Literature

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for Minda Honey’s highly anticipated debut memoir, The Heartbreak Years, which will be published by Little A this October.  In the car she’d had since high school, and with her boyfriend by her side, Minda Honey journeyed cross-country to Southern California. By the end of that year,

Showtime’s Yellowjackets was the unlikely sleeper hit of 2021 with its dark, off-kilter narrative and female characters who are messy, deeply flawed (and sometimes just downright sinister). The series follows a 1990s high school girls soccer team who, after dominating at the state championships, are on their way to nationals. But their plane goes down in

Jenny Fran Davis’ debut novel Dykette is indisputably, vibrantly, hilariously queer. Dykette follows three couples (and a charismatic pug) on a ten day, pressure-cooker trip to Hudson, New York. The oldest of the couple, Jules Todd (a news anchor who reads like a fictional Rachel Maddow) and her partner Miranda, a therapist who seems perpetually

At the clinic, my RN patiently explains to me how to change the 18-gauge needle to the thinner 25-gauge, how to swab the side of my thigh with an alcohol wipe to prep it for injection. I can barely hear him; my head feels like it’s underwater, and my hands are shaking. When I push

When we think of a family business, what springs to mind first is probably a straightforward, even heteronormative, structure: a commercial concern (hardware store; funeral home; shipping firm) passing from parent to child (usually meaning, under patriarchal and capitalist tradition, from father to son). And there are plenty of opportunities for conflict in this simple

I Can Walk Through Walls But I Can’t Find Love Tunneling The man can pass through solid walls. To do so, he only has to jostle and vibrate the particles in his body. That’s it. This then frees them from the confines of the man’s emotions, specifically the failures (which he has extensively catalogued) and

“Do you get internet in Trinidad?”  “You must live at the beach!”  “Do you really drink straight out the coconuts?”  I’ve been asked versions of these questions about my home country many times when I’ve been abroad. Maybe because I’ve lived almost my entire life in Trinidad and Tobago, I’m used to the inherent complexities

When Emmanuel Iduma was growing up in Nigeria, he learned little officially in school about the Biafran War, the civil war that split the country along ethnic lines between 1967 and 1970 when the secessionist Republic of Biafra declared its independence from Nigeria. Nor was the conflict talked about much at home, despite its great

Even with recent superhero blockbusters, Asian Americans in modern media are often presented as traumatized restaurant children with angry parents or as nerds who finally made it into Harvard or Stanford. All these books by Asian American women move away from traditional narratives into stories about unique individual experiences that celebrate and interrogate womanhood, identity,

Scene from the premiere of Omar at the Spoleto Festival in May 2022 / Photo by Leigh Webber / spoletousa.org The opera Omar, which had its North Carolina premiere at Carolina Performing Arts on February 23, 2023, is an intense journey into the life of its eponymous character. With the lead performed by Jamez McCorkle,

Finding Bigfoot Is Easier Than Finding Myself Jacqueline Vogtman Share article BI6FOOT by Jacqueline Vogtman I’ve always lived within view of a church steeple. From my childhood apartment to the living room of the duplex where I received my first kiss from the landlord’s son to the small split-level my parents were able to buy

In her debut novel A History of Burning, Janika Oza gives us the story of a family, one migration journey at a time. Beginning with indentured labor that leads the first member of the family, Pirbhai, from his home in India to East Africa, we follow four generations across several continents and over one hundred

When I first became a single mother, I hid it from everyone, including myself. In my new book, The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays, I track the evolution of my relationship with motherhood, starting as a reluctant mother of two in a married household and ultimately ending as a single mother in suburbia (I

Novels about intense romances are compelling because of the window of specificity it offers into something that from the outside might not make sense, but from the dizzying inside becomes intimately relatable. In this reading list, characters are desperate to be filled up and satiated. They look for meaning in their partners, and hope that

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but a vigilant and insomniac rationality”—Deleuze and Guattari The fly’s head is rendered in microscopic detail: its bulging compound eyes set above a fleshy proboscis, cradled between its mouthparts. There is, however, something more unusual about this intimate portrait. A pair of finely bristled, jointed

In the years since the summer of Crazy Rich Asians, Asian American representation in mainstream entertainment has experienced a triumphant swell, producing positive, sympathetic portrayals where there were once only unflattering, stereotype-driven clichés. So long, Long Duk Dong! Hello, Shang-Chi and the Eight Abs!  Now, during Asian American Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month each

All My Multitudes Will Eat You Alive Editors’ Note: The Commuter is moving to Wednesdays! Diverting flash fiction, poetry, and graphic narratives will now be your mid-week pick-me-up. Recommended Reading is moving to Mondays; other than that, everything else will remain the same. we dream of something, here hide my kids. Lady, don't eat me alive.

Karin Lin-Greenberg’s novel You Are Here places a dying mall in upstate New York at its center; its diverse cast of characters swirl in and around and through the mall, wrapped up in their various issues. Rotating between five different voices, this debut is an acute portrait of contemporary suburban America. At first glance, the