Literature

Electric Literature recently launched a new creative nonfiction program, and received 500 submissions in just 36 hours! Now we need your help to grow our team, carefully and efficiently review submitted work, and further establish EL as a home for artful and urgent nonfiction. We’ve set a goal of raising $10,000 by the end of

Electric Literature recently launched a new creative nonfiction program, and received 500 submissions in just 36 hours! Now we need your help to grow our team, carefully and efficiently review submitted work, and further establish EL as a home for artful and urgent nonfiction. We’ve set a goal of raising $10,000 by the end of

I Keep My Black Hole on a Leash Electric Literature recently launched a new creative nonfiction program, and received 500 submissions in just 36 hours! Now we need your help to grow our team, carefully and efficiently review submitted work, and further establish EL as a home for artful and urgent nonfiction. We’ve set a

I feel the recognition in my bones when I read the opening line of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” When I write in English, I feel like I’m lying. I am making up every waking thought I had since childhood, in

In the first few pages of Helen Elaine Lee’s Pomegranate, protagonist Ranita recalls a moment when her father gives her the titular fruit. She breaks the pomegranate open, “awed by the wild design of it…a whole world, strange and crazy-beautiful, underneath the skin.” In many ways, this scene serves as a metaphor for the novel

Photo by JR P / Flickr In her new essay collection, These Particular Women (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2023), Kat Meads writes about famous twentieth-century women, mostly authors. In this short excerpt, she ventures into Flannery O’Connor territory. It had been a rainy night in Georgia, and there followed a rainy day. Four miles north of

The parade started early in the morning, before the heat could set in. The humidity in Taiwan was formidable, and heatstroke-addled marchers made for poor celebrants. The bustling streets of Taipei had been half-cordoned off; aggrieved drivers inched along single file. I waited on the sidewalk, craning my neck over the crowd, trying to catch

  1 The 1984 Neustadt Prize banquet honored Finnish writer Paavo Haavikko. Left to right: Astrid Ivask, Ritva Rainio, Paavo Haavikko, Dolores Neustadt, Doris Westheimer Neustadt, and Walter Neustadt Jr. 2 Dolores Neustadt and juror Shirley Geok-Lin Lim at the 1998 Neustadt Prize banquet honoring Nuruddin Farah. 3. Dolores Neustadt at her ninetieth birthday celebration in April 2018 |

A Fresh Start in a City Ruled by History Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya Share article Excerpt from The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos by Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya I stayed in a hostel for a week, in Adams Morgan, by all the bars and clubs and hookah lounges. The hostel was quite nice. The desk people were

Obsessively scratching her scalp, while simultaneously chiding herself not to, Kendra Rae Phillips sits on a MetroNorth train anxious and jittery. She’s worried about being found, after being found out. Every lingering eye incites more sweat, and more scratching. Relief only comes when her train departs Grand Central Station. This is how Zakiya Dalila-Harris’ debut

There’s a reason that we as a culture have spent the last 20 years debating whether there was enough room on the door for both Jack and Rose in Titanic. Watching Rose let Jack freeze to death in the water instead of just shifting a little bit to the left and letting him on the

M. Evelina Galang explores the many manifestations of what it means to be Filipina and Filipina American across decades, countries, and moments of political poignance in her new short story collection When the Hibiscus Falls.  Returning to the short story form for the first time since her 1996 debut Her Wild American Self, Galang dreams

Sports, sci fi shows, and Stephen King were the most consistent topics of conversation for my father and I. Of the many hours I spent alone with him as a teenager, I don’t remember talking about much else. Perhaps this reveals us as one-dimensional and simple, or maybe even a little stereotypical (rough-around-the-edges Dad, lesbian

One of my favorite short story writers, Eudora Welty, once said: “Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tired. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.” Place, or setting, is something

Kiah Holliman’s car accident happened on the last icy day of February 2022. The following morning, clear blue sky lit my journey from Detroit to Grand Rapids, melting any remaining ice from the night before. The earth seemed to smile, soaking in the long-missed sunshine. As the world inhaled the first hint of spring, my

I am 33-years-old, just young enough that I feel like I can still reach out and touch my 20s. The early years of adulthood were full of discovery, joy, and energy (you really can drink an entire bottle of wine at dinner and then go to work the next day with nothing more than some

Photo by NancieLee Free at last. Free at last.Thank God almighty, we’re free at last. “[O]n the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion

  Jem Bendell is a known scholar on societal collapse who rose to prominence in 2018 with his academic paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Discussed in popular media and academia, the paper has been downloaded more than a million times since its release, which is a truly impressive number for an