Literature

Artists have long been notorious for their wellness of body and mind. Indisputable experts in life performance, these bastions of creativity are an infallible resource for healthy habits to live by. To optimize your holistic potential, consider The Famous Artist Wellness Plan (FAWP)™.  Or…don’t. Wake and quickly smoke opium (Proust).  Swallow uppers to counteract the

Ireland. We’re having a moment. In the Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh translated our elliptical “chat” into silences and irrationalities that allowed the whole world to understand the melancholy in Hiberno-english symploce. With the blue-eyed boy Paul Mescal as an avatar of young Irish men, global audiences have come to see unflattering GAA shorts and

It’s not entirely right to say that literature is starved for complex, chaotic, endearing LGTBQIA+ characters. Starved in the mainstream, sure. We are just now emerging into a post-Love, Simon popular universe in which young queer people of today do just a little bit more than come out to their Oscar-Award-Winning-Actor-Portrayed parent and embark on

Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of

Family and place make us. Whether the relationship to where, and who, we come from is complicated or not, all poets must reckon with these two fundamental things that shape who we are, our worldviews, and how we learn to love. For Chicanx poet José Olivarez, Chicago and his Mexican family are his bedrocks and

Whether or not you’ve watched season 2 of The White Lotus, Mike White’s anthology series, you’ve witnessed Jennifer Coolidge’s frenzied intonations onboard a yacht: “These gays, they’re trying to murder me!” Coolidge plays Tanya, a wealthy woman who finds herself at the center of a conspiracy to murder her for her money. The executors of

Let’s face it: half of our favorite stories wouldn’t exist if the characters just went to therapy. The Trojan War would’ve lasted nine years, and Bruce Wayne would own a normal basement with a ping pong table.  Part of the reason so many stories resist therapy is that 1) mental illness has been unrecognized and

You Can’t Come Back If Your Memories Are Missing Chloe N. Clark Share article Accidental Girls by Chloe N. Clark When I see Halley in a bar, years and years past when she disappeared, I know it’s her so quickly and completely that it makes me gasp. The Halley of her thirties is leaner than

A century ago, Robert Lopez’s grandfather Sixto left Puerto Rico for Brooklyn. Puerto Rico would have been a U.S. territory for decades at that point. “In theory, Sixto wasn’t an immigrant,” Lopez writes in his new book Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure, “but of course he was.”  Dispatches from

This essay, by Addie Tsai, is the first 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 fifteen weeks, on Thursday, EL will publish an installment of Both/And, with the series running through spring and into Pride Month. At a time

There has been plenty of handwringing among some over whether it’s too soon to write pandemic literature, but these five books answer that question with a firm no. Each is set in the lockdown days while being about so much more than the pandemic. Louise Erdrich The Sentence Harper, 2021 Louise Erdrich’s most recent novel

As a reviewer who is fluent in both English and Russian, I approach the reading of such works as Alexander Veytsman’s «Демография дремлющих душ» / A Succession of Somnolent Souls (‎Im Press/M-Graphics, 2022), translated by Laurence Bogoslaw, as if in stereo, considering the Russian original and the English translation as independent, but related, works of

Photo by Lava Lavanda / Unsplash First Language Not sure what to make of the title            (titles can be misleading, like                        Chinatown or Popiół i diament or that blue–white–red trilogy            by Krzysztof K.) we microwaved                        a bottomless bucket of buttered popcorn and ignoring the subtitles watched            człowiek of sixty in a tattered bathrobe                        spread faded

Scene from Performance Survivor’s Syndrome, based on a work by Andriy Bondarenko, Harmyder Theater (Lutsk, Ukraine), directed by Ruslana Porytska (@ruslana.porytska), starring Vadym Khainskyi (@vadym_khainskyi) and Pavlo Porytskyi (@porytskyi) / Photo by Ihor Dynia Ukrainian drama has become an essential genre for registering the shock and pain experienced by millions of Ukrainians since February 2022

“All our AI Frankenstein stories,” the author writes, “warn us that AI will destroy us, but far louder than that, they promise that the future is going to be mind-blowing and epic.” Will we heed the warnings? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the literary work that most clearly established the conventions of science fiction as we

The editors of World Literature Today are nominating the May/June 2022 “Muses” issue for the annual Best Cover Contest sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the principal organization for the editorial leaders of magazines and websites published in the United States. ASME members choose finalists and winners in ten categories, and covers are

Photo by Alex Arbelaez / Flickr Martil It’s okay to veer toward Tetouan,to stay a while,to be released from a pair of pliers, the two mountainsthat have gripped Tetouan since Tetouan rose,a whitedovein a cage of mountains.There is no escape but to the open sea,the sand that saves us from touching rock,the water where we

Mai Nardone’s dazzling linked story collection’s Welcome Me to the Kingdom exposes the raw wounds beneath the sparkle of Bangkok, his hometown and the original playboy city. Gamblers, bar girls, street kids, sexpats, models, and the model-adjacent populate this stunning debut. Funny, moving, and evocative of the grit of survival without the sheen of the