Literature

The social media editor of Electric Literature is responsible for ensuring the widest possible audience for Electric Literature articles, using both targeted outreach and organic sharing. You’ll be actively engaged with our 225,000 Facebook, 270,000 Twitter, and 36,000 Instagram followers: scheduling posts, interacting, and establishing a consistent, informed, and appealing social media voice. But you’ll

I’m the type of person that plans their travels around bookstores. A new city to explore means a route through bookish haunts: a walking tour of shops dedicated to words, my maps app aglitter with saved spots waiting to be discovered. I went to Maastricht once just to see a gorgeous 13th-century church converted into

A nonbinary teenager on their way home from an eating -disorder treatment center who tries to convince a stranger she is not a vampire, an aspiring fashion designer/dry-cleaning worker who develops an obsession with a customer, a community of people with Hansen’s disease that welcome and attempt to coexist with a newly arrived group of

On Halloween morning when I was fourteen, I got up extra early and padded into my mom’s room, where she had left her wedding dress hanging for me on the closet door: Victorian-style, head-to-toe lace, with a high collar and a tidy line of buttons all the way to the small of the back. It

In his latest novel, Oh, maligna (Acantilado, 2019), Jorge Edwards (b. 1931, Santiago) pays homage to one of Chile’s most important literary icons, Pablo Neruda, and fictionalizes an important episode in the poet’s life as a young man. In 1927, shortly after publishing his acclaimed Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) but barely

Growing up in Manila, my idea of certain countries was shaped primarily by novels. I equated John Steinbeck’s California novels with the United States, Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth) with China, and E.M. Forster (A Passage to India) with India. The only “Mexican book” I could remember was Steinbeck’s The Pearl. What’s wrong with

The Daring Life of Philippa Cook the Rogue Morgan Thomas Morgan Thomas is a writer from the Gulf Coast. Their work has appearedor is forthcoming in Vice, Ms, The Ploughshares Blog, and The Greensboro Review. Share article “The Daring Life of Philippa Cook the Rogue” by Morgan Thomas Wherein is treated how they came to be a

John Darnielle wants to get under your skin. His third book, Devil House, follows Gage Chandler, a true crime writer embarking on an obsessive downward spiral. Chandler, like Darnielle, is unbothered by the gory details of the crimes he covers. But he’s starting to be disturbed by the ethical implications of his work. Using true

I get ready in front of the big mirror in the front, taking the black crushed velvet cloak from where it hangs between my mother’s fur coats and sweeping it over my black jeans and black t-shirt, fastening it under my chin, pulling up the hood. I set the fangs inside my mouth, feeling the

If you spot a wealthy person in fiction, they’re very likely to be the villain—just like in real life! My novel Good Rich People is about a bored, wealthy couple who play games with disadvantaged people—just like in real life!  There are many (allegedly) fictional stories about how privileged people take advantage of the less

Olivia Colman plays Leda in The Lost Daughter / Courtesy www.imdb.com An Italian film scholar reviews Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter and finds a powerful interpretation that, although it sometimes strays from the original, deserves praise on its own merit. The glorious city of Naples is absent in The Lost Daughter, directed

The Best Sex Takes Three Loads of Laundry Lint Before my lover and I have sex, I cover myself in lint. It’s not that we only have sex on lint day—as we call it—but it’s the best sex and on the days leading up to it, we get more and more excited. It takes three

I relish the fact that our most celebrated living writers are women.  There are of course the constant evocations of JMG Le Clezio, the Franco-Mauritian winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is also true that the literary history we are taught is dominated by names such as Marcel Cabon, Malcolm de Chazal,

Modern day feminism is a messy endeavor. More than 50 countries have liberalized their abortion laws in the past few decades while Roe v Wade hangs in the balance in the United States. Trans activism is reaching new heights and yet even once-celebrated feminist authors seem to struggle to legitimize trans women’s experiences or accept

When I was driving from Pennsylvania to Atlanta with all of my earthly belongings in my trunk, I stopped overnight in a North Carolina mountain town to split up the trip. Someone told me Boone was beautiful and underrated and it landed about halfway between where I was coming from and where I was going.

Weina Dai Randel burst onto the literary scene a number of years ago with her duology about Empress Wu Zetian, China’s first woman leader. After winning the prestigious Rita Award in 2017 and seeing her novels translated into seven languages, she is back now with a new historical novel set in 1940s Shanghai. Keeping with

Too often, popular fiction welcomes convenient last-minute solutions to the end of the world, even if the old cliché that things are darkest just before the dawn doesn’t match our lived experience. This misleading pattern lends itself well to epic-scale narratives largely reliant on a hero/villain dichotomy. Set the stage for total societal demise and

My Slut Shaming Ghost Can Go to Hell Gwen E. Kirby Share article Here Preached His Last The first time I see the ghost of George Whitefield, I’m fucking my neighbor Karl. We’re going at it with more enthusiasm than finesse, the way you do when things are new. I lift my head, I’m going