Julia by Ada Zhang When she was twenty-two she used to spend what little money she could have saved on hardcover books, lattes, and croissants. She read in cafés alone and anonymous, with no reason except to offer the world a glimpse of her. Ten years later, she was leaving and decided to revisit all […] The post The City Can’t Replace Her Best Friend appeared first on Electric Literature. Continue reading at 'Electric Literature'
[ Electric Literature | 2023-05-03 11:05:00 UTC ]
About twenty pages into Sofia Samatar’s memoir The White Mosque, Sigmund Freud appears, sitting in a train compartment late at night. Up to this point, Samatar’s story has been primarily about her travels across Central Asia to study The Bride Sect, a Mennonite group who fled persecution in... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-02-07 12:05:00 UTC ]
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Marisa Crane’s debut novel I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is set outside of our reality: in an America where a cruel form of public shaming has taken the place of prisons. In Exoskeletons we meet Kris, a new mother struggling to see a future for herself and her kid in the wake of her partner’s... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-02-07 12:00:00 UTC ]
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It’s January and you know what that means—a reset for your TBR pile! There are so many amazing books to look forward to in 2023, but before we get too far into the new year, I think it’s worth spotlighting some of the titles you might have missed last year. And 2022 was an incredible […] The... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-01-27 12:05:00 UTC ]
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In our monthly series Can Writing Be Taught? we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time, we’re talking to Christine Ma-Kellams, who’s teaching an online eight-week fiction workshop. From improving narrative... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-01-20 12:00:00 UTC ]
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“I never thought I’d be one of those people,” she said. T Kira Madden and I were sitting in the private room of a fancy strip-mall restaurant in Albany, New York, and I was eating a very expensive salad. Earlier that afternoon, we had given a reading at a local bookstore with T Kira’s... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-01-19 12:05:00 UTC ]
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If you are a debut author or a literary fiction and nonfiction stan, you’ve likely heard of Debutiful. Adam Vitcavage launched the podcast and website dedicated to highlighting the work of debut authors in January 2019. It has since become a beacon in the literary community, helping over 100,000... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-01-18 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Growing up, the library was not just Amanda Oliver’s favorite place but also her “first beloved destination, first embodied center… it was absolutely sacred.” However, soon after Oliver began her career as a librarian at a Title I school and then in the D.C. public library system, she witnessed... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-01-05 12:00:00 UTC ]
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I was in my twenties the first time I read a memoir set in Lahore, my father’s city, where I’d spent time during my childhood. I was living in Syracuse, New York, then, and I read Meatless Days hungrily, soaking in familiar places and people, and when I finished it, I read it again. I […] The... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-01-04 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Over the holidays, we asked our social media followers to vote for the best book cover of 2022 and after an especially close competition, a crowd favorite won the hearts of book lovers. From 32 beautiful cover designs, here are the semi-finalists: Valley of Want by Ross White, cover design by... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-12-30 12:00:00 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-12-28 12:00:00 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-12-20 12:00:35 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-12-13 12:05:00 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-12-05 12:00:00 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-11-25 12:00:00 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-11-23 12:00:00 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-11-18 12:06:00 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-11-17 12:05:00 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-11-11 12:05:00 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-11-01 11:05:00 UTC ]
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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 at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-10-27 11:05:00 UTC ]
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