Literature

The age of the boyfriend has ended. Give yours away. Donate him to charity or, if he doesn’t have too much wear and tear, maybe you can sell him on The RealReal. Your girlfriend can be a boyfriend, too. If I’m making proclamations about tired conventions then I’m definitely getting rid of gender. Whoever your

Hey Siri, Cure My Postpartum Depression Dear Siri My son says you’re listening so you might tell us what we want. If so, I want to know what is lost under my fingertips besides home? And whether you understand that I googled postpartum depression after the first year, & I’ve since been bombarded by ads

I was a single parent when I got married on my lunch break. Taking a day off from my unruly job in foster care wasn’t feasible, plus I was pregnant and my health insurance was crap—it didn’t cover office visits or emergencies (or, ahem, birth control). So, after a quick exchange of vows at the

Photo by said alamri / Unsplash Immigration, detention, unequal payare modern words for slavery again. Dictatorship, borders. Any impositionof one’s will over another is a form of slavery.Even the legal rules that enslave: debt, foreclosure,poverty above all. Any compromise of humanityis a form of bondage. Then, what can the Artsdo to liberate anybody? Only this

At 5:15 in the morning, I tiptoe across my kitchen floor and pray it doesn’t squeak in that one spot where it always squeaks. I don’t pray often, but these are desperate times: I have a small child and forty-five minutes to write in solitary silence. With a baby monitor and a cup of coffee

Today, the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust announces the shortlist for the second annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. The recipient of the $25,000 prize will be chosen by authors William Alexander, Alexander Chee, Karen Joy Fowler, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Shruti Swamy from nine nominees selected by the Trust. Last year Khadija

Roman floor mosaic with scene from the Odyssey / Photo by Jamie Heath / Flickr In Homer, Humanism, Holocaust: Jewish Responses to the Crisis of Enlightenment During World War II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Adam Goldwyn, a prolific scholar of Late Antiquity and Byzantium, has focused his attentions on a different set of keywords and written

Many of my experiences in the Marines were equally as ugly and terrifying as a classic gothic haunted house. My book studies some of the parallels between gothic horror and the absurd terror of Operation Enduring Freedom, but The Militia House focuses on the experience of one individual. As I read other veteran writers, I

I’m the Wrong Ghost for This Haunting Ren Arcamone Share article The Difficulty of Getting Through to You by Ren Arcamone I was rematerializing in the garden shed when Cherie Katsoulas found me and said, “I heard screaming last night. Did you hear screaming?” Well, this was a delicate thing to handle, because in fact

Zuzanna Ginczanka in April 1938 / Muzeum Literatury / East News History displaced Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–1944) from birth. Born in Kiev a few days after the outbreak of the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution, she was left by her parents to be raised by her grandmother. She grew up in the Volhynian town of Równe (today

Kathleen Cheng is having a hell of a Saturn Return. The late-20s protagonist of Jenny Xie’s debut novel Holding Pattern has just been dumped by the man she thought she’d spend her life with. Unmoored and questioning, she drops out of her cognitive psychology graduate program on the East Coast and moves back in with

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey, which will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing on March 5th 2024. Preorder the book here. From the Booker International Prize-winning translator and Guggenheim fiction fellow, a propulsive, beguiling debut about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes

In 2019 Sarah Viren’s wife, Marta, was subject to a Title IX investigation for sexual misconduct. The allegations, which appeared via Reddit posts and emails, were that Marta had offered students wine during office hours, requested sexual favors, and threw wild parties. Viren knew the allegations were untrue—she’d never thrown a wild party with her wife,

I don’t know about y’all, but I love rewatching a performance after I learn that something catastrophic has gone down behind the scenes. Whether it’s the iconic 1997 Fleetwood Mac performance of “Silver Springs” in which you can watch Stevie Nicks put a curse on Lindsey Buckingham in real time, or a film like What

After four years of writing and rewriting a story close to my vulnerable heart—about traveling home to attend my estranged mother’s wedding—the essay finally appeared in the Huffington Post. My best friend Ellen read it seconds after it went live. She texted me her favorite lines, sending my words back to me with affirmations. She

… And instead of despairbefore your own cracked skininstead of drowning in memories of himinstead of hopelessness as you facethe scorched plain of your future –even though you still say “tomorrow” out of habit.Instead of the world eternally perfectedthe egocentric hopethat perhaps your life has some meaningyou unexpectedly feel intense painwatching images of nature burnbecause

Nearly forty years before the Stonewall uprising—often incorrectly pegged as the moment in history when queer people first began experiencing pride in our identities—Ruth Fuller Field, writing under the pseudonym Mary Casal, published her autobiography, The Stone Wall, where she details a life largely defined by her ferocious pursuit of women.  Even then, Field wasn’t

When I was growing up in western Canada in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, my sister and I were the only people we knew who were biracial—not quite white, not quite Chinese, but somewhere in the empty space between. I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. Internalizing both the quiet racism and gender norms I