Literature

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.

In its origins, the word “fabulous” lacked a positive connotation but simply meant “having to do with fables.” I’m no etymologist, so I don’t know how “fabulous” drifted into its current meanings, but I suspect it has something to do with the concepts that are expressed by similar words like “wonderful” (full of wonders), “marvelous” (related

If you search the web for books about violent women, you are instead met with countless novels about violence against women. There are hundreds more books about murdered and abused women than there are about women who murder and abuse. But I’m tired of reading about how women are violated, traumatized, and killed. I want

I walked into Webster’s, a local café in State College, Pennsylvania, to meet a professor for the first time to discuss a project on literary translation. He was new to the Department of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, so I had no idea what to expect. Looking back, I cherish that first conversation that

The Collective Tragedy of Maternal Isolation Marianne Jay Erhardt Share article The Swing by Marianne Jay Erhardt Eleanor Gaw didn’t know she was one of the last people to see Luca Swenson alive. She had seen him from quite a distance, just the little shape of him. The hood of his winter coat, moving back

In Mobility, Bunny, as aptly named as Jay Gatsby and Elle Woods, is the daughter of a public affairs officer in foreign service. “Silly but not stupid,” she splits her adolescence between boarding school and posts in Greece and Azerbaijan. Mostly, Bunny thinks of material possessions, teen soaps like Dawson’s Creek, thinness, and older white

If you want to be a likable person, one easy thing you can do is not murder anyone. I would go as far as to argue that not murdering people is indispensable to being likable. But we’re not talking about real life here. In fiction, we can explore the darker aspects of being human without

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for Cynthia Marie Hoffman‘s poetry collection, Exploding Head, which will be published by Persea Books in February 2024. Preorder the book here. Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s vivid memoir-in-prose-poems, Exploding Head, chronicles a woman’s childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting

Born and raised in Khammam, a small town in the state of Telangana, India, Nishanth Injam published The Best Possible Experience, his debut short-story collection, in July 2023. He immigrated to the United States in 2011 as a graduate student in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. With his MS in hand,

Sally Wen Mao has built a powerfully intricate world in her third poetry collection, The Kingdom of Surfaces. An incisive examination into the Western gaze that others and exploits so much of Chinese culture, Mao’s poems invite the reader to enter into a lush garden of art, pop culture, fashion, and China’s artisanal crafts, to

You would think that with all the TV shows and books set in schools, people would have a pretty good idea of what happens in them on a day-to-day basis. But school stories are more often stories set in schools than they are about school. Stories that show the actual work of teaching and learning

In He’s Expecting (Netflix 2022), a six-episode drama, Kentaro Hiyama is a 37-year-old successful ad executive shocked to discover he’s one of a small percentage of cis men in Japan who have become pregnant. We watch him navigate some of the typical scenarios of a surprise pregnancy we’re used to seeing around women. He counts

Banana Republic. No, not the clothing store. The term is more insidious than cotton slacks and button downs. In the 20th century, the phenomenon known as the “Banana Republic” originated from a white, American man’s imagination to describe a country with a monocrop economy, ruled by a small, powerful elite, and prone to political turmoil,