Literature

I’m in the fourth exam room with one of my last patients of the day, late afternoon light streaming in through the windows behind him. We’re about to go over the results of his scans after several months of therapy for metastatic kidney cancer, and as I turn from the computer screen, squinting against the

Have you ever harbored a desire so fierce that you were consumed by it? Maybe to fall in love, or shut down a toxic mine, or reconnect with a lost family member, or move to another country? And during the day you plot out how to achieve this goal, and during the night you dream

What is the role of the past in our psychic universe? What happens to us if we learn only later about terrible things that took place in our streets, our parks, our own families, revealing dark tunnels beneath everything we thought we understood? Questions like these may strike anyone who grew up in the former

The Mating Call That Occupies My Memory Author’s Note: These pieces are written in the style called “skaz”—a term coined by early-Soviet Formalists to describe an oral bard’s voice on the page. Somewhere between prose poetry, theatrical performance, and rambling essays—dense and personal, holding eye contact with the reader. It was particularly popular in Ukraine,

It’s March Madness, and you know what that means (or, if you’re like most of us, maybe you kind of don’t. Basketball? Competing colleges? Probably a lot of drinking?): it’s time to fill out all sorts of brackets entirely unrelated to actual March Madness. We may not always be up on all the sports news,

For writers at every stage, the publishing industry can feel inaccessible. There are so many steps between drafting a book and seeing it out in the world. Especially for debut hopefuls, it’s more than a little intimidating: how do we know what we don’t know? Meanwhile, those who’ve already published may have different unknowns related to

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