Literature

To all the versions of myself who haven’t made it to a bathhouse, here’s what to expect. Start with the obscured visibility of a club. Add the purposeful disorientation of a haunted house. Multiply all of that by the atmospheric arousal of scrolling through Pornhub, as most everyone is wearing just a towel. Divide everything

Mom Has Her Boyfriend, I Have Her Cigarettes Morgan Talty Share article Smokes Last by Morgan Talty At the kitchen table, Frick fidgeted with a bag of pork rinds. Mom scrubbed dishes while the oiled pan on the stove got hot enough for her to lay down spoonfuls of batter in it. The sideboard was

I get more email in a day than I can keep up with, let alone respond to.  Most of us do. Collectively, we sent an estimated 319 billion emails each day in 2021. I’d love to know the breakdown of these messages. How many chains of rambling updates between old friends? How many are notes

Dear Readers, Happy Pride! It’s been a minute since I’ve written an editorial letter, but I’m doing so now to bring your attention to a special project that I’ve been working on at EL. I’m writing to introduce Both/And, a new limited essay series by trans and gender nonconforming writers of color—the first of its

It’s fitting that two of the first three essays in this roundup are centered on examining the Black American experience as one of horror. In a year when radical right-wing activists are truly leaning in, we’ve already seen record numbers of anti-LGBTQ legislation, the very real possibility of the end of Roe v. Wade, and

A Hoagie by Any Other Name Makes Me Just as Hungry Tonya  We want a hoagie. We want a fucking hoagie as soon as we wake up. Danny’s has the best in town. Right down the street. So here’s what we do. We drop Barb off down the T so she can ride into town

Delusion, when used as a literary device, is just another word for truth-seeking. Facts are not truth. Characters with irrational thinking have usually given the facts a try, and are frankly unimpressed. Instead, they develop an extreme conviction that, held up against the traditionally accepted facts or reality, seems ludicrous. Even dangerous.  Yet I would

In South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, Imani Perry, an Alabama native, returns to the South and meets with Southerners to chronicle their stories, past and present—from Henry Bibb, an enslaved man from New Orleans forced to rub salt brine into the bleeding back of

Pankaj Mishra’s return to fiction, Run and Hide, depicts the emotional and social costs exacted by the relentless drive for self-advancement and material progress on the inner lives of individuals as well as nations. The novel traces the intertwined trajectories of Arun, Aseem and Virendra—three students of the premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), described

A few years ago, the internet lit up with a story about a bride nicknamed “Canadian Susan,” who demanded her guests fork over $1,500 each to help bankroll her wedding to her childhood sweetheart. The details were exquisite: A psychic had convinced her to choose the more expensive venue. Her role models were the Kardashians.

Even as a millennial growing up in the ‘90s and aughts, it was rare to read a book that featured a queer protagonist, let alone a whole Heartstopper cast. I searched hard, despite not knowing exactly what I was searching for.  Most queer adults I know didn’t have an adolescence or coming of age that

In Our Town, There Are No Strangers Alexis Schaitkin Share article Excerpt from Part I of Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin We lived high above the rest of the world. Our town sat in the narrow aperture between mountains, the mountains forested, the forests impenetrable. A cool, damp place: ferns pushing up between rocks, moss on

Angela Garbes hadn’t planned to write another book on motherhood. Her first book Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy, a reported investigation of pregnancy in exuberant and detailed prose, was published in 2018. But during the isolating dawn of the pandemic, Garbes began ruminating on the question: “What

In 2013, Ostap Slyvynsky, a writer and translator who lives in Lviv, was invited by a composer friend to collaborate on a performance for a music festival in Donetsk, shortly before the city was occupied by pro-Russian militants. “It was very vibrant,” Ostap recalled. “There was a huge arts community there, and they created an

In thinking about this reading list, I considered writing about “overlooked” Kentucky writers. I realized, quickly, that this would be redundant. Even someone like Wendell Berry, who is well known in Southern literary circles, is far from a household name. To make any list of Kentucky writers is to call attention to a kind of

I May Not Be Flaming But I Know Heat Duplexes for whatever is the antonym of coming out When I said full homo, I was lying. I just meant I loved you. I lied, saying I just loved you. There was no such thing as just love. There is no such thing as just love

Outsiders often perceive truths invisible to the majority. They tend to observe the scene more carefully. Like newborns, they must learn how to fit into a new world.   For me, as with many immigrants, it is not always comfortable to be an outsider. After emigrating from The Bahamas—to the United States, India, Spain—the very

Just like we don’t choose who we love, we don’t choose the iconic blockbuster hits of our youth that go on to build up and break down our conceptions of love, relationships, and sexuality. I grew up in rural Texas, in a town so small the high school marching band played when the Home Depot