Literature

The Diminishing Returns of a Prodigal Crush Mark Chiusano Share article Swiss Summer by Mark Chiusano Teresa saw him out of the corner of her eye first, her usual lunchtime walk off the Bahnhofstrasse bringing her past a glittering section of the lake. Just a touch of the lake every afternoon to get her through

When it comes to short fiction, the past year has been filled to the brim with stellar collections that have opened our eyes and hearts to worlds beyond the one we inhabit. These stories are liminal, surreal, and global. They celebrate families—both chosen and biological—as well as ambition, desire, myths, and the bodies that house

Tis the season for some literary pageantry and Electric Literature is hosting our third annual “Best Book Cover of the Year” tournament. You, our beloved readers, will decide a winner amidst a sea of book covers that published in 2022 via an interactive poll on our Twitter and Instagram stories starting today. We encourage you to embrace the competitive

There’s no denying that this has been an exceptional year for poetry. Throughout 2022, we’ve read intimate, lyrical, political poetry that has experimented in all areas of craft, most notably form. But what has been, perhaps, most exciting, has been the return of many of our most well-loved masters, all of whom have managed to

The poems in Michael Chang’s latest collection, Almanac of Useless Talents, are punk jazz or noise hip hop—avant-garde and anarchist. Intertextual and reality. Surreal and real. Ugly and pretty. Crystal-clear and obscure. Confident and confessional. Serious and absurd. I speak in binaries, but Chang’s poems are anything but. They deconstruct binaries. Poetry is often the

Your Zoom Camera Is Not a Mirror “Authors Fidget Online” by Michael Dahlie At the beginning of her reading, this lifestyle memoirist announced that she was struggling to quit vaping and, thus, would be chewing nicotine gum that evening. It was clear that her efforts were not going well, however, and during the presentation she

This has been a particularly powerful year for Latinx and Caribbean diaspora poetry. While perusing these ten collections, two vital things made themselves abundantly clear: this first is just how strongly interwoven our community truly is. Many of the poets in this list reference each other, whether through poem dedications or in the acknowledgements pages

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