Literature

Photo by Sofya Badkhen “We Live Without Touch” is a found poem. Composed of fourteen English translations of the first two lines of a famous 1933 poem by Osip Mandelstam, it is a timely meditation that amplifies the lines. We live, but feel no land at our feet,Our senses grew numb in this country of

Plants don’t make the easiest protagonists. They’re largely silent and immobile; they rarely emote; they lack big brown eyes. When I consider the sub-genre of novels about famous writers’ pets (Woolf’s Flush, Nunez’s Mitz), I glance apologetically at the half-dead succulent on my windowsill. When will it have its day?  Honestly, I often feel this

My Student Loans Would Prefer Me Dead Click on images to enlarge Forgiveness Your Job 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,

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for writer Ross White’s poetry collection, Charm Offensive, which will be published by Eyewear Publishing this July. White is the designer and author of Valley of Want, a finalist for Electric Lit’s Best Book Cover of 2022 contest. Charm Offensive, Ross White’s debut poetry collection, explores the space

There’s a quote from novelist John Green that wonderfully captures the power and magic of shopping indie: “You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that’s the secret weapon of the bookstore—no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers.” In

Rachel Heng’s sophomore novel is a sprawling, scrupulously researched marvel. At once a coming-of-age love story and a tale of political turmoil that takes readers through decades of Singaporean history, The Great Reclamation follows its smart but shy protagonist, Ah Boon, from childhood into adulthood, as he falls in love, makes his way beyond the

When I got a callback over a year ago for the leading lady in a musical revival Billy Porter was set to direct in New York, I sang for Porter himself.  It was the second project of his I had gotten a callback for that year, having come in for the lead of a trans

My book, The Dead Are Gods, centres around my friendship with Larissa, who I met in my early teens in early aughts London. She died in 2018, a death that shook me to my core. Together, we were fixtures on the rock ‘n roll scene in the city, and found home in each other, both

Photo by Pedro Soares Just published in March, The Drinker of Horizons (translated by David Brookshaw) brings to a close Mia Couto’s captivating Sands of the Emperor trilogy: The story of late nineteenth-century Mozambique seen mainly through the lens of a love affair between Imani, a young, mission-educated VaChopi, and a Portuguese sergeant named Germano de

Gone in the Desert and Never Coming Home Share article The Disappeared by Andrew Porter I have a photograph of Daniel on the last day I ever saw him. This would have been in 2005, just after we’d moved into our first house in San Antonio, our starter house, as my wife still refers to

“A disconsolate brown man in an unabashedly gentrified neighborhood is the beginning of a below-the-fold news item,” thinks Eduardo, the central character in Alejandro Varela’s new collection of interconnected stories, The People Who Report More Stress. He is sitting on a park bench, just moments after an emotionally devastating hookup, when he delivers this blunt

When I was 15, my family moved to a new city, and I transferred to a new high school. It was our second move in three years, and I was not handling the change well. Depressed, anxious, and terribly lonely, I did what most emotionally unstable teenagers do: devoted myself to a niche of pop

At a certain point while I was writing the stories in my short story collection, The Disappeared, I began to notice that all of the stories I was writing were set in either San Antonio, where I currently live, or in Austin, which is the next closest major city to me, about an hour and

God Has Definitely Forsaken Us Plagues First it was frogs, then locusts, then remote aerial drone strikes. Clearly God was punishing us. God was punishing us but we were happy because at least we knew that God existed. All the liquid turned to blood. The water in our Brita filters and the fountain at the

And these things,that live by going away, know that you praise them; fleeting,they look to us for rescue, us, the most fleeting of all.Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” The author of twenty-five novels and short stories, Dominique Fabre is a student of philosophy, a photographer, globetrotter, and high school teacher who leads writing workshops

Unlike the narratives created in both literature and film, selling one’s soul usually isn’t a literal Faustian bargain. Despite our devilish fantasies, it’s not Al Pacino leaning across a desk, asking us to sign away our innermost being for fame and fortune, scantily clad sylphs gyrating in the background, urging us towards our own temptation.

A Taxonomy of Gay Animals The owl wore my tank top. The hippo swam in rice pudding. The tree was actually broccoli. The fish were made of wood. I’m lying, except for the part about the owl wearing my tank top. It’s a gay thing, and I’ll explain why. In my world, we have an

“Listen to the local voices here on the ground, not some sages sitting at the center of global power. Please start your analysis with the suffering of millions of people, rather than geopolitical chess moves. Start with the columns of refugees …” Last March, shortly after Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine began, the Ukrainian writer