Literature

Writer and editor Nicole Chung is the author of the best-selling memoir All You Can Ever Know (Catapult, 2018), the story of the search for her Korean birth family and a challenge to the stereotyped rescue narrative of transracial adoption. In her new memoir, A Living Remedy (Harper Collins, 2023), she reflects on the circumstances

Like magic, narrative rearranges the world through words, and Kelly Link is one of modern fiction’s boldest alchemists. Her stories (which have now been collected into five books, and garnered Link a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” among other honors) make the familiar so strange it’s almost familiar again, spinning straw into ghosts and ghosts into disgruntled

If you’ve turned on a TV lately, you’ve likely heard more than enough ‘opinions’ from certain conservative news outlets about the trans community. In the face of hate, misinformation, and violence, standing up for one’s identity may begin to feel like fighting an endless war rather than an act of power. At Electric Literature, we’re

Like many children, I grew up scared of ghosts. I imagined their bodies hovering above my bed while I slept or looked away, their faces translucent and menacing.   But the more I grew up, the more I realised this made no sense. Ghosts are the soul of the deceased: why would I be their foe?

I’m cat-sitting tomorrow for a friend, the one with the apartment right over R Bar. They’re out of town to visit their Californian partner, a children’s toy engineer with pastel blue hair.  R Bar is the first place I think of when I hear about Club Q. R Bar and the cat I need to

To say that The Last Catastrophe is a dystopic take on humanity’s final hour is to miss the humor in these pages, as well as the tenderness in Allegra Hyde’s gaze. She is looking upon all of us—even those with the greatest culpability—as if she is sad to lose us and for us to lose

Terence Hammonds (American, born 1976), Hope, 2022, HD print on aluminum, 24 x 18 in. Photo by the artist Universal Magnetic: New Works by Terence Hammonds is currently showing at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hammonds’s works in Universal Magnetic feature collages that combine historical images with decorative motifs that adorn and memorialize representations of racial

This essay, by Autumn Fourkiller, is the second 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 fourteen weeks, on Thursday, EL will publish an installment of Both/And, with the series running through spring and into Pride Month. At a time

Electric Literature is thrilled to reveal the cover for Vanessa Chan’s highly anticipated debut novel, The Storm We Made, which will be published by Marysue Rucci Books in January, 2024. Malaya, 1945. A family in harrowing danger: a missing teenage son, a youngest daughter locked away in a basement as the only means of preventing

You Will Want Me When I Disappear Thomas Renjilian Share article I’d Never Felt So Light by Thomas Renjilian The night my boyfriend switched from when to if while he talked about our future, I said I’d eat nothing but boiled carrots and egg whites until I dropped twelve pounds. One for each month we’d

In Gina Chung’s stunning debut novel, Sea Change, the familiar and unfamiliar mix harmoniously. A 30-year-old woman, Ro, finds herself adrift, struggling with a tense relationship with her mother, the disappearance of her father, a breakup with an ex who has left for Mars, and an unhealthy attachment to a cocktail called a “sharktini.” To

I’m in the fourth exam room with one of my last patients of the day, late afternoon light streaming in through the windows behind him. We’re about to go over the results of his scans after several months of therapy for metastatic kidney cancer, and as I turn from the computer screen, squinting against the

Have you ever harbored a desire so fierce that you were consumed by it? Maybe to fall in love, or shut down a toxic mine, or reconnect with a lost family member, or move to another country? And during the day you plot out how to achieve this goal, and during the night you dream

What is the role of the past in our psychic universe? What happens to us if we learn only later about terrible things that took place in our streets, our parks, our own families, revealing dark tunnels beneath everything we thought we understood? Questions like these may strike anyone who grew up in the former

The Mating Call That Occupies My Memory Author’s Note: These pieces are written in the style called “skaz”—a term coined by early-Soviet Formalists to describe an oral bard’s voice on the page. Somewhere between prose poetry, theatrical performance, and rambling essays—dense and personal, holding eye contact with the reader. It was particularly popular in Ukraine,

It’s March Madness, and you know what that means (or, if you’re like most of us, maybe you kind of don’t. Basketball? Competing colleges? Probably a lot of drinking?): it’s time to fill out all sorts of brackets entirely unrelated to actual March Madness. We may not always be up on all the sports news,

For writers at every stage, the publishing industry can feel inaccessible. There are so many steps between drafting a book and seeing it out in the world. Especially for debut hopefuls, it’s more than a little intimidating: how do we know what we don’t know? Meanwhile, those who’ve already published may have different unknowns related to