Literature

I met Bella Swan in the middle of 2008, when the anticipatory Twilight movie poster circulated at my school. I took her home and hung her on my wall, blacks and grays covering the coral paint near my headboard. She gripped the folds of Edward Cullen’s dark denim jacket. They both looked like teens, but

The Many and Various Uses for Mayonnaise The Many and Various Uses for Mayonnaise One little pale fresh tennis ball of rain bounces across my forehead. Fifteen-love. I have very bad posture. An only somewhat inquiring mind. But they tickle me the many and various uses for mayonnaise considering there is only one use for

Justin Torres’ much-awaited follow-up to We The Animals, Blackouts is a meandering conversation between an unnamed young queer narrator and Juan, an older man on the verge of death in a decrepit palace in the desert. At its center lies a book of sexology from the 1930s, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns. The

I don’t remember exactly when I first heard it but it was in high school sometime in the early nineties. I was listening to the radio after school but before my parents returned home from work. Rock music was the sound of my teenage rebellion. It was forbidden in our house so I had one

Author Elissa Bassist is obsessed with the patriarchy. She once texted me, “BENNY needs to go pee, and I need to go tell him he’s a GOOD BOY for PEEING, which is TYPICAL PATRIARCHAL BULLSHIT.”  Reader, Benny is a dog. To read Elissa Bassist is to be in awe of Elissa Bassist. A self-proclaimed “aspiring

Betrayed by the City That Raised Me Annesha Mitha Share article The Waiting Room by Annesha Mitha I sweat through my blouse in a police station in Kolkata, not far from the house where I grew up. Kolkata is an unkind city in July. The officers look at me like a foreign object. I want

Most of my really potent reading memories have less to do with exact books or passages, and more to do with the city I was living in, the people I was surrounded by, and the things happening on the fringes of my life as I read. It’s for this reason, in part, that I tend

On March 11, 2022, Molly McGhee shared a resignation letter on Twitter. She was quitting her job as an assistant editor at Tor, despite the fact that her first acquisition, The Atlas Six, had debuted at number three on the New York Times Bestseller List. She cited “systemwide prejudice against junior employees, rooted in the

Mona Simpson’s latest novel, Commitment, is a tour de force that takes place in the early 1970s and follows three siblings—Walter, Lina, and Donnie—as they grow up in Los Angeles, into adulthood, and discover themselves while deciding whether to live an artist’s life, or a stable one. Each character uniquely confronts this question after their

In “A Hundred Years Ago,” the eighth episode of the second season of Max’s Sex and the City spin-off, new addition to the group Seema—played expertly by Sarita Choudhury—tells Carrie what many of us are afraid to utter aloud, lest we make the fear real: there probably isn’t a great love out in the world,

Literally Squeezed Out of the Market Skinny House The houses are getting skinnier. By the time Ant can afford to buy one, there is only enough room to stand. His elbows bump up against the walls. His nose hits the front door. He goes outside whenever he has to take a deep breath. He spends

Before August 2017, most people were more familiar with my home of the past 30-plus years, Charlottesville, Virginia, for its postcard appeal: Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the University of Virginia, his “academical village”; charming neo-classical cityscapes; undulating foothills rolling into blue-tinged mountain horizons; and a burgeoning multitude of scenic vineyards, microbreweries, and artisan distilleries, plus

When you hear the phrase “queer history,” how far back does your mind go? For many, there’s a sense that LGBTQIA+ history is fairly recent, starting with Marsha P. Johnson or maybe Oscar Wilde. Beyond that, we start to get into murky territory: stories of “lifelong bachelors” and “happy spinsters” and “historically very good friends.”

If you live in New York, you may have spotted The Nonbinarian Book Bike. It’s hard to miss—a bicycle carrying a big, bright pink box full of free LGBTQIA+ books for all ages and languages directly to the community. The initiative was founded by K. Kerimian, and is new on the scene; it’s only been

Electric Literature is thrilled to reveal the cover for acclaimed writer Claire Messud’s new novel, This Strange Eventful History, which will be published by W. W. Norton & Company in May 2024. Spanning seventy years, Claire Messud’s forthcoming novel, This Strange Eventful History, tells an intimate yet expansive story inspired by the author’s own family

How to Audit a Capitalist Nightmare Molly McGhee Share article An excerpt from Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee Abernathy arrives at the office late by three minutes. A harried woman leads him through the cold foyer, down a set of carpeted stairs, into a small basement recently refurbished. The woman deposits him next to

My introduction to romance novels came when my high school crush handed me a book written by his mother’s friend under a pen name. It was all very hush hush, no one knew what the author’s real identity was, but he trusted me with this big secret (which might have been the first grand romantic

Athena Dixon’s The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays opens on New Year’s Eve of 2021, with Dixon alone in her apartment in Philadelphia, thinking about death during a year fraught with pandemic fear. The first pieces explore her fascination with women who died on their own and, because they had no family or friends