Literature

The question at the heart of If I Survive You is “What are you?”  Jonathan Escoffery’s debut collection of linked stories follows a Jamaican American family of mixed heritage that migrates to Miami in the 1970s. Trelawny, the second of two boys and the main character in most of the stories, is about nine years

Whether you refer to it as “hot goss,” “spilling the tea,” or attempt to sound refined by using “talk of the town” (we’re looking at you, The New Yorker), everyone loves a good juicy story, especially those involving schadenfreude. We delight in the downfall of our friends and strangers because, for a little while, we

There are very few things in the world that we at Electric Lit love more than bookstores, but one of those things is pets. We are absolutely obsessed with our furry friends. It only stands to reason that to our minds, there is no greater place in the world than a bookstore with a pet.

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

Seán Hewitt begins All Down Darkness Wide in a graveyard with a brief encounter with a stranger. There, surrounded by ghosts and prayers, Hewitt and the man attempt to conjure memories of their past loves and attach them to what they feel at that moment. It’s an unforgettable opening image for what is ultimately a

The tried and true sad-girls-in-New-York-City genre has been around for ages: Esther Greenwood descending into a haze of depression during her magazine internship in The Bell Jar, the titular star of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie risking it all for a new wardrobe and financial freedom, and of course, any one of Edith Wharton’s heroes and

Set on the idyllic New England campus of an elite art school called Wrynn, and situated against the backdrop of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Antonia Angress’ debut novel Sirens & Muses is an exemplary depiction of what can occur at the intersection of art and adolescence. This coming-of-age novel follows the lives of four

Under a microscope, a virus looks like nothing; it’s too small for a conventional microscope to see. Under an electron microscope, coronaviruses look like a crown: a wide circle of membrane as the base and ornaments of spike proteins sticking up like precious jewels. Indeed, these proteins are precious to the virus; they bind to

I used to think I was afraid of death because it is the only problem in life you can’t fix with a good retelling. My own death, I mean—the potential dying of my loved ones did not grip me so tightly; such deaths seemed remote in a way that the sudden failing of my own

Our Decades-Long Friendship Has Become a Liability Katie Moulton Share article Pre-Existing Conditions by Katie Moulton I got the house off Natural Bridge Road for a great price, especially for spring when everybody wants to move. The previous owner had died in the recliner in the back room I planned to make my home office and

In 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah, author of ten novels, including By the Sea, Paradise, and Desertion, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” Gurnah’s newest novel, Afterlives, which captures the devastating effects

In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?“, we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we feature Aimee Suzara, a poet, playwright, and performer whose book, Souvenir, was a Willa Award Finalist (2015). Check out her 6-week online workshop on archival materials and

I have always been drawn to the uncanny, to the strange that doesn’t feel strange, to the stories that can frighten us at the same time that they reveal the brutal truths of our realities. As Lydia Dietz says in Beetlejuice when asked why she can see the spirits of the dead, “Live people ignore

How to Build a Dad Out of Bricks A riddle in which were they heavy or were they bright My father was a bag of bricks my mother carried around, stone enough for foundations but stubbornly refusing to become a building. My father was a right pallet of bricks of the opinion that buildings were

This year, Scotland is host to a year-long celebration called A Year of Stories 2022. A celebration of the great storytellers of Caledonia that have set the world ablaze, we will, of course, be harking back to classics like Robert Burns, Muriel Spark, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as the more recent likes of

How do I start this story about friendship and relationships and the power of a good book? If I were any younger, I don’t think I would be able to write this story at all. It’s about my friend Susan and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.  It’s about carrying grief for the past quarter-century.  It’s

In her first book, Beth Macy chronicled how the Sackler family, through Purdue Pharma, used deceptive marketing tactics to push healthcare providers to prescribe opioids. If Dopesick, now also a Hulu miniseries for which Macy served as writer and producer, offered a gripping answer to the question of how the US was plunged into the

A Landlocked Parisian Swims in Her Fantasies Barbara Molinard Share article “Happiness” by Barbara Molinard Clarisse de Karadec, née Desanges, hurried to the table; the deed to her house was there, where she’d put it the night before, amid the various papers and the enormous heap of envelopes. God, she’d been scared! Joyously she embraced