Why All Americans Should Read “Celestial Bodies”

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 first novel by an Omani woman […] The post Why All Americans Should Read “Celestial Bodies” appeared first on Electric Literature. Continue reading at 'Electric Literature'

[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-26 11:59:00 UTC ]

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Her Corpse Is a Wild Animal

No Man’s Mare by Djuna Barnes Pauvla Agrippa had died that afternoon at three; now she lay with quiet hands crossed a little below her fine breast with its transparent skin showing the veins as filmy as old lace, purple veins that were now only a system of charts indicating the pathways where... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-11-04 12:10:00 UTC ]
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Naomi Cohn On the Sensory Experience of Reading with Her Hands

Naomi Cohn’s memoir focuses on her progressive vision loss and her embrace of braille as an act of reclaiming her love of reading and writing, along with an expanded sensory and sensual existence in the world. Intertwined with this focus are themes braided and bountiful, including a history of... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-10-25 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Joshua Mohr on Writing a Genre-Blending Post-Modern Punk Rock Saga

Since 2009, when his first novel Some Things That Meant the World to Me introduced his heart-rending, beat-driven, often surreal voice, Joshua Mohr has published nine books—two raw addiction memoirs (Sirens and Model Citizen) and seven idiosyncratic novels. The New York Times called his 2011... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2024-10-22 08:55:25 UTC ]
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Zara Chowdhary on Coming of Age During Anti-Muslim Violence in India and the U.S.

Zara Chowdhary’s The Lucky Ones is a devastating, timely memoir about survival, reclamation and what it means to exist on the margins of society and within your own familial unit. Zara speaks to us, raw and unfiltered, about growing up as a young muslim girl in Ahmedabad, India, in the aftermath... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-10-17 11:00:00 UTC ]
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How Should Debut Novelists Measure Success?

Earlier this May, an Esquire article by Kate Dwyer called “Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?” channeled the fear of debut novelists everywhere: What happens if no one buys my book? Book sales are an important way for editors and agents to gauge whether to invest in an author. If her first... Continue reading at The Millions

[ The Millions | 2024-10-16 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Sapphic Undertones Littered L.M. Montgomery’s Fiction, as Well as Her Female Friendships

My favorite book is a pale, mint green, Illustrated Junior Library edition with edges sprayed indigo blue. The girl on the cover wears a white pinafore over a practical plaid dress. Her two orangey-red braids fall around her shoulders, topped off with a wide-brimmed straw hat covered in... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-10-16 11:10:00 UTC ]
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15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Fall

I’ve been reading from outside of Phoenix, where there have been over 120 days of 100 degree temperatures as summer comes to a close.  With Hurricane Helene devastating the Southeast and war spreading in the Middle East, the uncertainty about our collective futures—whether it is from climate... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-10-11 11:05:00 UTC ]
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Douglas Unger Turns Rapacious Greed and Moral Slipperiness into High Literature

Forty years after the publication of Leaving the Land, Pulitzer Prize finalist Douglas Unger returns with his fifth novel, Dream City, an excoriating tale of hope, greed, and betrayal in Las Vegas. C.D. Reinhart is Unger’s fatally flawed protagonist, a failed actor bent on self-improvement who... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-10-08 11:05:00 UTC ]
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Luis Jaramillo on Creating a Multigenerational Speculative Story of the Borderlands

I highlighted Luis Jaramillo’s first book, the short story collection The Doctor’s Wife—a gathering of 91 ultra-short chapters, some as brief as a sentence, that add up to a portrait of a family—as a best book of 2012 for NPR. His first novel further reveals his wide-ranging literary talents.... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2024-10-08 08:55:05 UTC ]
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8 Books About Growing Up Through Ballet

Books about ballet dancers are, invariably, books about growing up. Whether it is a young child desperate to win a place at a ballet school, a ballerina escaping from a dangerous relationship, or a memoir about finding a sense of belonging in the dance world, ballet books return again and again... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-10-04 11:05:00 UTC ]
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Reese Witherspoon announces first novel co-written with Harlan Coben

The Oscar-winning actor and author of the Myron Bolitar series have been ‘writing pages over many months’ together to create a thriller to be published next yearReese Witherspoon has written her first novel, in collaboration with bestselling author Harlan Coben, publisher Penguin Random House... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2024-10-02 17:00:45 UTC ]
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Clement Goldberg’s Debut Novel is Horny, Queer, and Very Revolutionary

In Clement Goldberg’s madcap and campy debut novel, cats, plants, alien intelligences, and a group of human misfits conspire to make us all freer and more joyfully connected. New Mistakes offers a hilarious, surreal, and sexy new vision of queer collectivity—one that involves the living earth... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-10-02 11:00:00 UTC ]
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I Love Short Stories. Do I Have to Write a Novel?

In 1993, I published my first decent story in a literary journal and a few months later received a letter from an agent whose name I recognized. I’d written short stories in college classes, sent them off, and typically the only thing that came back was a rejection, housed in the... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-10-01 11:10:00 UTC ]
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Our 15 Most-Read Posts Of All Time

Fifteen years ago, Electric Literature started as a print and digital quarterly journal during the glory days of the print magazine era. Our very first issue surpassed 10,000 copies in sales, we were stocked in newsstands and bookstores, and as an e-book. We were one of the first to publish... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-09-27 11:10:00 UTC ]
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7 Small Press Books About Motherhood You Might Have Missed

When I started to write about motherhood a decade ago, the topic still carried a tinge of shame. Writers tended to fear motherhood would push them into some unsightly box, as if they’d succumbed to something less serious than the laudable material of their (non-mothering) peers. In the Los... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2024-09-18 11:05:00 UTC ]
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Exclusive Cover Reveal of “When the Harvest Comes” by Denne Michele Norris

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[ Electric Literature | 2024-09-18 11:04:00 UTC ]
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Movie Alert: 'The Wild Robot'

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‘I wanted to write a suburban Reacher’: Richard Osman talks to Lee Child about class, success and the secret to great crime writing

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[ The Guardian | 2024-09-14 09:00:23 UTC ]
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Tracy O’Neill’s Mid-Pandemic Search for Her Birth Mother Became A Globe-Trotting Memoir

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In “Brothers and Ghosts,” a Vietnamese Diaspora Family Cannot Escape Their Generational Wounds

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