by Mary Jones, which will be published by Zibby Books on July 30th, 2024. Preorder the book here. In this stunning debut short story collection, Mary Jones uses her distinctive voice to examine the painful and occasionally surreal ways we say goodbye. The stories—which