Literature

A woman turns into a forest. So begins Maru Ayase’s novel, The Forest Brims Over, translated into English by Haydn Trowell. Rui Nowatari is an (in)famous muse for her husband’s romance novels; one day, she swallows a handful of seeds and germinates. What follows is a layered exploration of what it means to create, and

Vacation Is No Escape From Her Sorry Husband Louise Kennedy Share article Beyond Carthage by Louise Kennedy It had begun at dawn as they got off the plane, sparse plashes on the runway. By the time the coach deposited them at the Marhaba Aparthotel it was a slanted, dancing deluge. For three days they had

A great heist story features criminals we love to hate. While we disagree with their actions, a team of thieves is bound to bring drama and keep the pages turning. This genre has been immortalized in classic films like the Ocean’s 11 series, but there is a bevy of fantastic novels that push the boundaries

Jiordan Castle’s memoir-in-verse Disappearing Act follows the teen-version of herself as she lives through the arrest, court proceedings, and subsequent incarceration of her father while navigating the fraught years of the transition from girlhood to adolescence. Through mostly narrative poems‚ Castle invites us into her world as it’s changing faster than her mind can keep

“It was an uncertain spring,” begins The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez, which takes place during the peak of the Covid lockdown in New York. As the pandemic rages, a group is haphazardly forced to shelter in one Manhattan apartment together: a parrot without its owners, a young man estranged from his parents, and the narrator,

An enduring battle between book lovers is that of hardcovers versus paperbacks. Ultimately, your preference might come down to many factors. Hardcover fans insist on the book’s durability and quality and being among the first to purchase a long-awaited release, while paperback lovers advocate for the cheaper price and lightweight design. But in addition to

If you are a person on social media, then my guess is you have at least one person you hate-follow—you know the type, the person you simultaneously envy and eye roll at every post. They are dating the person you want to date or wearing the clothes you want to wear or working the job

This American Dream Tastes Like Government Cheese Dear Irreverence, We were raised on food stamps that looked like British pounds and dead-end jobs where bodies slung over crates and cans and cam shafts or pouches with pennies and coupons and a giant magnet sign wearing the paint off the car was just another insult. This

Since the early aughts, the cultural phenomenon known as the Korean Wave has expanded from a tiny homegrown ripple to a global tsunami of trends and merchandise encompassing pop music, gaming, cosmetics, cuisine, film and TV, and literature. K-pop bands now top the music charts, kimchi and gochujang are sold in most supermarkets, and Gen-Z

On March 20th, 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released. Just a few days after the majority of the world shut down, marking the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people fell into a virtual world in which sickness was not rampant and you could pay back the construction costs on your home at

Farah Ali’s debut novel The River, The Town is a haunting portrait of lives relegated to the margins by capitalism and its resulting byproduct: the inequitable distribution of resources. The world of the novel centers two places, the Town and the City, and the narrative focus, in typical Farah-Ali-fashion, is on people. Farah tells me

Performing on Stage for an Audience of One Sarah Blakley-Cartwright Share article An excerpt from Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright Check out the audiobook edition of this excerpt, read by award-winning actress Chloë Sevigny, from Simon & Schuster Audio. AliceFRIDAY Opening night and, as soon as they could get Leontes’s detachable sleeves Velcroed on—the

These 10 books take the imaginability of other minds as their explicit subject. Their writers are curious about nonhuman consciousness: could language reproduce that as well? In order to imaginewhat animals, plants, or objects might be thinking, these writers try to think those thoughts themselves. They wonder: what is it like to be an elephant,

I’ve seen Salar Abdoh only a handful of times. The most noteworthy is in May 2017 when, hearing that I’d be spending vote day in the southernmost areas of Tehran interviewing working class Tehranis about their choice for president, he offered to give me a ride through some of those neighborhoods. Abdoh, whom I had

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

If we label a work as bilingual for using at least two languages, then how do we quantify a work as having more than one language? For example, would one call Megan Thee Stallion’s song “Hit My Phone” bilingual with these lyrics: “Party like a vato, shots of the blanco / Guaranteed to knock a

The National Book Awards took place on November 15th at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. A day before the biggest night in books, two sponsors—Book of the Month and Zibby Books—announced they were not attending because of “political speeches,” following rumors that the nominees were planning to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for Annell Lopez’s debut short story collection, I’ll Give You a Reason, which will be published by Feminist Press on April 9th, 2024. Lopez is the winner of the Louise Meriweather First Book Prize.  The Ironbound is a large, multi-ethnic immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, filled