Literature

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

Photo by Yousef Khanfar / www.yousefkhanfar.com. This olive tree in the Al Aqsa compound is believed to be 2,000 years old. I’m not interested inwho suffered the most.I’m interested inpeople getting over it. Once when my father was a boya stone hit him on the head.Hair would never grow there.Our fingers found the tender spotand its riddle:

When I first encountered the work of Henry Dumas, I was very nearly finished with my undergraduate degree in English. I favored American literature in my time studying, and was lucky to have access to syllabi that spanned a more diverse array of writers. The Black writers I would come to know intimately were who

Hannah Michell’s Excavations begins with tragedy. A skyscraper suddenly collapses in 1990s Seoul, killing hundreds and leaving devastation in its wake. Sae, the mother of two young boys, is at home when she learns her husband is missing; he has been working on a project in the recently-collapsed Aspiration Tower. Drawing on her past as

Electric Literature is excited to announce our latest initiative to support the freedom to read. Through Banned Books USA, any resident of Florida can order books that have been banned or challenged in the state of Florida for free, plus the cost of shipping. Of the over 800 books that have been banned and challenged

The death of her father flings Peruvian journalist writer Gabriela Wiener back to her hometown of Lima and to a confrontation with his infidelity, and then back further to the paternal ancestor who bestowed her brown body with her Austrian surname. With this, Wiener begins Undiscovered, translated by Julia Sanches, a rollicking decolonial fact-fiction remix

Stars and Stripes and Racist Imperialism No History Is Immune From Ends, but the Americans Were Infinite To the times that call for candor, hunger. Mr. President, what was the sound before surrender? It’s almost summer. I sit across from a white woman in the student union cafe who wants to adopt a child from

Encompassing a wide range of genres from historical fiction to fantasy to poetry to investigative journalism to memoir, this exciting abundance of books published in 2023 by emerging and acclaimed Native writers speak to the rich diversity of the Indigenous experience. From meditations on the lasting impact of climate change and the destructive legacy of

Dewaine Farria belongs to the world. As a US Marine, he served in Jordan and Ukraine, and spent much of his professional life working for the United Nations Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS), with assignments in the North Caucasus, Kenya, Somalia, and Occupied Palestine. In June 2013 Dewaine was awarded UNDSS’s Bravery Award for

A Doomed Romance Is the Deadliest Tragedy SJ Sindu Share article Patriots’ Day by SJ Sindu Four days before his death, Amit Srinivasan files for divorce. He’s living in a tiny apartment in Somerville that he began renting in December, ever since his wife packed a suitcase full of his clothes and burned it in

Fall, the season of sweaters, PSL, and—of course—haunted houses.  Though the Victorian clapboard house will forever remain iconic, the past few decades have broadened our scope of what can be haunted. 2022’s Barbarian, for instance, introduces a humble Airbnb, while Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör is set in a very familiar Swedish furniture store.  What ultimately binds

Elle Nash’s novel Deliver Me tells the story of Daisy, a Southern woman in her 30s seeking control over her life. Daisy struggles under the thumb of her partner (a petty criminal with a sexual fetish for exotic bugs), her mother (a domineering matriarch who wields the evangelical church like a weapon), her job (a chicken slaughtering

Photo by Alexander Grey / Unsplash Welcome news to those of us in the “Flyover Zone”: our reading habits are healthy and well served. The Jackson Madison County Public Library in Jackson, Tennessee, is one such example. Possessing 115,799 physical items and over one million electronic books, it is one of the larger West Tennessee

Safiya Sinclair writes in her memoir How to Say Babylon, “The perfect daughter was nothing but a vessel for the man’s seed, unblemished clay waiting for Jah’s fingerprint.” The memoir, Sinclair’s first, is about her journey to shaping a future that isn’t limited by the idea of the perfect daughter or Rastafari’s tenets. Raised in

Imagine if the suffering chef of The Bear were physically becoming, well, a bear. Imagine if in his journey through grief, he landed in a kitchen of not only underdogs but a family of warring brujas. This comes close to the mythopoetic realm of Brendan Shay Basham’s debut novel, Swim Home to the Vanished, which

Fall is a huge release season for books. Indie bookstores across the country are jam packed with new titles, and every Tuesday, even more hit the shelves. It’s an exciting time for publishers, booksellers, and readers alike, but so many new books can also mean it’s hard to know where exactly to turn your attention.

For a long time, I’ve described my writing as “spooky literary”—the term that seems closest to the pulse of this genre-muddling category I love so much. “Spooky literary” books have ghosts or monsters or werewolves, and they also have complex characters and gorgeous prose. They have moonlit swamps or dark New England woods or shadowy

Back in the ‘80s, crack was a boogeyman come to life. It played on the minds of neighborhood kids like bible stories, seeming to make real the supernatural myths of demonic possession from Sunday School. It could animate the body with strange ticking motions, or deplete users into life-sapped stupors. It obliterated one’s sense of