Literature

It’s one thing for a book to pass the Bechdel Test or give readers a glimpse inside Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own—it’s another for a book to let that room extend from cover to cover. After spending far too many of my school years reading books about cis boys and men, as an adult,

Her Life Is a Borrowed Room in This Open House ​​​​​​​​​Janis Hubschman Share article Open House by Janis Hubschman The realtor had let herself into the house on Sunday morning while Frankie slept—overslept, rather—and baked something sweet-smelling. Now she was darting around the kitchen, opening cabinets and banging them closed, while monologuing into her Bluetooth

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of When the Harvest Comes by editor-in-chief Denne Michele Norris, which will be published by Random House on April 15, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. In this heart-wrenching debut novel, a young Black gay man reckoning with the death of his father must confront his painful past—and

In Tony Tulathimutte’s new short story collection, Rejection, a man fantasizes that his “individual spermatozoa are so tall and charismatic that they’re elected to lead the G8 nations”; a group chat splinters over a bloodthirsty raven and a “coochie juice” stain; and a terminally online recluse ascends “from human to spam.” Brain-twisting, incisive, and laugh-out-loud

Li-Young Lee’s first collection in a decade, The Invention of the Darling, remixes many themes from his five previous poetry books: family, exile, intimacy, and the divine. Yet somehow these plain verses feel fresh. In “Counting the Ten Thousand Things,” Lee writes, “Start over in secret, at nightwith my mother and father and the escape

My whole life I’ve felt like a bad girl, like something was inherently wrong with me that I couldn’t manage to play the part society (and my immigrant family) had carefully laid out for me. From coming out to being splashed across headlines for listing “sex work” as a work experience on LinkedIn, I always

When I first read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, I was straight. Or, at least I thought I was. It was 2014, and I was a sixteen-year-old closeted bisexual in the Pennsylvania suburbs, with nothing to my name but a mildly successful hipster-themed Tumblr blog. The novel’s ending, in which Edna walks confidently into the sea

If the rise in popularity of Dark Academia has taught us anything, it’s that readers love a campus novel with an eerie bent. Of course, the murder-y campus aesthetic extends well before the #darkacademia hashtag garnered over 100 million posts on TikTok. Arguably first, there was The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel that introduced

“September,” an excerpt from Come By Here by Neesha Powell-Ingabire YAHA The tour guide calls our class’s attention to an alligator on a log, napping to a symphony of songbirds and swaying bald cypress trees. Y2K is around the corner, and we’re on a field trip at the Okefenokee Swamp. Our lives are in the

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