Literature

When I started to write about motherhood a decade ago, the topic still carried a tinge of shame. Writers tended to fear motherhood would push them into some unsightly box, as if they’d succumbed to something less serious than the laudable material of their (non-mothering) peers. In the Los Angeles Times in 2017, Sarah Menkedick

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

As a poet, I think about how a poem’s formal elements impact its content. To put it another way: form is the container into which we pour our material, and like water, the poem takes on the form’s shape. A coming-of-age novel, film or TV show is often regaled in prose, with a linear structure;

Orlando is Virginia Woolf at play—a piece of frippery, pure queer pleasure, a little romantic, a little coy, hinting at secrets. I have returned to Orlando repeatedly over the years, most recently after a few lifetimes away. Each time, something different awaits. To return to Orlando is to travel in time. Woolf shows us how

I first visited Croatia in 2000, drawn to the place my grandparents were from, the language they spoke, and the food I tasted in their Dayton, Ohio home. I’ve since been more than two dozen times—including for my wedding!—and have written about everything from night-foraging for truffles, how Croatia invented the cravat (tie), the “healing

The World Will Always Drop Her Sarah LaBrie Share article Tender by Sarah LaBrie The girl is going to be late for school and Melora is going to be late for work, but Melora’s daughter is always late for school and Melora is always late for work. Melora sits in the kitchen and watches her

In the weeks that followed the horrific attack on October 7th, we saw as one of the largest movements in American history rose up to stop the incoming genocide in Gaza. To date, Israel has killed at least 40,000 people in its unprecedented campaign in the small, two-mile wide stretch of land, destroying civilian, political,

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Casualties of Truth, the new novel by acclaimed writer Lauren Francis-Sharma, which will be published by Grove Atlantic on February 11th, 2025. You can preorder it here. Prudence Wright seems to have it all: a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, D.C.; and the

The World Wasn’t Made Straight Up and Down by Heather Lanier The cherry tomatoes look like little planets on their vines, their centimeter-sized axes tilted this way and that way in the sun. It’s September. Will they ripen enough for next week’s salad? Will they sweeten into October? I don’t know. I’m a clueless, newbie

Tracy O’Neill’s Woman of Interest is a quest memoir: a voyage there and back, out and in. The book recounts the author’s search for her birth mother during the frightening heights of covid, “a pandemic that had miniaturized life.” Enlisting the help of a PI named Joe, a former CIA operative, O’Neill embarks on a

Nigerian literature possesses a remarkable ability to create female characters who defy the ordinary. These women don’t just exist within their stories; they embody a resilience that transcends the page. They redefine what it means to navigate the complexities of motherhood, societal pressures, and personal battles in a world that often seems intent on testing

Twenty-five years ago, Jhumpa Lahiri began publishing stories that offered America a rare glimpse into South Asian American lives. But Interpreter of Maladies and Lahiri’s other well-known early work represent only an opening into South Asian American stories. Lahiri and her contemporaries, including Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Bharati Mukherjee, were formative for spotlighting the community’s

Men on the verge have dominated literature for decades. Raskalnikov wandered the streets of Moscow, driven to murder by philosophy; Holden Caulfield let us know we’re all goddamn phonies. Gatsby held parties as an act of passive aggression; Humbert Humbert absconded with a young teen. All the while, women protagonists were either absent entirely or

The World Wasn’t Made Straight Up and Down by Heather Lanier The cherry tomatoes look like little planets on their vines, their centimeter-sized axes tilted this way and that way in the sun. It’s September. Will they ripen enough for next week’s salad? Will they sweeten into October? I don’t know. I’m a clueless, newbie

It began, for me, with Xena. I was ten years old, living in South Africa. Home alone after school, seeking a snack, perhaps. I heard the haunting melody of Bulgarian Bagpipes lilting from the lounge. I followed the melody. There, on the TV, a warrior woman rode a palomino horse out of the mists, stripped

My Chili Tastes Like Failure and Death Grocery Shopping Click to enlarge and scroll 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

At the beginning of Khuê Phạm’s debut novel Brothers and Ghosts, translated by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey, the narrator makes a confession: “I don’t know how to pronounce my own name.” It’s not something you hear often and something unimaginable for many. But for Kiều, the young Vietnamese German writer at the center of

“Whose story is this?” workshop critiquers often ask when a character in a manuscript seems to be narrating someone else’s experience or when a different character might be more intimately related to the story than the one the writer chose. But sometimes a story belongs to more than one person.  My mother is one of