Literature

Jessie Ren Marshall lives on an off-the-grid farm on Hawai’i Island. Women! In! Peril!, her irreverent stories are, as the title suggests, about women of various guises facing messy, precarious situations. This partial list of protagonists is a good indicator of Marshall’s amplitude: an Asian sex robot trying to outlast her return policy, a lesbian

Installing Ourselves in the Memory Museum The Museum Was Built So No One Would Forget . . . us, pottery fragments once dusted in warm sand—jagged, mismatched—today, preserved in glass. it began to rain while we walked from the bar, so we came here, listening to artifacts speak about their hieroglyphs, even after we learned

Animals are all around us; as I write this, stinkbugs are crawling on my office window, squirrels are busy in the white pines and poplar trees, and (though I can’t see them) deer and bobcats are roaming not far away. Culture usually trains us to draw sharp lines between ourselves and all other species. We

We have a winner! There were many strong contenders, but there was one book that cleared every round with a trail of broken hearts and rose to the top on a tidal wave of tears. But before we reveal the winner, here is some behind-the-scenes commentary on the competition: While we’re really impressed with how

A few years ago, I found myself getting into short books.  Works of fiction mostly, very short story collections.  I was quite literally attracted to their shortness—the slim spines a definite selling point.  At first I worried that my attention span was shrinking.   That soon—perhaps very soon—I wouldn’t read anything at all.  But no: I

Is This Dissertation Research or a First Date? Lily Meyer Share article An excerpt from Short War by Lily Meyer Buenos Aires, Argentina, February 2015 Nina Lazris met her husband in the week between arriving in Buenos Aires and discovering the book that punched holes in her personal history. Besides that, she did little of

Growing up with a pair of hearing aids, it never occurred to me that deafness was an experience. Mostly it was a problem that I was taught to hide. When I started meeting other deaf people my own age, and learning British Sign Language, I began to see deafness from a new perspective. Books, when

“When you say ‘departure,’ what does that mean?” Marie-Helene Bertino asks me.  This question launches our conversation about her new novel, Beautyland. Given that the story opens with spaceship Voyager 1 leaving planet earth, it makes sense that the author is attentive to the semantics of “departure.” I’d used the word as I referenced Bertino’s

“Impediments to unity are so common and copious,” write Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, “they appear as an ordinary, even intractable, aspect of life.” But for the authors of the new book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, division is not some spontaneous or natural thing. Rather, it requires the strategic

We’re thrilled to announce that Electric Literature is opening for submissions across all categories on Monday, April 1st. This includes our acclaimed literary magazines, Recommended Reading, and The Commuter, as well as the daily site. Below we’ve posted our handy flow chart to help you find the best fit for your writing. Get your submissions

The Bible and fairytales are the oldest stories we have in the West. They serve as our culture’s myths, providing a familiar, guided path for centuries of writers.  Retellings can breathe a new life into what was once flat and staid. Characters from the Bible and fairytales can feel one-dimensional. With retellings, the writer has

Short stories can do things novels cannot because they’re short. They’re limber and can dart in and out of close-fitting places. They can be weird and daring in ways that novels cannot always sustain. Joy Williams writes in, “8 Essential Attributes of the Short Story (and one way it differs from a novel), “A novel

“AM I A LESBIAN?” by Rachael Marie Walker Well, well, well. Look at you, @teen-w00lf, back again. You’ve taken this quiz sixteen times. How many times can quiz creator @leavebritneyalone696969 tell you what you are? What are you so afraid of?  It’s up to you if you want to continue. Remember: These quizzes are just

I was balancing a plate of honeydew in the green room of a book festival when I walked by a white man bemoaning the state of the publishing industry. The man wore a suit, and he spoke to a white woman; both of them looked to be in their 40s. As the man speared a

Your Body Is a System of Caves Naufragios Does anything really begin. The house, clinking window frame in the last of canyon wind. Does anything begin. * The day a room becomes a field. The day a field fills with water. The day you fall through yourself— this is how you say it— and how

The biting cultural commentary that emanates from the pages of Alexandra Tanner’s debut novel Worry is like the too-bright light of a smartphone screen at night, pulling you closer and keeping you absorbed late into the night. One year following a secret suicide attempt that only Jules, our narrator, knows about, her sister Poppy moves

Putting the words “fun” and “murder” next to each other in a conversation is a great way to give off the impression that you are gleefully maladjusted. But I’d wager if you tried it (the conversation starter, not the murder)—go ahead, show up at a party and say, “Isn’t murder fun?”—people would know just what

All thrill seekers are different. Some need to bungee jump or chase tornadoes to experience a rush of adrenaline but for me, there is nothing more exciting than opening a book and meeting a brand-new fictional character for the very first time. And the best characters are the ones who make me feel…something. Because they’re