This past summer, an auntie of mine dusted off an old cardboard box of books from a cluttered storage unit, and handed me a slim blue and gold paperback with soft, slightly frayed corners and a creased spine by Octavia E. Butler. I had never read science fiction that featured a Black girl being... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-12-28 12:00:00 UTC ]
Tis the season for some literary pageantry and Electric Literature is hosting our third annual “Best Book Cover of the Year” tournament. You, our beloved readers, will decide a winner amidst a sea of book covers that published in 2022 via an interactive poll on our Twitter and Instagram... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-12-20 12:00:35 UTC ]
You should watch Euphoria, a friend told me while we were on a walk during our young daughters’ dance class. I wasn’t sure why she would suggest this. Particularly in the context of our conversation: I was confiding in her about the anxiety that felt like it had been boiling inside of me for... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-12-13 12:05:00 UTC ]
Mary-Alice Daniel has been on a journey, literally, across continents. She documents her experiences in A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which is a memoir about places, from which she has been uprooted, assimilated into, revisited, and settled, giving the reader a close look into the lives... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-12-05 12:00:00 UTC ]
The first chapter of Daniella Mestyanek Young’s memoir Uncultured opens with a screech: It is 1993 and Mestyanek Young—then 5 years old—is inside a commune in Brazil, standing at the back of a line of children waiting to be paddled. As she explains, it’s a normal day in the Children of God, the... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-11-25 12:00:00 UTC ]
Joshua Whitehead can’t be held by genre. Following on the success of his Lambda Literary Award winning novel Jonny Appleseed and poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer, Making Love with the Land is Whitehead’s first full-length work of creative nonfiction. But to describe this book as merely... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-11-23 12:00:00 UTC ]
The National Books Awards returned in full force on November 16, 2022 for a night of in-person glitz after two years of virtual ceremonies. In front of white tents where the literati gathered for photos on the red carpet, publishing workers with the HarperCollins Union, standing in the cold,... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-11-18 12:06:00 UTC ]
The memoir Heretic opens with Jeanna Kadlec boarding a bus to the Middlesex County Courthouse in Massachusetts, where she is filing for divorce against her husband, an Evangelical Christian, and pastor’s son to boot. Kadlec is twenty-five and exhausted from the labor of suppressing her... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-11-17 12:05:00 UTC ]
Esteemed Agent, I’m seeking representation for my [300,000-word rhyming memoir / novel-in-grocery-coupons / famous literary graves calendar**] which is a cross between [Maid and Green Eggs and Ham / a bag of Halloween candy and that novel-in-texts you just sold / an apple watch and a mortuary... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-11-11 12:05:00 UTC ]
The first time I felt possessed by a fantasy series, I was fifteen. It was 2004, and from my family’s small computer room, I spent the after-dinner hours in a web forum devoted to NC-17 Harry Potter fanfiction. This was the same room where my brother had constructed a secret liquor cabinet from... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-11-01 11:05:00 UTC ]
Endometriosis is classified by Mayo Clinic as a “common” condition, “treatable by a medical professional.” And yet, when Emma Bolden began experiencing aggressive symptoms of the illness in elementary school, she was treated for decades by doctors who neither believed her account of her... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-10-27 11:05:00 UTC ]
I have long been fascinated by books about the early years of the AIDS crisis. Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir from 1988 remains a cherished work; last year’s Let the Record Show by Sarah Schulman and It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful by Jack Lowery provided crucial insights into... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-10-26 11:00:00 UTC ]
On May 13, I finally got to read my wayward science fiction story “It Is the Voice That Unnerves Me” in The Dread Machine. I had been submitting the story since the spring of 2019, and had thought many times about consigning it to the “retired” list. I knew every word, sentence and section break... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-10-20 11:05:00 UTC ]
Prince Shakur’s debut memoir When They Tell You to Be Good starts with an argument between him and his mother which recalls the image of his father’s murder, a man he never got to know. In unflinchingly honest detail Shakur traces his own journey of self actualization as a queer, Black Jamaican... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-10-13 11:00:00 UTC ]
It’s difficult to say anything that hasn’t already been said about Torrey Peters’s debut novel, Detransition, Baby. It won the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a national bestseller, a NYT Notable Book, and named a Book of the Year by more publications than my word count limit will let me include. Not... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-09-26 11:05:00 UTC ]
On her first day at an American high school, the protagonist of my novel, Hira, faces a dilemma. She considers herself well-read, but as she rifles through a thick textbook in her English Literature class, she realizes that none of the American authors in there are familiar to her. It is 2010,... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-09-22 11:00:00 UTC ]
Meghan Gilliss’ debut novel Lungfish follows Tuck, her husband Paul, and their toddler Agnes as they all squat on Tuck’s dead grandmother’s island in the Gulf of Maine after running out of money. While Paul undergoes substance withdrawal in the rustic house, Tuck and Agnes survive on whatever... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-09-13 11:00:00 UTC ]
There are very few things in the world that we at Electric Lit love more than bookstores, but one of those things is pets. We are absolutely obsessed with our furry friends. It only stands to reason that to our minds, there is no greater place in the world than a bookstore with a pet. […] The... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-09-05 11:00:00 UTC ]
Set on the idyllic New England campus of an elite art school called Wrynn, and situated against the backdrop of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Antonia Angress’ debut novel Sirens & Muses is an exemplary depiction of what can occur at the intersection of art and adolescence. This... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-09-01 11:00:00 UTC ]
Tess Gunty’s debut novel The Rabbit Hutch follows the inhabitants of a low-income housing complex, called the Rabbit Hutch, in Vacca Vale, Indiana. It’s a loud novel, full of many voices, since there are many inhabitants of the Rabbit Hutch, some of whom we know by apartment number and some by... Continue reading >> [ Source: Electric Literature | 2022-08-18 11:00:00 UTC ]