Literature

Masturbation scenes run contrary to the standard rules of writing good fiction. There’s not a whole lot happening, plot-wise. The character involved is hardly moving, their thoughts are both incoherent and numbingly predictable. Nuance is abandoned, Gods rise from a variety of machines, clichés proliferate. What a shocker: the pool boy is sweaty and needs

Since the late 1990s, Meghan O’Rourke battled symptoms no one, including O’Rourke herself, could explain: dizziness, night sweats, fatigue, electric shock sensations, stabbing pain, hives. When on a trip to Vietnam in 2012 a rash—seven or eight raised bumps arranged in a circle—appeared on her inner arm, she thought, It looks like Braille. But what

Designing a book cover is challenging, even more so when the work contains a raunchy subject matter. How do you convey, in a single glance, that the book is sensual, even sexy, without falling for pornographic tropes?  My debut novel, Little Rabbit, is about a sub/dom relationship between a 30-something queer writer and an older

Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt is a revelation: a gory, prickly horror novel unflinching in its violence but deeply humane as well. The book depicts a world ravaged by a plague that turns all people with testosterone in their bodies into feral, matted-haired monsters. But in contrast to the growing canon of cis-normative gender-apocalypse fiction, Manhunt centers

My Ex Cheated, But I Outlived Him Meng Jin Share article “Phillip is Dead” by Meng Jin Poor man. I got the news as I was coming aboveground. “Phillip is dead,” the subject line said. In the body of the email were details of the memorial.  I was shocked. Not so much because Phillip was dead

In Nishant Batsha’s novel Mother Ocean Father Nation, a family’s life shatters as the horrors of a military coup befall a fictional South Pacific island. The country is rife with tension between the native population and the Indian community, who arrived on the island as part of colonization. The outsiders and their businesses become targets

In the climax of Stranger Things 3 a giant laser punctures the wall of an underground bunker, breaching the veil between ours and the Upside Down. An alternative dimension which lies parallel to our own, the Upside Down is governed by an evil hive-mind intelligence known as the Mind Flayer. The fissure between worlds looks

I have thought a lot, over my decade-plus of drinking and working in bars, about what makes any one establishment stand out over another. Why are there places we love and return to, and others we leave with indifference, ambivalence, even disappointment? On the one hand, if there was an easy answer, opening a bar

My God Has the Head of a Vulture Ornithology After Theodore Roethke To find the owl I must follow the crow who says my ears and eyes better behave; it’s hard for me to learn what the crow knows unable to refuse the blueish glow nor the shiny trinkets my wingtips save. To find an

In Lillian Fishman’s debut novel, Acts of Service, a queer barista is struggling to craft a meaningful, real life that balances her ethics with her desires. Despite being in love with her long-term girlfriend, Romi, Eve ends up in a sexual relationship with Nathan and Olivia. She is equal parts compelled and disturbed: Olivia is

The best literary fiction is in some ways a simple character study. It is a roadmap into the interiority of a specific character: the way they think, how their identity impacts their relationships, and what decisions get made in response to the socio-political pressures shaping their lives. But literary fiction about young women too often

We hold onto things more tightly when we feel they are in danger. We cling to a relationship as it falls apart; we know we must leave home, so we keep finding reasons not to. You see the same in pop culture trends. Consider the true crime boom of the last several years: as people

Chelsea T. Hicks’s A Calm and Normal Heart is a brilliant and breathtaking debut story collection. While it appears straightforward as a twelve-story collection, these stories and their characters impress upon the reader something longer: a legacy, one that simultaneously stretches back and forward. In “Tsexope,” between a breakup and a shackup, the main character

Fairytales, myths, folklore, urban legends, all of those compact, strange stories that we pass from person to person and between generations—they’re the first stories we encounter, a medium for transmitting ideas and expectations, a window into our individual and our collective imaginations. All of this, and they still have to be entertaining enough to hold

To all the versions of myself who haven’t made it to a bathhouse, here’s what to expect. Start with the obscured visibility of a club. Add the purposeful disorientation of a haunted house. Multiply all of that by the atmospheric arousal of scrolling through Pornhub, as most everyone is wearing just a towel. Divide everything

Mom Has Her Boyfriend, I Have Her Cigarettes Morgan Talty Share article Smokes Last by Morgan Talty At the kitchen table, Frick fidgeted with a bag of pork rinds. Mom scrubbed dishes while the oiled pan on the stove got hot enough for her to lay down spoonfuls of batter in it. The sideboard was

I get more email in a day than I can keep up with, let alone respond to.  Most of us do. Collectively, we sent an estimated 319 billion emails each day in 2021. I’d love to know the breakdown of these messages. How many chains of rambling updates between old friends? How many are notes

Dear Readers, Happy Pride! It’s been a minute since I’ve written an editorial letter, but I’m doing so now to bring your attention to a special project that I’ve been working on at EL. I’m writing to introduce Both/And, a new limited essay series by trans and gender nonconforming writers of color—the first of its