Literature

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! The world of children, aburst with animal energy, strikes only children like me as strange and perhaps a bit vulgar. So we observe. Our lack of siblings makes us unlike our

Stay Forever in the Office of the Mind Leland Cheuk Share article Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! “Office of the Mind” by Leland Cheuk On the first day of work, I sat at my desk in

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Sally Rooney breaks new ground for herself in her recent release Beautiful World, Where Are You, when two queer characters finally have sex on-page. Famous novelist Alice and warehouse worker Felix,

If reading Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg’s Robot (Penguin Classics, 2021), translated by Tomasz Mirkowicz, makes you think about Stanislaw Lem’s work, you’re not alone. Indeed, both Robot and Lem’s His Master’s Voice (published in Polish just a few years apart) take up the fascinating but insoluble problem of whether or not we’re alone in the universe. One

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! In O Beautiful, Elinor is a 42-year-old ex-model from North Dakota on assignment in the Bakken, a career-making offer that comes unexpectedly from her grad school mentor and former lover. Though

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! For a very brief period of time, I wanted to be a doctor. My medical aspirations were not, however, borne of so noble a desire as to ease suffering—frankly, what I

Mitchell River National Park, Victoria, Australia / Photo by Zac Porter / Unsplash While the landmark anthology Guwayu – For All Times: A Collection of First Nations Poems (Magabala Books, 2020), edited by Jeanine Leane, refuses the “voyeuristic obsession with tragedy and trauma as the ultimate and only contribution of Aboriginal writing to Australian literary

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! In American fiction, when immigrants and first-gen characters encounter the U.S., they’re often in New York. Or Miami. Or at Harvard. I love many of those stories—works by Jhumpa Lahiri and

Hootie & the Blowfish Killed My Rock and Roll Dreams Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! The death of college rock: September 5, 1995 I’m drunk on a Tuesday at the old Knitting Factory and stumble into

Series editor’s note: Sometimes it is good to go back to our old rituals; sometimes even conversations slim with anxiety are welcomed into a home, into a body, into a tree. So does the speaker in Adrienne Christian’s poem, basking in the joy and glory that small things bring, like coffee with more sugar and

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of heated discourse surrounding a trend in book covers in which many new releases opt for variations of the same colorful abstractions:

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! As a child, the worst mean-big-sister trick I ever played on my little brother was to convince him that I could transform at will into an evil entity named Madame Ruby. The

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! To hear Weng Pixin tell it, Let’s Not Talk Anymore started out as a kind of “fuck you” move after a particularly bad fight with her mom but—as these things tend

Dacheng Flour Factory, Shekou, Shenzhen / Photo by Chris / Flickr Every day, educated youth of the erstwhile industrial zoneride the sightseeing elevator, up and down, crowdinginto the skylark that used to bellow card-punching sonatas.Through the rain-drenched amber-tinted glass, the worldlooks like a philosophical hanging bell.With each strokeof its radical pendulum, the sunlightsqueezes itself into

I Joined a Cult, But I Still Feel Alone Tyler Barton Share article Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! “Once Nothing, Twice Shatter” by Tyler Barton Luther buys cars. It’s what he does, and it’s what his

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! The first time I saw artist Martha Rosler’s “Semiotics of the Kitchen,” I laughed. Made in 1975, the video depicts a young Rosler wearing a long black dress and apron as

Lamar Babi, who plays Matthew (Niran’s neighbor and love interest), enjoys a pomegranate while Niran’s family gathers over a meal set on the floor / Photo by Kenneth Moss Born in Baghdad to an ancient lineage called the Chaldeans, Weam Namou is the author of fourteen books, including the novel Pomegranate. Set in the weeks

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Aruni Kashyap’s debut poetry collection, There Is No Good Time for Bad News, tells the story of India’s diverse and strife-riven borderlands, which have been neglected in Indian books, films, and