Literature

An Excerpt from Women Surrounded by Water by Patricia Coral Marriage Addictions I I remember how you cried when I walked towards you and took your hand in my hand. After the wedding, we danced all night in Casa de España to our favorite songs, to our friends’ joy, to our love. My feet were

When asked in an interview about her relationship to her home state, Maine novelist Elizabeth Strout balked. “That’s like asking me what’s my relationship with my own body,” she said. “It’s just my DNA.” That’s how I feel too—that Maine, where I was born and lived until my mid-20s, is so central to my selfhood

When I tell my therapist I put the ‘bi’ in Bipolar she asks to see me twice a week Click to enlarge sales lady says stop romanticizing the struggle Click to enlarge The post I Told My Therapist I Put the Bi In Bipolar appeared first on Electric Literature. Read the original article here

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers by Keetje Kuipers, which will be published by BOA Editions on April 8, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual. These unforgettable love

When the ominous appears in fiction, it increases anticipation and deepens empathy. As readers watch a character struggle with a feeling of unease caused by people or events, it offers them the pleasure of intimacy. Like the character, they have, in their own lives, questioned if something that urges wariness is real or imagined. As the matter

Do you remember it? When you changed? Or, stranger still, when you were between one thing and another? I do. When my breasts started to show beneath my T-shirt—buds, they called them, but it never felt like a flowering. In the dictionary under buds, it explains: in certain limbless lizards and snakes a limb bud

Raising Sons In a Forest Full of Fascists Julian Zabalbeascoa Share article Adela by Julian Zabalbeascoa Añon de Moncayo, June 1938 David and Marco, my two youngest, walk into the forest and return with wounded animals, branches that resemble people, leaves in the perfect shape of a star, colorful rocks for which they invent fantastical

“You’re Desi and gay–what’s that like?” This question was asked sometimes with a touch of fascination, that someone born and raised in the subcontinent can also be queer, or, more often, with concern: what it means to be queer in a country where the current conservative regime denied marriage equality in 2023 and where the

Zara Chowdhary’s The Lucky Ones is a devastating, timely memoir about survival, reclamation and what it means to exist on the margins of society and within your own familial unit. Zara speaks to us, raw and unfiltered, about growing up as a young muslim girl in Ahmedabad, India, in the aftermath of a train being

Early in noam keim’s debut collection of lyrical nonfiction, The Land is Holy, they awake panicked from a dream where they are running away from disaster, carrying only what is in their pack. They realize they have been called to do ancestral work, to unearth their family’s lineages, even as they are now estranged and

Email, we can probably all agree, is generally a bummer. At the moment, my inbox is a jumble of stressful news stories and tasks I’m behind on jammed alongside emails from friends I really do want to answer and sales on things I don’t need but will definitely spend some time scrolling. (I’d bet I’m

Whether we like it or not, literary history tends to follow a known path. In high school, we read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, and we are told this is the definitive book about The Dust Bowl. In college, we are introduced to T.S. Eliot’s long poem “The Waste Land” and told that

One of the first forms my creative writing students adopt is the list. I love a list for its generosity and promiscuity, its non-hierarchical logic and stochastic lineation, its tendency to produce itself: to advance—accumulate—through coincidences and association and proximity, reassembling under the approximate logic of adjacency and wish fulfillment. Anyone can write a list

Walking the Ghost by Adam Spiegelman September 25, 2022. It is a 40 minute walk from the nearest train station to the spot along the water in Queens where Nick died, two years ago today. There are two bridges to cross on the way there and the sky is a sullen gray like an ice

A Cruise Ship for the Disappeared Awaiting the Declassification of Documents at Some Point in the Near or Distant Future The cruise ship washed ashore, tipped sidelong, keel sunning itself beneath the cold November sky. The ship was a city block of aluminum alloy and wedged between two stone jetties. The area was roped off

My favorite book is a pale, mint green, Illustrated Junior Library edition with edges sprayed indigo blue. The girl on the cover wears a white pinafore over a practical plaid dress. Her two orangey-red braids fall around her shoulders, topped off with a wide-brimmed straw hat covered in freshly-picked flowers. She balances the hat with

For generations, in forms both practical and supernatural, the Haddesley family’s existence has been inseparable from the cranberry bog. Family lore has long led to a belief that their stewardship –– and their sacrifice of their patriarch to the bog –– yields a bog-wife who then marries and bears children for the patriarchal successor.  However,

In the fantasy books I read as a child, the hero was often unassuming, misunderstood, flustered, out of sync with the world. But then she’d learn the truth: she was actually a wizard. Or she could speak to animals. Or she could zoom between centuries, or cover unfathomable distances on the wings she never knew