Literature

Electric Literature is excited to welcome Deesha Philyaw, acclaimed author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, to its board of directors. Much of Philyaw’s fiction centers Black women, sex, and the Black church. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Philyaw’s debut short story collection, was published to immediate critical acclaim, and went on to

Since Roe v Wade was repealed in the summer of 2022, those of us who believe in bodily autonomy have been reeling from the cascade of increasingly bad news about reproductive justice in America, as the rights of people who bear children are picked off state by state.   We are fighting—and we need help, not

How to Dispose of a Toxic Father-in-Law Pushed Buttons Liz put her father-in-law in the lift, pushed the button, and watched as he was taken away. Liz, not thinking, carried her father-in-law down the stairs, through the hall, into the living room, where the lift was waiting, placed him inside, pushed the button, and watched

I enjoy fiction that has a vaguely menacing atmosphere. Narratives with the threat of death looming over the characters, and they either are not able to identify the source or they do but face enormous difficulty reconciling their fears. This threat can manifest as ghostly projections of the characters’ unstable mental state. They might see

In the opening pages of David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return, Michel Adanson, a renowned botanist, is dying. He thinks about a bush fire he started on the banks of the Senegal River years before, and remembers the way the trees split open violently and creatures, in their attempts to flee, emitted sounds

In Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava (River Paw Press, 2023), Kalpna Singh-Chitnis writes an urgent tribute for Ukraine, the same urgency she employed when putting together her Ukraine anthology Sunflowers: Ukrainian Poetry on War, Resistance, Hope and Peace. In Love Letters, Singh-Chitnis compiles a series of echo refrain poems for an embattled nation. Her

If a dystopia is a place where everyone, or at least someone, lives in abject misery and terror, then most cows, fishes, forests, and humans, right now, today, are living in completely non-imaginary dystopias. The human species’ ravenous egocentrism is the landfill on which such hells are built. The landfill, in turn, consists of dregs

A Swim Across the Open Waters of Mid-Life Vauhini Vara Share article The Hormone Hypothesis by Vauhini Vara I feel badly for my husband—for men in general—because they’re left out of so much of human life. It’s more common to talk about the ways in which they have it better—and God knows those abound, I’m

Photo © Laura Malmivaara A deadly curse, mythical creatures, and a murder investigation: in Juhani Karila’s English-language debut, Fishing for the Little Pike, a young woman has much to contend with on her annual pilgrimage to catch a pike in Lapland, Finland. Lola Rogers translated this wildly imaginative novel published by Restless Books in September 2023.

If ever there was a poetry collection you yearn to viscerally sink your teeth into, as if biting into a freshly ripe mango, it’s Melania Luisa Marte’s Plantains And Our Becoming. Even the cover is stunning, but it’s the poems within that unrestrainedly pulse with life, joy, rage, and love. It’s a book grown and

What I love most about the plethora of literary podcasts on air these days is that each podcast feels like entering a niche corner within the larger literary community, and taken together, the many literary podcasts available reveal just how vibrant, intelligent, and robust the world of writers and readers really is. Lately, I’ve found

Some might think of cozy mysteries as edgeless and old-fashioned, but that’s only the case if you want it to be. To my mind, the genre feels like a metaphorical warm blanket around the shoulders. Though the detective will be out to solve a murder, there’s usually (but not always) less gore on the page,

Growing up as a Javanese daughter, there was one word that was drilled deep into my head by my mother: malu, which means “shame.” I had a huge list of things that I shouldn’t do or say because they could bring shame to my parents. I still hear the word often even today, in my

The year I taught at the College of New Jersey, a freshman went missing. It was a large mystery—he had crashed, drunk, in a friend’s dorm room after a party, then vanished without his shoes. This was whittled down to a smaller mystery—copious amounts of blood in the trash compactor room to which the trash

Take a Bow, Gas Station Drag Queen Portrait of Drag Queen with a Pig Nose behind the gas station the queen begins facing away from the crowd. low cut back, floor length gown. pulses a knee to the music, arm on hip, believable human silhouette. i should know this song. the rest of the audience

If I could go back to any time in my life, I would choose the years between my girlhood and womanhood. Just for a day. And just to appreciate what I was noticing, doing, thinking, and feeling. That was a rich time of discovery and simple joy. Equally, as I grew older, I also came

In Javier Fuentes’s touching and tender debut novel, Countries of Origin, the concept of home is complicated and politically fraught. After years of growing up undocumented in the United States, building a long and respectable career in the New York City restaurant industry, Demetrio faces deportation and must return to Madrid, his place of birth.