Electric Literature

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

Small presses have long been the home of the debut short story collection. I absolutely love short stories, and even I sometimes am overwhelmed by the number of debut story collections.. Yet, the three debuts on this list—Now I’m Photogenic, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think, Debris—stand out and bring bring originality, voice, and leverage the genre to tell powerfully compressed narratives and point to why small presses are such an important home for collections.  And while not debuts, Th

Watching Normal People by Katy Whitehead They started watching Normal People, like everybody else, during the first lockdown. They’d been married three years at this point. She’d read two of Rooney’s novels, and both of her published stories (as well as much of the criticism) so she knew it wasn’t going to be socialist in any major way––knew, too, that everyone was tired of Rooney’s women, with their self-loathing, masochistic (anti-feminist?) tendencies. But her real problem with the young I

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of There’s Plenty of Sunshine Where You’re Headed by Ghassan Zeineddine, which will be published on March 16th, 2027 by Tin House/Zando. You can pre-order your copy here. From the award-winning author of Dearborn, a tragicomic story collection that moves between Lebanon and Michigan, exploring migration, war, family, and the enduring pull of home. In a village haunted by unexploded cluster bombs, a chorus of matriarchs obsess o

Gazebo Scene Who cares that Liesl loves a blonde boy who sings to her of her own suppression as they shelter from the storm in a gazebo before he declares himself a Nazi in full?Is the hope of happiness ever allowedto meander past the glare of youth,as in the summertime gaze of Danny Zukobefore he reenters the familiar territoryof learned leather and greased lightning?My mother and I watch Meggie being watched from afar by the priest and remind each other in the end it turns out he sticks aro

I am a big fan of Krys Malcolm Belc’s writing because he takes binaries like queer:straight male:female and turns them on their heads. In his latest memoir, What I Made for Dinner, he seems to like to live in the gray area, as the title of his essay “I’m a Trans Man, but I’ve Become My Mother” suggests. Originally published in Electric Lit, that essay is now a chapter in What I Made for Dinner, titled for the influencer who inspired him, “Ree.”  What I love a

An excerpt from The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders For Christmas dinner, Boyd’s mother Brigid had suggested a casual (“very casual”) potluck in the kitchen of the Elledge home. Small and easy, compared to some sort of extended-­family do. “No one will have to spend the week beforehand cleaning for company or the whole holiday cooking,” she’d said; and, put that way, it made more sense than the alternative. For Aubrey’s maternal relatives, with whom she and Boyd had spent the previous Chris

Once, very stoned around a campfire, I asked my friends what fire was. One scientifically minded member of the group offered a dutiful-if-also-stoned explanation about chemical bonds and oxidation; it left me totally unsatisfied. “No,” I said. “But what is it?” Everyone laughed. The whole thing became a long-running joke, and rightly so. But I stand by my original question. It brings to mind a line from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: “The relation between what we see and what we know is ne

“Train Corridor” by Weike Wang One fall I took many Amtraks. It was two trips per week or four trains. I was teaching at two different colleges, in two different cities. Most semesters I commute only to one school, so one trip per week or two trains. In total, I have taken hundreds of Amtraks and receive daily emails from them about my next trip or to give feedback for my last. “We would love to hear about your boarding experience!” Select a number between 0 (not satisfied at a

Knitting into the Algorithm, into Infinity Instagram insists on red light therapy, a pink plastic eye mask that glows like a ruby-geode inside, Zorro illuminated and self-conscious, afraid of aging. Each fissure chips at the issue: I am un-afraid to die. I am just kidding. Death is a blind date, sure as Emily’s carriage is right on time. My small dog took her own ride six months ago, was picked up by eternity. Her atoms have a kind of immortality. If matter is never created or destroyed, each

There is a particular feeling that accompanies loving something as you watch it disappear. It is not quite despair and not quite hope. It lives somewhere in between, in the place where grief and stubbornness meet. Literature feels particularly suited to capturing that emotional contradiction because novels can hold multiple truths at once. They can contain dread and tenderness, beauty and decay, intimacy and catastrophe without reducing them to neat resolutions. Yet there’s not enough literature

“Swan Song for the Republic,” excerpted from Freedom by Zinzi Clemmons We are born into good times. “Dream big,” they tell us. “The sky’s the limit.” We are lied to. One day at school, I’m shepherded into the band practice room, the TV set rolled out of the closet and switched on. On the screen I see smoke billowing from familiar buildings, the broken body of a plane in an empty field, reporters screaming, everything veiled in dust. We start to fear. The whispers of war cresce

The Body Is a Courtroom Where I Am Always on Trial Click to enlarge I Still Believe in My Country I still believe in my country, not because I am immune to disappointment nor because I’ve stopped counting the ways we fail each other, but because here, people keep doing small impossible things. Someone shares fuel during a blackout, counts the litres like prayer beads, says take it, I’ll manage, even though the night arrived prepared. Offices open late or not at all. Files slee

When I was a proto-embryonic critic, in my painfully awkward junior high school years, my reading was wildly incongruous. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine to Siddhartha to The Grapes of Wrath to cheap, used Harlequin Regency romances.  I had weird middle of the night reveries about what I might grow up to be. Becoming a nun seemed attractive, perhaps a challenge as I wasn’t Catholic. Maybe a kind of whirling dervish/Siddhartha-type nun, instead? I wanted a purpose: a reason

“The Ominous Shaft” by Marlena Williams Cole set out early, when the fishermen of his hometown were just beginning to cast their nets into the sea. Claudia Bernard, the woman that Cole was journeying towards, had no idea that he was on his way. Cole made the drive from Astoria to Fortuna in one white-knuckled shot, terrified that if he lingered anywhere for too long, something awful would happen—a nosy traveler would report him as a teen runaway, or he’d simply lose his nerve and

Why is the act of painting one’s face so charged with gendered implications? How might makeup smear the lines drawn between “feminine” and “masculine”? And what can drag culture teach all of us about the role of artifice—and art—in constructing identity? Although our books differ in genre and scope, they shimmer with striking similarities. Montesanti’s Drag Thing is a memoir by a millennial writer raised in Michigan and Alaska; G’Sell’s Lipstick is cultural criticism written by an author

Original Oratory by James Davis In every speech kid, I see a version of myself that I love with frightening intensity: 14 years old, a closeted freshman at Liberty High School with long curly Weird Al Yankovic hair, thick glasses, blisteringly cheap dress shoes, and something to say.  It was the second week of the new millennium. The Columbine massacre was less than a year old, its aftershocks still rumbling in my hometown, Colorado Springs. That Columbine High School was still holdin

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of A Cow Gives Birth at Night by Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston, which will be published on January 26, 2027 by Pantheon Books. You can pre-order your copy here. From the celebrated author of Crossing, a finalist for the National Book Award, a piercing, candid novel about a man haunted by the violence of his past and a family ruptured by the war that ravaged their homeland, for readers of Douglas Stuart, Jenny Erpenbeck, Ocean

Ball Jar Demon The demon lasted a good month, emitting low moans and sandpaper coughs into her ear, before Celia found an old Ball jar in the cellar, plucked the being off the cutting board with a pair of chopsticks where it had writhed since its summoning, screwed it in tightly without any empathy, and slotted it between the crunchy peanut butter and the wax beans.   This one, her first, lasted longer than she expected. She’d heard stories of demons scuttling away into nothing w

When I brought Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine to the women at the Ahmanson Senior Citizen Center’s writing class, many of them working on their own short stories about motherhood and family, they couldn’t stop talking about Lexie—the ambitious, young, single mother who refuses the provincial life laid out for her and escapes to 1950s London. What struck everyone in our upstairs computer room was how O’Farrell conjured a woman hungry for more, unwilling to apol