Literature

I Narain’s home state of Uttar Pradesh / Reality Images / Adobe Stock t is a grim reality that many important Indian poets are not yet known by the anglophone readers spread across the globe, sadly, because their poetry could not find translators. However, Apurva Narain, himself an author, has tried to take on the

You can tell a lot about a country by the culture it consumes. The Bush era was defined by a brand of bombast befitting a blundering empire: from 24 to 300, Team America to Talladega Nights, the U.S. in the new millennium seemed intent on both dramatizing and lampooning the nation’s new role as dunderheaded

A few years back, Mona Awad found herself in the grips of a skincare addiction. Hauling her laptop with her wherever she went, she watched video after video about Retinol and exfoliants, spellbound by the soothing voices and gently glowing faces of the skinfluencers on her screen. And she bought; she bought; she bought, whatever

Murder has long been a man’s game in literature. Patrick Batemen, Joe Goldberg and Tom Ripley are just a few of the complicated killers who have appeared in novels (and later on screens). Readers take a front row seat to their sadistic minds and delight in their depravity as they kill with few consequences. Similarly,

When I turned eighteen, I started going to a Lincoln Heights music venue called Low End Theory a couple times a month. Hosted every Wednesday, the spot was a hotbed for experimental hip-hop producers. I’d pick up my friend David in Anaheim’s fringes, and then we’d make the hour-long drive to the venue. We’d met

Brando Skyhorse’s new novel My Name is Iris, is a harrowing and, at times, darkly funny exploration of one woman’s complex relationship with her own identity as Mexican American in a slightly fictionalized United States.  Iris (born Inés) is an educated and semi-successful businesswoman. She sees herself as a good citizen, a good mother to

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Since Roe v Wade was repealed in the summer of 2022, those of us who believe in bodily autonomy have been reeling from the cascade of increasingly bad news about reproductive justice in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