Literature

Bodies, Lakes, and Other Uninhabitable Places by AJ Romriell Teetering on the edge, I slip from my shoes and take a seat on the sand, surprised at how comfortable it feels. The Great Salt Lake shoreline is behind me, rocky and jagged. This sand is soft, a startling contrast as I wiggle my feet and

For the 15,000 people who visit our site every day (3.5 million per year), reading Electric Lit costs nothing. For the 1,500 writers who submitted their work to us this year, submission also costs nothing.  And yet Electric Lit is not free.  If you read Electric Literature, you already know what we are about: supporting

Florida is one the most diverse and fastest growing states in the United States. It is also, tragically, the epicenter of book banning in America. Thousands of books have been banned from public schools and libraries in an attempt to silence dissenting voices that explore the experiences of diverse, marginalized, and underrepresented communities. To be

Hinge The post Who Needs a Date When I’ve Got a Microwave appeared first on Electric Literature. Read the original article here

The post “Elevator in Saigon” Disguises Itself As a Detective Novel To Tell the Story of a Rapidly Changing Country appeared first on Electric Literature. Read the original article here

Have you ever read a story about women that was so horrible and so fantastic it made you cringe? Did you cringe because the story depicted a latent female horror, something that could emerge from the seams of our present moment, yet is packaged as fabrication?  You may have been reading a work of speculative

If you’ve read only one book about the Spanish Civil War, chances are it’s either Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls or George Orwell’s memoir Homage to Catalonia. And if you’ve read only two, as to what they might be, I’d confidently push all my chips into the center of the table.  Many

The Mystery of the Haunted Boarding School Bathroom Yáng Shuāng-zǐ Share article Tang-Kue-Tê / Winter Melon Tea by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King “Lí-ya!” A slur for Islanders, used by Mainlanders. Half a year into my time on the Island, Chi-chan and I found ourselves trailing behind F-sensei, a woman teacher and dormitory supervisor

Chill Subs is a lot of things: an intriguing name, a hip alternative to Submittable, and, most of all, a long-awaited disruptor in the literary publishing space. In the guise of a common-sense submission tool for the literary writer (overworked, aspiring, successful, confused, you name it, everyone’s welcome!) the company is quietly upending the way

“All academia is dark academia.” I said it without thinking, a knee-jerk reaction to a literary label that had been assigned to me but always felt ill-fitting. Until that moment—discussing my first novel, If We Were Villains, with the Folger Shakespeare Library book club—I hadn’t really understood why. It was the “dark” modifier I disliked.

Heather McCalden’s genre-defying fragmentary memoir, The Observable Universe, begins with “this book is an album of grief. Every fragment is like a track on a record, a picture in a yearbook; they build on top of one another until, at the end, they form an experience.” And what an experience it is.   When McCalden was a child,

Waiting for War in Lebanon by Vera Kachouh I put my body into the sea in Lebanon only once. Its warm, salty water extended a liquid embrace, beckoning me like a lover I could never have. From the shore came my aunt’s laughter, rolling in at odd intervals on the back of the wind. I

Cozy fantasy is a fairly new term, and its definition is still being hammered out by the reading public. In my opinion, we should embrace the subjectivity of the term. “Cozy” is about how a book makes you feel. Since we all have different perspectives and life experiences, we may feel different things in response

One Day the Rice Cooker Won’t Live on the Floor Things I Say to My Partner We will live, one day,in a place with hinged doors.The chairs will not whineand the art will not be greetingcards. Our basil will all be alive.On cold days, because we will stillhave cold days, we will gatherthree dogs around

Fang Si Chi’s First Love Paradise is a seminal novel that helped kick off the #MeToo movement in Taiwan and has sold millions of copies worldwide. But only two months after the novel’s publication, the author Li Yi-Han passed away due to suicide. Shortly after, her suspected abuser was also acquitted of charges. Despite the

For Puerto Rican protest poets, one of the most important ways to appreciate and show love for Puerto Rico has been to write poems that underscore pride in their Puerto Rican cultural identity and heritage and denounce Puerto Rico’s status as a U.S. colony. As they explore Puerto Rican empowerment and expose how Puerto Rico

It’s no coincidence that there are horses on the walls of caves in Lascaux, atop St. Mark’s in Venice, under the derriere of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, and alongside the Terracotta Army in China. Since they were first domesticated more than three thousand years ago, horses have been our transport, farming equipment, war machines, source

Her Corpse Is a Wild Animal Djuna Barnes Share article No Man’s Mare by Djuna Barnes Pauvla Agrippa had died that afternoon at three; now she lay with quiet hands crossed a little below her fine breast with its transparent skin showing the veins as filmy as old lace, purple veins that were now only