Writing literary fiction stories? Forget what you’ve learned about complex characters and earned endings. What you really need is to include the required tropes. To help you out, we’ve created this handy checklist. Literary Fiction Trope Checklist _____ 1. Starts with character waking up _____ 2. Starts with character looking out of window, describing scenery […] The post Who Needs an MFA When You Have This Literary Fiction Trope Checklist? appeared first on Electric Literature. Continue reading at 'Electric Literature'
[ Electric Literature | 2019-07-26 11:00:50 UTC ]
Test your knowledge of women writers with a fun pop quiz. First Round Name the title and author of the first-ever science fiction novel. This Pulitzer-prize winner and Italian translator declared in 2015 that she is now only writing in Italian. Name this author. The 2018 Nobel laureate for... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-12-27 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Tiffany Midge is the author of several books including the recent memoir Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s, a collection of prose that blends humor with social commentary and meditations on love and loss. Her poetry collection The Woman Who Married a Bear won Kenyon Review’s Earthworks Prize... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-12-19 12:00:00 UTC ]
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When I read the reviews of Ali Wong’s memoir Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice For Living Your Best Life, I was at first thrilled—the responses were glowing—and then perplexed. I fundamentally agreed with what they said: that the book is a more intimate and poignant (yet... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-12-16 12:00:00 UTC ]
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In our 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 Lilly Dancyger, editor at Narratively and author of the forthcoming memoir Negative Space. Lilly’s next... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-12-12 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Is your attention span ravaged by living in our hellscape of a modern era? Good news: 2019 brought us plenty of brilliant short fiction. We polled current and former Electric Lit staff and contributors about their favorite collections of the year, and their picks include debuts, National Book... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-12-11 12:00:00 UTC ]
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In this episode, taped live at the Miami Book Fair, writer Jeff VanderMeer and editor Ann VanderMeer talk to Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about editing The Big Book of Classic Fantasy anthology, historical understandings of fantasy, editing beyond... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-12-05 09:48:07 UTC ]
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Every day of the year, Electric Literature is grateful for the people who read and share what we publish. But on this Giving Tuesday, we’re coming to you with a special request: Electric Lit is aiming for 1,000 members by 2020, and we want you to be one of them. Your membership gets you... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-12-03 12:00:00 UTC ]
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It was a rainy, snuggly night in November 2018, perfect for making mushroom barley soup or stuffed cabbage. I was walking home from the train when I saw it, inexplicably abandoned at the Little Free Library on my block. There, lying on its side as if after a long day of work, was that... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-27 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi won the Man Booker International Prize this year for its beautifully rendered portrayal of a family’s tangled history in the village of al-Awafi in Oman. The novel was the first book translated from Arabic to win the prize, and more surprisingly, it was the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-26 11:59:00 UTC ]
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November is Picture Book Month, so these illustrated little gems are deservedly in the spotlight. In a recent blog post for Books Are Magic, novelist and bookstore owner Emma Straub curated a list of picture books. Among Straub’s picks for the best picture books of 2019 is a wonderful biography... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-25 12:00:00 UTC ]
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The new Elena Ferrante is just one of the exciting novels in translation coming next year. Lara Feigel talks to the UK editors who are rediscovering classics and finding new audiencesThere are voices that speak to us across oceans and centuries with more intimacy than the people who surround us... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2019-11-23 08:00:49 UTC ]
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From the title, you might think that On Swift Horses is about cowboys, horse wrangling, rural landscapes—and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Shannon Pufahl’s debut novel explores wide-open spaces and how people navigate them in a post-Depression, post-World War II, Baby Boomer era in Southern... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-21 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Writers of literary fiction are supposed to disdain celebrity memoirs. They’re sucking up all the big advances and lowering the bar of what’s supposed to be Literature, right? But I’ve got a dirty reading secret. I love celebrity memoirs, particularly by standup comedians (and not just because... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-20 12:00:00 UTC ]
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These are some important things to know about my dad: every Halloween he dresses up in a different inflatable costume to hand out candy, he’s seen Bigfoot, he watches John Wick about once a month, he wanted to name me Elvis, and when I was younger he read all my favorite books along with me.... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-19 12:00:00 UTC ]
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I first encountered Carmen Maria Machado in 2016, reading her short fiction “Horror Story” in Granta. Her innovative and acclaimed debut collection Her Body and Other Parties had not yet been published, but I scourged the internet for everything I could find. What I found were stories about... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-15 12:00:00 UTC ]
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It’s a confusing thing, being Irish. We’re European with none of the sophistication, and for a tiny island, we have an impressive lack of consistency. That said, we also have an impressive literary output. Our politics, social movements, and religions have born enough conflict to make a canon... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-15 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Virtually none of us will ever know what Ahmet Altan has gone through, and continues to live through. After the 2016 Turkish coup d’etat attempt, the writer was arrested along with his brother on such claims as “sending subliminal messages to coup supporters.” In 2018, they were sentenced to... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-11 12:00:01 UTC ]
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ALMOST NO CONTEMPORARY literary fiction recounts the experience of getting an abortion. Perhaps this is because it can seem politically suspect to write in a nuanced way about its difficulties; opponents of legal abortion are all too eager to turn any mention of these difficulties into evidence... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-11-07 13:30:09 UTC ]
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In the middle of Carmen Maria Machado’s new memoir In the Dream House, CARMEN, stylized in all caps like a play script, sits across from the woman with whom she’s been in an abusive relationship (THE WOMAN IN THE DREAM HOUSE). The scene is set (“the curtain rises”) and we’re shown, “the house... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-05 12:00:26 UTC ]
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You go to a coffee shop in order to focus on your craft. What do you order? A. A black coffee. B. An almond milk matcha. What is your critically acclaimed debut novel about? A. A man getting stuck on a subway train and revisiting the weight of all of the mistakes he’s made in […] The post... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-01 11:00:37 UTC ]
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