Electric Literature

“Father’s Feet” from The Crossing of the Boars by Zhang Guixing, translated by Christopher G Rea and Julie Ming Wang Guan Ah-fung hanged himself from a jackfruit tree one sundown as wildfire whirled through fields of lalang grass, spewing a dirty haze that choked the jungle and enveloped half of Kampong Krokop, the Village of the Boars. Rays of the setting sun, striated by the smoke and the vapor of the fierce heat, floated like a school of golden carp in a red sea. Hawks, t

Literature from India’s Northeast is an under discussed literary body from a highly contested and racialized region in India. It is widely considered different from Indian Writing in English (IWE) since it comes from a unique region in South Asia that has traditionally been politically, culturally, and racially otherized from the Indian mainland. Northeast Indian Literature is often misunderstood or incorrectly described as a “newly emerging body of writing.” It is also termed “confl

This is the second essay in a series. Read part one of “Blue Spark” here. “Blue Spark,” Part Two by Nelly Reifler Chapter II 1.  Noah and I got married on August 25, 2001. My stepmother’s immediate family was in a gruesome car crash on the way to my wedding. We found out seconds after we said our vows, and from there the wedding became a kind of nightmare that still brings with it, when I dare remember any details, a tidal wave of shame. Mahnaz, my step

Fallen Deer by the Dam The dog is eating the deer.He’s a good boy. He’s got a collar. He’s going to go home bell-troddenand lick his human’s arm with a gentle tongueor so we assume. The deer doesn’t have her belly. That’s as close as we can look at what happened.When we call by the screaming dam, the dog rises.We don’t know his name. We don’t know what makes him listen. We kiss air. We bark no.The light shows us sharper light—scarlet facedisappearing ballet bones. Her breathing

For the spring edition of our debut craft series, three debut authors—Alexa Yasemin Brahme, Sonia Feldman, and Vincent Yu—discuss in detail their journeys through writing about imaginary lives. One may argue that all fiction is rooted in imaginary lives, but these novels especially feel centered around the stakes of these imaginary lives as the protagonists confront, examine, wonder, and muse upon each of their choice’s ramifications on the rest of their years. From the gritty-and-glamorous art

“Darkness Like a Seam” by Rebecca Turkewitz When I was a child, my grandparents lived in a squat scab-colored house that sat in a clearing carved into the New Hampshire woods. Everything inside their house was a shade of beige or muted brown, the carpets were too thick, and there was a musty smell I associated with basements and garages. In the living room, there was an end table wedged between the couch and the wall that was unusually deep. The table held only a lamp and a set of

When I was an infant, my mother abandoned our family and disappeared without a trace. Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, I heard the same questions again and again: What happened to your mother? Did she die? How can a mother leave her children? I had no answers and no frame of reference. I knew of no books about children abandoned by their mothers, and, though I knew it couldn’t be true, I imagined I was the only one to have experienced that particular pain. When we can’t find narrativ

An introduction from the author “Blue Spark” came about when the incredible writer and editor Jennifer Kabat asked me to contribute to a nonfiction publication she’d started with three fellow writers: Janet Steen, Greg Olear, and Sean Beaudoin. I was terrified. I said yes. I ran a subject by her, and we decided on a deadline. But every time I started, I was horrified by my writing. Writing fiction, I felt in control. Writing nonfiction about myself was mortifying. Even writing in a journal wa

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of I Can Feel It All Over by Ebonya Lia, which will be published on March 16, 2027 by Amistad Books. You can pre-order your copy here. In this radiant and incisive debut novel in the tradition of works by ZZ Packer and Toni Cade Bambara, a Black woman fights to reclaim—and reinvent—her world after a little understood illness and a public health crisis threatens to upend everything she has. Forty-seven-year-old Harmony Johnston is

We Should Go Out! We should go! We should go out! We should go out in our shiny firework tops, sleek and constructed like architectural wonders in leather pants and compass-drawn brows. We should go out and blind the crowds with our crackling white-hot sex appeal. And guess what? It worked! The reviews are in and they love us.  A guy fainted when he saw me. Knocked out cold. See that man over there with the blood-soaked napkin? No—not him. Him! With the napkin pressed t

Julie Buntin and I first met when Electric Literature shared an office with Catapult in the mid-2010s. She was a book editor and the director of Catapult’s beloved educational program; I had recently become Electric Literature’s Executive Director. I was an aspiring writer with a few short stories; Julie was about to publish her debut novel, Marlena, to critical and commercial acclaim. We hit it off as two hard-working, mostly type-A people with the same cynical sense of humor that protects over

The latest target of book banning and censorship is Vinita Prabhakar, an English professor who dared to assign her students Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself.” Prabhakar, who taught the story for years, was fired from her position at South Florida State College after one of her English students said the story made them “a bit uncomfortable.” Fred Hawkins, the college president responsible for Prabhakar’s firing, said the quiet part out loud when he called the story “political.” Be

An excerpt from Whyteface by A. Igoni Barrett Four years after skipping town, Frank Whyte was back in Lagos traffic, from which none escapes once caught. It was another hot night in June, and he was slouched in the back seat, the oga’s corner, of an air-­conditioned Cerato when the smash and grind of metal on metal flung him against the front headrest. His forehead burned from the impact and his ears rang from the blare of the traffic now pouring through the shattered rear window. Pebbles of

When my husband and I started house hunting in the DC suburbs three years ago, it never crossed our minds that we’d live as anything but a typical nuclear family: just us and our future kids. But the house we bought featured an apartment-style basement, complete with its own kitchen, full bathroom, and private entrance. The month we bought it, a friend of ours lost his apartment. “I’ll rent yours for a few months, tops,” he said. He lived with us for two years.  I got attached to the

“ACHILLEA | the Addict,” an excerpt from I Have This Thing for Flowers by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn In its most generic form, yarrow (Achillea millefolium, mille meaning thousand and folium referring to its numerous petals) appears as clusters of tiny blossoms atop thin, sturdy stalks. The word for the plant’s flowering structure is “umbel.” Picture dill or carrot tops, or radishes and cilantro when they’re left too long in the ground and bolt. At first glance, yarrow seems to be quite delicate;

bird hunting My father staggers aheadwith a rifle strapped to his shoulder,the first snow still saltedin drifts of his hair.Cov noog tau mus tsev lawm,he says, but we trek furtherto places the wildfires have yet to claim.We passed a nest of robin eggscrushed beneath a giant silver maple,he gathers the speckled shellsinto his palms, fits them into unnamedcountries, then buries them beneaththe scorched earth.He speaks a prayer before moving ondeeper into the songless morning.My hand in his hand

Set during a sweltering summer in 1977 Guadalajara, a serpent girl weeps in a carnival glass box. A neighbor’s dog is dangled repeatedly from a tree. A ghost sits on a bed in a sinister house, returning night after night. Cecilia Eudave’s The Summer of the Serpent moves among six narrators—children and adults who witness the same events but understand them differently. Violence circulates through families and neighborhoods long before anyone can fully name what is happening, and no one cha

“The Hanged Man” by Katherine Conner Roman spots the flyer on his way to read palms in Jackson Square. Taped to the window of a coffee shop, Have You Seen Me? above a photo of a dark-haired girl, maybe fifteen, sixteen. He can’t tell, doesn’t have time to stop because it’s almost dark and he has to catch Anna before she leaves the square. She’ll be packing up by now, all her palm readings and aura readings and scrying done for the day. He imagines her, bent over her table in profi

I was once a different version of myself. I was a child and then a young adult in a conservative, Christian community. Existing in that environment required morphing and shrinking in ways that I find painful to think about now. But one thing I could never fully deny was my interest in sex, that thing Garth Greenwell calls a dense and complicated act of “self-making.” My doomed attempts not to think about sex became a way of thinking about it often, of keeping on the periphery of my awareness bot

My partner and I go to the movies. The theater and our conversations after, on the drive home or at the bar where we’re regulars—this routine is our most consistent intimacy. We are in couples therapy, have been for many years now. The current cadence is once a month. In this season of my 30s, dry and lacking direction like I’m in the deep desert of Arrakis, a month can feel like a year. So much effort but no change. All pain and no gain. Powerless, like many men tell us they feel. Not