Literature

When my partner of four years blindsided me with a breakup over the phone, I couldn’t help but turn to my favorite singer, the serially-burned-by-men-via-too-brief-phone calls Taylor Swift. My boyfriend was no Jake Gyllenhaal-esque male manipulator, but when Swift’s re-recording of her classic breakup album, Red (Taylor’s Version), came out three weeks later, it felt

I watched Scream for the first time when I was not quite 10 years old. I can date it so precisely because my parents and I were living in a townhouse that we rented for six months after moving from St. Louis, Missouri, to Huntsville, Alabama, where my father worked as a systems analyst for

In his newest book, What Is American Literature? (Oxford University Press, 2022), award-winning cultural commentator, translator, and editor Ilan Stavans, the publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, rereads an assortment of American literary classics through the prism of the Trump years, from

Everyone’s Sins Taste Delicious Except My Own Jane Flett Share article “The Sin Eater” by Jane Flett Everyone is silent as we stand around the corpse. Galina—the wife, the one who hired me today—is perched by the head. Her hands are folded like bird wings against her ribcage and I can hear the rub of

“Surprising … Rising from the surp. What is a surp anyways?” The narrator of How We Are Translated by Jessica Gaitán Johannesson questions. The Swedish word for “surprising,” on the other hand, translates to “överraskning”—which, when taken apart into “över” and “raska”—literally translates back to English as “to trod over something.” Word games like this

Antoine-François-Jean Claudet, [Multiple Exposures of the Moon] (1846–52), daguerreotype, 2019.47, ​​​​​Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel / Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Queer Exposures: Sexuality and Photography in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), by Ryan F. Long, is an innovative and original text that

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’re featuring Jubi Arriola-Headley a Blacqueer poet, author of original kink (Sibling Rivalry Press), and winner of the 2021 Housatonic Book Award. Check out the 6-week generative

I have always held a keen interest toward the processes of myth formation and how beliefs about family identity are handed down through generations. My debut novel Defenestrate tells the story of a family in the midst of reckoning with superstition and inheritance, the long-held beliefs that can shape both the collective identity of a

Completely at random, the world ended.Trade in shares was lively, the weather splendid.Lovers lay in beds and some on the sand.Artists painted nature, if not the lay of the land.Professors wrinkled brows and wrote of weighty things.The season was any season: fall and also spring. The plumber changed a pipe and mended a leak.The bridegroom’s

What You Call Your Territory I Call My Home What is another word for colony? The internet tells me my country has a dependency. Without being a possession of the United States, how could we have survived? Our veins needing the high of first world blood money. Maybe being a territory is not so bad,

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