Reading a good book can feel like traveling to a remote island. A particular kind of journey where having crossed a stretch of water, and surrounded by sea, you are cut off from the rest of the world. For a writer, an island lends itself to creating atmosphere—claustrophobic, mystical, exposed. Or, as Agatha Christie understood, […] The post 7 Novels About Being Trapped on an Island appeared first on Electric Literature. Continue reading at 'Electric Literature'
[ Electric Literature | 2020-02-28 12:00:00 UTC ]
In Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility, Michelle Tea chronicles her path to pregnancy and motherhood as a 40-year-old, queer, uninsured woman. The tone is irreverent, the storytelling is hilarious, and the topic—choosing to exercise one’s reproductive freedoms—is extremely timely.... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-08-15 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Sneha, the 22-year-old protagonist of Sarah Thankam Mathews’ debut novel All This Could Be Different, is the dutiful immigrant daughter. Despite the long recession, she bagged a corporate job right after college, and a free apartment in Brewers Hill, Milwaukee. She regularly sends money home to... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-08-11 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Solar power. The end of war. Gender role reversal. Dirigibles. First published in 1905, Rokeya Hossain’s short story “Sultana’s Dream” is steampunk avant la lettre, strikingly advanced in its critique of patriarchy, conflict, conventional kinship structures, industrialization, and the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-08-08 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
One of the central questions I had when shaping my story collection, Proof of Me, was how to invite into it a unified feel, how to place each story to be in conversation—geographically, thematically, linearly—with what follows. I also sought for each story to stand on its own, offering a... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-08-05 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Taymour Soomro’s debut novel Other Names for Love begins with a son flinching at the sound of his father’s voice. Sixteen-year-old Fahad has been ordered to spend the summer with Rafik, his authoritarian father who manages their family farm in Sindh, Pakistan. It’s on the train ride there that... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-08-02 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Noir has long been obsessed with books—books as objects, as evidence, as repositories of the past, and occasionally as glimpses into other worlds of possibility. It’s no wonder, then, that booksellers often turn up in fiction, and especially in mystery. There’s something intoxicating about the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-07-29 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Gentrification takes center stage in Cleyvis Natera’s debut novel Neruda on the Park, which follows the different reactions the members of the Guerrero family have to the impending redevelopment of their predominantly Dominican New York City neighborhood.When a neighboring tenement is demolished... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-07-28 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Chris Belcher’s searing memoir about her work as a professional dominatrix isn’t exactly a comfortable read. Not because of the subject, but because Pretty Baby asks more of the reader than many memoirs. Like the best art does, this book invites introspection and interrogation of both our own... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-07-20 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Before we begin, I must confess to my bias. I am not an objective reader, so in some ways I have already failed. A few months before I read Elif Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot, I had a conversation with a friend that unlocked a safe in my brain. After, there was nowhere I could […] The post... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-07-19 11:05:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
We are thrilled to announce that Electric Literature has won the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize! This highly competitive award recognizes excellence in digital and print magazines, and supports winners with an outright grant in the first year, followed by two years of a matching... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-07-14 13:15:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
When CJ Hauser published “The Crane Wife” in The Paris Review, an essay about repressing her needs in a relationship, calling off a wedding, and going to study whooping cranes on the Gulf Coast, it quickly became a viral hit. Three years later, her 17-piece memoir in essays of the same name... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-07-14 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
The winners of the fifth annual Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes have been announced, with five publications, including 'Electric Literature' and 'Zyzzyva,' taking home a combined total of $144,000 in funding. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-07-14 04:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
The Northwest, where I live and where my novel is set, is a big place and it is a lot of things. It is the damp, mossy woods of the coast, the high desert, and the snowy, jagged mountain ranges that divide the two. It is home to weird and real creatures like giant octopuses, […] The post 7... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-07-13 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Okay, maybe I say this every Tuesday, but I really, really mean it today: we’ve got a good book bounty this week, folks. * K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want (One World) “Relationships between women—familial, beloved, strange, imagined—dominate queer Taiwanese American Chang’s explosive and bizarre... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-07-12 12:00:03 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Morgan Talty’s The Night of the Living Rez is a searching and honest collection of short stories following a young Penobscot character named David and his coming of age on the rez, where community, family, and tradition are as fraught with colonial entanglement as they are forces for healing. ... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-07-06 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Designing a book cover is challenging, even more so when the work contains a raunchy subject matter. How do you convey, in a single glance, that the book is sensual, even sexy, without falling for pornographic tropes? My debut novel, Little Rabbit, is about a sub/dom relationship between a... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-06-30 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
The best literary fiction is in some ways a simple character study. It is a roadmap into the interiority of a specific character: the way they think, how their identity impacts their relationships, and what decisions get made in response to the socio-political pressures shaping their lives. But... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-06-24 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
While we celebrate queer literature and history all year long at Lit Hub dot com, we also love a good book list. This year, in honor of Pride, we reached out to some of our favorite librarians, booksellers, and authors and asked them about the queer books they find themselves recommending over... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-06-24 08:52:38 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Shelly Oria’s new collection, I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom, is the latest in a string of new anthologies that reclaim and challenge the conversation surrounding reproduction. The collection deals with the choice of whether or not to have children, and also explores... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-05-26 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this
Naheed Phiroze Patel’s debut novel Mirror Made of Rain follows Noomi Wadia, an indignant young woman raised in a Parsi family in India, through a world that is keen to control women and safeguard long-established pecking orders. Since her childhood, Noomi has had a difficult relationship with... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-05-19 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this