Literature

My book, The Dead Are Gods, centres around my friendship with Larissa, who I met in my early teens in early aughts London. She died in 2018, a death that shook me to my core. Together, we were fixtures on the rock ‘n roll scene in the city, and found home in each other, both

Photo by Pedro Soares Just published in March, The Drinker of Horizons (translated by David Brookshaw) brings to a close Mia Couto’s captivating Sands of the Emperor trilogy: The story of late nineteenth-century Mozambique seen mainly through the lens of a love affair between Imani, a young, mission-educated VaChopi, and a Portuguese sergeant named Germano de

Gone in the Desert and Never Coming Home Share article The Disappeared by Andrew Porter I have a photograph of Daniel on the last day I ever saw him. This would have been in 2005, just after we’d moved into our first house in San Antonio, our starter house, as my wife still refers to

“A disconsolate brown man in an unabashedly gentrified neighborhood is the beginning of a below-the-fold news item,” thinks Eduardo, the central character in Alejandro Varela’s new collection of interconnected stories, The People Who Report More Stress. He is sitting on a park bench, just moments after an emotionally devastating hookup, when he delivers this blunt

When I was 15, my family moved to a new city, and I transferred to a new high school. It was our second move in three years, and I was not handling the change well. Depressed, anxious, and terribly lonely, I did what most emotionally unstable teenagers do: devoted myself to a niche of pop

At a certain point while I was writing the stories in my short story collection, The Disappeared, I began to notice that all of the stories I was writing were set in either San Antonio, where I currently live, or in Austin, which is the next closest major city to me, about an hour and

God Has Definitely Forsaken Us Plagues First it was frogs, then locusts, then remote aerial drone strikes. Clearly God was punishing us. God was punishing us but we were happy because at least we knew that God existed. All the liquid turned to blood. The water in our Brita filters and the fountain at the

And these things,that live by going away, know that you praise them; fleeting,they look to us for rescue, us, the most fleeting of all.Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” The author of twenty-five novels and short stories, Dominique Fabre is a student of philosophy, a photographer, globetrotter, and high school teacher who leads writing workshops

Unlike the narratives created in both literature and film, selling one’s soul usually isn’t a literal Faustian bargain. Despite our devilish fantasies, it’s not Al Pacino leaning across a desk, asking us to sign away our innermost being for fame and fortune, scantily clad sylphs gyrating in the background, urging us towards our own temptation.

A Taxonomy of Gay Animals The owl wore my tank top. The hippo swam in rice pudding. The tree was actually broccoli. The fish were made of wood. I’m lying, except for the part about the owl wearing my tank top. It’s a gay thing, and I’ll explain why. In my world, we have an

“Listen to the local voices here on the ground, not some sages sitting at the center of global power. Please start your analysis with the suffering of millions of people, rather than geopolitical chess moves. Start with the columns of refugees …” Last March, shortly after Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine began, the Ukrainian writer

The cover of the cookbook shows a bamboo basket laden with bell peppers, asparagus, and broccoli. Surrounding it on the table are scallions, ginger, dried mushrooms, peapods, a red onion. A fish, an eggroll, some dumplings, a pair of chopsticks. In the background, a white ceramic soup tureen waits coquettishly to be opened. A long, seductive

It’s no coincidence that wellness has become a trillion-dollar industry at the same time that most people have been affected by failing public health systems and government agencies. Self-care has become a best-selling product, a buzzword that anyone can use to increase their bottom line. Because of this, it can be impossible to parse what

Nothing Like a Lockdown to Lock Down a Relationship Daphne Kalotay Share article Communicable by Daphne Kalotay The first time it happened—though she didn’t exactly take note—was when the plumber reemerged from the basement to report that the water was back on. He wore the kind of mask that protruded like a snout and kept

All too often, we find ourselves wishing we had said or done more when we lose someone, no matter the circumstance. That is the very nature of grief: It leaves us feeling robbed, of time, of memories that will remain unmade. But while all of us have known or will come to know grief at

This essay, by Logan Hoffman-Smith, is the third in Electric Literature’s new limited essay series, Both/And, which centers the voices of trans and gender nonconforming writers of color. For the next thirteen weeks, on Thursday, EL will publish an installment of Both/And, with the series running through spring and into Pride Month. At a time

A neighbor once told me that a woman died in my house. From then I was constantly looking in my house for signs—every creak was a footstep, every sound was a whisper, a loud scream. My mother says that the way Americans see death as a horror only tells half the story. The other half

I woke up earlier than usual on the Sunday morning Princess Diana’s death was splashed across the news. I knew my mom would want me to wake her up for this. When I told her what happened overnight in Paris, she leapt out of bed and hurried to the television, where she sat in silent