Literature

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,

Mary-Alice Daniel has been on a journey, literally, across continents. She documents her experiences in A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which is a memoir about places, from which she has been uprooted, assimilated into, revisited, and settled, giving the reader a close look into the lives of African diasporas. Daniel has a way of

Twenty Questions with a Philosopher Iguana When I Look Up an Iguana Turns His Head Away From the Sun He asks: What is beginning? Something I never notice, like my nails growing. I hiccup, forgetting why I’m waterside or that we’re both abandoned like balloons at a wedding. A foraging pelican winks at me twice.

In her debut collection, Under My Bed and Other Essays, Jody Keisner meticulously unpacks her fears, revealing their complex interiors. Her subject matter is diverse, ranging from 1980s horror films to parenting to adoption to wildfires to reincarnation to autoimmune disease to murder. She weaves research throughout her personal stories, which has the effect of

Hi everyone! Dorian here, back with another vlog. You all were absolutely blowing up the comments section on my last video with things like, “Dorian! How do you look so young?”, “What’s your secret??”, and “It is not humanly possible to look this good for this long.” So flattering! I wanted to give you guys

The thing about being from Queens is that when you leave Queens you realize there’s no other place in the world like it. It lives in your imagination like a wild-flower-weed, its roots deep in the hard rock soil of Queens.  My novel, Roses in the Mouth of a Lion, takes place in my home

When I first started dating my partner, I mentioned to his family that I was from Fort Wayne, Indiana, a town famous for having a mayor named Harry Baals (pronounced the dirty way) and for being, according to Men’s Health magazine, the third most sexually satisfied city in America, three years running. Despite being armed

Nivedita, a mixed-race graduate student in Dusseldorf, has it (kind of) figured out. She runs a popular online blog about being a mixed-race German woman and has a staunch support system in her cousin Priti and an ok boyfriend. Most importantly, she studies with Saraswati—a hot, hotshot, woman-of-color professor who teaches her everything she needs to

Nov 1: Maybe I’ll just get some bad first drafting done, and that’s okay! Happy to be focusing on my writing this November. Nov 2: Realized I have no plot. It needs more vampires . . . ? Sign up for acupuncture, cupping, and salt therapy to tap into my source energy. Nov 4: Order

The Irresistible Pull of an Unhealthy Life Zein El-Amine Share article Is This How You Eat a Watermelon? by Zein El-Amine The kidney was secured and the doctors were ready to operate on Ghassan the following morning. But right now not one, not two, but three doctors stand at the foot of his bed. Ghassan

I call my book, Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster, a book-length essay or set of interconnected essays but, really, this is a failure of language. Trouble is I simply don’t have words yet for what I’m trying to do, and for what the sui generis women on this list have already done. I long

One recent evening, I brought to a simmer a pint of dry, hazy cider, then draped into the pan a whole glistening trout. I diced an onion, having torn off the papery outer layers; having peeled back the thin, translucent membrane still clinging to the pearlescent surface of the bulb, and browned it in a