At Electric Literature, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer take a look at fantasy’s impact on comtemporary pop culture, in their introduction to the new collection, The Big Book of Modern Fantasy. “Fantasy becomes something of use to a writer to make a political or social statement,” they write. “It’s not just a mode, it’s a tool … The post Ann and Jeff VanderMeer on Fantasy’s Influence on Today’s Literature appeared first on The Millions. Continue reading at 'The Millions'
[ The Millions | 2020-07-20 20:30:05 UTC ]
It would make sense that any history would begin at Stillwater Prison, where so much of the story and mythology of prison in Minnesota also begins. It is where Cole Younger of the famous James-Younger gang did their time, and where they spent their own money to start the Prison Mirror, the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-10-16 11:00:00 UTC ]
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When I first encountered the work of Henry Dumas, I was very nearly finished with my undergraduate degree in English. I favored American literature in my time studying, and was lucky to have access to syllabi that spanned a more diverse array of writers. The Black writers I would come to know... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-10-13 11:15:00 UTC ]
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When I first encountered the work of Henry Dumas, I was very nearly finished with my undergraduate degree in English. I favored American literature in my time studying, and was lucky to have access to syllabi that spanned a more diverse array of writers. The Black writers I would come to know... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-10-13 11:15:00 UTC ]
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Athena Dixon’s The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays opens on New Year’s Eve of 2021, with Dixon alone in her apartment in Philadelphia, thinking about death during a year fraught with pandemic fear. The first pieces explore her fascination with women who died on their own and, because they... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-10-13 11:00:00 UTC ]
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My introduction to romance novels came when my high school crush handed me a book written by his mother’s friend under a pen name. It was all very hush hush, no one knew what the author’s real identity was, but he trusted me with this big secret (which might have been the first grand romantic... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-10-12 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Encompassing a wide range of genres from historical fiction to fantasy to poetry to investigative journalism to memoir, this exciting abundance of books published in 2023 by emerging and acclaimed Native writers speak to the rich diversity of the Indigenous experience. From meditations on the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-10-09 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Safiya Sinclair writes in her memoir How to Say Babylon, “The perfect daughter was nothing but a vessel for the man’s seed, unblemished clay waiting for Jah’s fingerprint.” The memoir, Sinclair’s first, is about her journey to shaping a future that isn’t limited by the idea of the perfect... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-10-05 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Writing about pop culture and current technology is always a gamble, pitting critique of the present against longevity, a story that will still feel relevant after we’re gone. But for novelists (present company included) who were exposed to the Real World before the, um, real world, reality TV... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-09-27 11:00:00 UTC ]
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As we move into the fall reading season, deeply imagined short stories and inventive linked essays are having a moment alongside novels. What’s thrilling about the books coming out from small presses is the breadth of range—there are intentional and accidental murders, family drama and... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-09-26 11:15:00 UTC ]
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Queer people have been writing historical fiction since before queerness existed—by which I mean, since before it was hammered into an antithesis to heterosexuality during the long nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth, queers looking to write about the past had to grapple with new,... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-09-25 11:00:00 UTC ]
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In Alissa Hattman’s debut novel Sift, the world, at first, appears hostile to life, nearly uninhabitable. Skies darken with toxins and smoke. Food, especially produce, is scarce. Drinking water is limited, a result of rivers and other natural bodies that have been poisoned. Fires rage and a... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-09-05 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Aurora Mattia’s debut novel The Fifth Wound is a fantastical journey through the formulation of one trans woman’s truth. Mattia’s own recapitulation as protagonist Aurora aka @silicone_angel bridges the gap between ancient Greece, Covid-era Brooklyn, and the rolling fields of Iowa searching to... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-09-01 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Jane Wong’s memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is a feast of a book. It’s about hunger—the hungers of the body, of addiction, of history. Brilliant, gutting, and funny, she writes with such range about growing up in her family’s Chinese restaurant in Atlantic City as their reach for the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-08-31 11:00:00 UTC ]
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John West’s Lessons and Carols is a lyric memoir of recovery, parenting, loss, and hope, which is also periodically quite funny (ex. the first line of the first Lesson, “Caring for this baby has taught me new ways to resent.”) Hopscotching through time, the memoir shows us West’s first, early... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-08-18 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Ashley Wurzbacher’s debut novel How To Care for a Human Girl jumps with both feet into the debate over reproductive rights. When two sisters find themselves pregnant not long after their mother’s death, Jada choses an abortion, while Maddie drifts into the sticky embrace of a crisis pregnancy... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-08-08 11:00:00 UTC ]
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The Oracle by Joanna Pearson You name it, Lola’s found it in someone’s ear. A green Skittle, a watch battery, the tarnished back of a gold earring, a bunched-up bit of mint floss, a Lego head. Insects—yes, of course. Roaches of various sizes, a wasp, a small beetle. Hardened ear wax (cerumen,... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-07-31 11:05:00 UTC ]
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As I prepare for the paperback launch of my debut novel The Girls in Queens, I share with a group of writers and artists that I’m putting together a Book Club Kit. This has become a fairly common digital offering; a colorful PDF of brief insights from the author, a recipe or two related to... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-07-25 11:12:00 UTC ]
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It isn’t unusual for libraries to feature prominently in novels; novelists, after all, are merely adult versions of the little people who fell in love with books at public libraries. But what of librarians? The keepers of the books, the ones who know you prefer romance, science fiction, or... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-07-20 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey, which will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing on March 5th 2024. Preorder the book here. From the Booker International Prize-winning translator and Guggenheim fiction fellow, a propulsive,... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-07-07 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Kathleen Cheng is having a hell of a Saturn Return. The late-20s protagonist of Jenny Xie’s debut novel Holding Pattern has just been dumped by the man she thought she’d spend her life with. Unmoored and questioning, she drops out of her cognitive psychology graduate program on the East Coast... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-07-05 11:00:00 UTC ]
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