Literature

My career as a criminal didn’t last long. I’m not proud about it (that I was a criminal at all, not the brevity and ineptitude of my reign).  But in high school, I stole CDs and records. That was my thing. Here’s what I would do: I would take the meager bankroll I’d earned from

Fifteen years ago, Electric Literature started as a print and digital quarterly journal during the glory days of the print magazine era. Our very first issue surpassed 10,000 copies in sales, we were stocked in newsstands and bookstores, and as an e-book. We were one of the first to publish literary fiction using an online

I watched Bad Boys: Ride or Die on a long summer Sunday night in Malmö, Sweden, halfway between Midsommar and the Fourth of July. I was on vacation, visiting family and friends, but took advantage of a free night to see what summer blockbuster season felt like in another country. The theater was packed for

Taiwan is having a moment these days: in the headlines, in the culinary landscape, in the history books, and in our global literary imagination. Gone are the days (we hope) of mistaking Taiwan for Thailand, or automatically responding, “Oh, do you mean China?” No, we mean Taiwan! Taiwan is a beautiful island whose identity has

Possession by Charley Burlock The summer after eighth grade in 2012, I began working at a mental hospital at the very top of a very tall hill in San Francisco. I had gotten the job—the internship—because my mother was, at the time, a patient of a doctor who practiced there. Being a good doctor, or

A Three-Bedroom Victorian to Kill For House Hunting It’s Saturday, which means Greg and I are house hunting. We’ve done this every weekend for the past four years and it’s a miracle we’ve lasted this long. Of the other couples we know, only a few have managed to get an offer on the table; fewer

Don’t die wondering, the old yellow button told me, but of course this only made me wonder more: Who wore this pin? Who made it? Who said it first? The pin is from the Lesbian Herstory Archives. There’s three of them, two yellow and one pink, all in big commanding capitals, no metadata provided to

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Awakened by A.E. Osworth, which will be published by Grand Central Publishing on April 29, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. A coven of trans witches battles an evil AI in the magical coming-of-middle-age romp about love, loss, drag shows, and late capitalism. ​ On a morning

Horror novels function as a way of controlling our fears and the unknown, transforming it into something tangible and… temporary. There’s something comforting about picking up a book, feeling terrified and setting it back down, the fear always contained in the pages.  During Covid, while some people turned to baking, I sought out Latina writers

It’s one thing for a book to pass the Bechdel Test or give readers a glimpse inside Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own—it’s another for a book to let that room extend from cover to cover. After spending far too many of my school years reading books about cis boys and men, as an adult,

Her Life Is a Borrowed Room in This Open House ​​​​​​​​​Janis Hubschman Share article Open House by Janis Hubschman The realtor had let herself into the house on Sunday morning while Frankie slept—overslept, rather—and baked something sweet-smelling. Now she was darting around the kitchen, opening cabinets and banging them closed, while monologuing into her Bluetooth

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of When the Harvest Comes by editor-in-chief Denne Michele Norris, which will be published by Random House on April 15, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. In this heart-wrenching debut novel, a young Black gay man reckoning with the death of his father must confront his painful past—and

In Tony Tulathimutte’s new short story collection, Rejection, a man fantasizes that his “individual spermatozoa are so tall and charismatic that they’re elected to lead the G8 nations”; a group chat splinters over a bloodthirsty raven and a “coochie juice” stain; and a terminally online recluse ascends “from human to spam.” Brain-twisting, incisive, and laugh-out-loud

Li-Young Lee’s first collection in a decade, The Invention of the Darling, remixes many themes from his five previous poetry books: family, exile, intimacy, and the divine. Yet somehow these plain verses feel fresh. In “Counting the Ten Thousand Things,” Lee writes, “Start over in secret, at nightwith my mother and father and the escape

My whole life I’ve felt like a bad girl, like something was inherently wrong with me that I couldn’t manage to play the part society (and my immigrant family) had carefully laid out for me. From coming out to being splashed across headlines for listing “sex work” as a work experience on LinkedIn, I always

When I first read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, I was straight. Or, at least I thought I was. It was 2014, and I was a sixteen-year-old closeted bisexual in the Pennsylvania suburbs, with nothing to my name but a mildly successful hipster-themed Tumblr blog. The novel’s ending, in which Edna walks confidently into the sea

If the rise in popularity of Dark Academia has taught us anything, it’s that readers love a campus novel with an eerie bent. Of course, the murder-y campus aesthetic extends well before the #darkacademia hashtag garnered over 100 million posts on TikTok. Arguably first, there was The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel that introduced

“September,” an excerpt from Come By Here by Neesha Powell-Ingabire YAHA The tour guide calls our class’s attention to an alligator on a log, napping to a symphony of songbirds and swaying bald cypress trees. Y2K is around the corner, and we’re on a field trip at the Okefenokee Swamp. Our lives are in the