Literature

One of our favorite things to do around the holidays is take a closer look at the writing we’ve published over the course of the year. We’re coping with difficult, tumultuous times, and inevitably, EL’s content reflects our larger context. In a year that began with a nearly rabid Covid variant, it was difficult to

David Leo Rice’s newest novel paints an unlikely and often uncanny portrait of the artist as a young man. In The New House, that young man is Jakob, the only child of promise in a family of Jewish outsider artists living in isolation in a surrealist approximation of rural New England. When they’re not taking

From reanimated skeletons to the manic dispatches of a roofing association president, The Commuter is our home to bite-sized and experimental flash fiction, poetry, and graphic narratives. Sign up for The Commuter’s newsletter to receive our latest burst of awe-inspiring poetry and prose every Monday, and read below for our top ten issues of the

If on a Country Road a Car Crash Bora Chung Share article The Frozen Finger by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur She opens her eyes. Darkness. Pitch black. Like someone has dropped a thick veil of black over her eyes. Not even a pinpoint of light to be seen. Has she gone blind? She

From weightloss pills and ghosts of preachers past, to trespassing and difficult mothers-in-law, Recommended Reading is EL’s acclaimed home to a wide array of masterful short fiction. We’re proud to be one of the largest free digital archives of short fiction featuring many of today’s (and tomorrow’s) most important literary voices. Today we are sharing

Bushra Rehman’s newest novel Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion  follows Razia, a young Pakistani Muslim girl growing up in 1980s Corona, a neighborhood in Queens, New York. Razia’s world consists of her family, her close friends, who are also Pakistani Muslim girls from her neighborhood, and her deep desire to have bigger experiences through

You should watch Euphoria, a friend told me while we were on a walk during our young daughters’ dance class. I wasn’t sure why she would suggest this. Particularly in the context of our conversation: I was confiding in her about the anxiety that felt like it had been boiling inside of me for weeks,

Jonathan Dee’s new novel, Sugar Street, is a fantastic subversion of an old American story. The nameless white man, sinful, remorseful, arrives in a new town with a hope to start again—except in Dee’s version, rather than westward, the man has gone east. He avoids the freeways—“full of libertarian possibility”—because he’s worried about cameras. He

Drowning Under the Perfect Wave Waves of the California Coast Mavericks, where surfers compete to slide inside the emerald room of the largest tube. Pescadero, where girls drip tinctures under their tongues to sleep awhile, while boys hide bottles in glove boxes. San Onofre, where a hushed shore conceals riptides, a low current counting down

In Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, the ocean is queer. Survival is subversive. Tiny shrimp scurry around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, scrappy and alive in a place hostile to all life. A yeti crab dances for food. The goldfish, an animal we can only imagine

The world seems to be moving faster and faster, asking us to keep up and keep on with its changes. It’s dizzying. Between my general mental chatter and the noise of today, my desire for slow paths into quietude has increasingly grown. For the lucky and privileged, the pandemic served as a pause to reflect

The train lurches into Penn Station. I check my phone: it’s noon, two hours before my appointment. I climb out of my seat, gather my belongings, and text my best friend, Meredith. We manage to locate each other in this grimy underground world. Her blond hair bounces as she walks toward me. We’re almost 30

In Which Side Are You On, 21-year-old Reed returns to Los Angeles, his hometown, to call on his ailing grandmother. But once there, he uses the opportunity to finally break the news to his parents: he’s dropping out of Columbia. Why participate in the neoliberal system that perpetuates white supremacy and inequity? He would rather

Unlike any other genre, mystery breaks the world apart. Sometimes this shattering comes from a death at a dinner party. Other times it happens when a family member goes missing in broad daylight. No matter how things fall apart, to solve a mystery, the pieces must come back together by the end. To do this,

Ed and the Movies Robert Glück Share article Ed and the Movies by Robert Glück Seven on a warm June evening. The glossy light is full, the shadows are mild. Little brown birds make thin music, weak metallic trills. I’m walking through Ed’s garden to his front door. It’s overgrown and orderly, the smell of

When the pandemic erupted, I was in the midst of leaving my lucrative corporate job and transitioning to graduate school. I had returned to my parents’ home, logging onto client meetings from my childhood bedroom during the day, losing hours to fanfiction on Archive of our Own (Ao3) at night. As the terror of the

From Iago, Claudius, Richard III, and the murderous Macbeths in Shakespeare, to Choderlos de Laclos’s master manipulators in Les Liasons Dangereuses, to Nabokov’s silver-tongued Humbert Humbert (who seduces the reader as effectively as he seduces young Lolita), opportunists abound in literature. My last novel, The Answer to Everything, was about an impecunious artist who starts

Dear Reader, It is not an exaggeration to say that a large part of the incipient writing career I have, I owe to the platform that Electric Lit gave me when The Commuter published my story, “The Ugliest Babies in the World,” in October 2020. Editor Kelly Luce found my story in the slush pile—me,