When it comes to great novels, this year felt like an embarrassment of riches. The books collected here are ambitious—in intellect, in scope, in subject matter, and in size. Some are perfect encapsulations of the unique problems of our time, while others illuminate the human threads that connect us through time and space. Novelists often […] The post Electric Lit’s Favorite Novels of 2021 appeared first on Electric Literature. Continue reading at 'Electric Literature'
[ Electric Literature | 2021-12-16 12:05:00 UTC ]
Matthieu Aikins’s olive complexion, dark hair, and ambiguous features means that he is often mistaken as a local in Afghanistan and the Middle East where he has lived since 2008. In his non-fiction book The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, the Japanese Canadian journalist goes undercover as an Afghan... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-04-22 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Interviews Eloghosa Osunde and Okwiri Oduor. Photo of Oduor by Chelsea Bieker. It’s hard to argue with Booker Prize–winning author Damon Galgut’s assertion that 2021 was “a great year for African writing.” And as WLT’s “New African Voices” issue... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2022-04-21 13:41:40 UTC ]
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L.A.'s authors, from 19th century novelists to Wanda Coleman to Steph Cha, have always pushed genre boundaries and dissected California myths. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2022-04-14 13:00:55 UTC ]
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The theatre is a perennially popular setting for novelists and no wonder. The tawdry glamour and sense of spectacle make it a rich gift for any author, but it’s what happens behind the scenes that I find the most interesting. This is particularly true for those novels set on the 19th-century... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-04-14 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Guardian photographer who captured most of the main events and notable people from the early 1960s to the late 90sThe photographer Frank Martin, who has died aged 89, was on the staff of the Guardian from 1964 to 1997, creating an extensive body of work that covered news, arts, fashion, politics... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2022-04-13 16:01:26 UTC ]
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Aamina Ahmad’s debut novel The Return of Faraz Ali begins with a moment of no return. Born and raised in Lahore’s old city, the young Faraz is forced to leave behind his mother and his sister Rozina. It isn’t until Faraz is an adult in 1968 working as a policeman, that he goes back to […] The... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-04-07 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s debut novel When We Were Birds begins in the time before time and follows the uneasy truce between the living and the dead. Cigarettes are offered, liquor is poured, prayers are said, all in the hope that the buried stay buried. This is the story of Yejide, a young woman who... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-04-01 11:00:00 UTC ]
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The grocery store of all places was my initial indoctrination into the world of horror. As my father shuffled up and down the aisles, dutifully stacking groceries in the cart for our family, I would sneak away to the magazine section and my eye was always drawn to the shiny paperback display... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-31 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Mine is the story of the woman who thought she was making a book about others; realized only as it was about to be published, that she was the broken one the book talked about. The fragmented, the dispersed, the uprooted. When I was editing the anthology Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-29 11:00:00 UTC ]
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In Sensorium by Tanaïs is, at once, a sensuous and gut-wrenching experience in expansive memoir that bleeds across genre and time. Using perfume as a framework, Tanaïs builds the work slowly, moving from the base to the heart to the head notes, recounting alienation and life on the margins as a... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-25 11:00:00 UTC ]
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At the risk of seeming obnoxiously obsessed with ourselves, writers and readers do tend to love books about writers and readers—especially when those fictional writers and readers behave badly. (It’s no wonder, really, why the Bad Art Friend discourse hit a nerve; so many people were frantic... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-11 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Three authors joined author/moderator Emma Straub in a thought-provoking keynote panel, “Storytelling in the Cultural Moment,” to begin the third day of ABA's Snow Days online conference. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-03-11 05:00:00 UTC ]
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Qian Julie Wang’s debut memoir Beautiful Country is a compelling and intimate portrait of an undocumented childhood. Much like Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, we are carried into the heart and mind of a child: this time, a young, undocumented girl in... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-10 12:00:00 UTC ]
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When I got to an age where I could read the same books as my mom, she started passing them along to me after she had finished. One of the books she gave me was Reading Lolita in Tehran by New York Times best-selling author Azar Nafisi, a book that I remember not only for […] The post Resist... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-08 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Book Reviews Statue of renowned Kurdish historian, author, and poet Mastoureh Ardalan (1805–1848) in Erbil / Photo by Levi Meir Clancy / Unsplash Even though they appear to have a lot to say about the historical, political, cultural, and literary... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2022-02-23 21:05:41 UTC ]
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Literary novelists are struggling with whether, and how, to incorporate Covid into their fiction. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2022-02-20 22:17:31 UTC ]
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“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” –Arthur Ashe * Years ago, when I was still a budding fiction writer, I published an essay about how hard skateboarding is to write about. I focused on a few novelists who had skater characters in their books but who clearly didn’t skate […] Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-02-09 09:55:45 UTC ]
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In They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents, Iranian American author and Vice journalist Neda Toloui-Semnani reconstructed the story of her parents as young, leftist Iranian activists radicalized at Berkeley in the late ’60s and who came to see communism as the political answer... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-02-08 12:00:00 UTC ]
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I have always held a keen interest toward the processes of myth formation and how beliefs about family identity are handed down through generations. My debut novel Defenestrate tells the story of a family in the midst of reckoning with superstition and inheritance, the long-held beliefs that can... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-01-31 12:00:00 UTC ]
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A nonbinary teenager on their way home from an eating -disorder treatment center who tries to convince a stranger she is not a vampire, an aspiring fashion designer/dry-cleaning worker who develops an obsession with a customer, a community of people with Hansen’s disease that welcome and attempt... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-01-27 12:00:00 UTC ]
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