Electric Literature

“Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart showed me how bonding over food could let me cope with anticipatory grief.”

“We need them to assert our very existence.”

What does it mean to perform race for a white audience?

“From ‘Wicked’ to ‘Cruella,’ rehabilitated villainesses rely on outdated ideas of women’s virtue.”

“Breaking news: Black people have families and jobs and romantic interests and hobbies and challenges and yes, we have all of this within systems not designed for us, and yet we exist. We live and love and die. Those institutions and structures don’t HAVE to be in the forefront of the stories we tell and it’s also okay when they are.”

“Here’s what we can learn from Margery Kempe, patron saint of writing mothers: cry if you must, then bulldoze your own path.”

For all the writers who rely on food stamps, day jobs, friends’ couches, and spouses to write their books with no guarantee of payment or publication, novelist Sandra Newman talks openly about her financial struggles. And she says: don’t feel ashamed. Create a room of your own anyway you can, even if it requires eating spaghetti with ketchup, and writing on a park bench.

“That fight-or-flight feeling, the body’s warning system, is what horror regularly exercises. It reminds you to stay alert because danger could present itself from the depths of any shadow, from behind any door, from the cab of any passing vehicle.”

Boredom and an enterprising Brit gave birth to the modern tourism industry, and we’re still trying to make sense of it all.

In 1995, twenty-one year old novelist Mariana Enriquez came to fame in Argentina on the power of a single novel built around youthful subcultures, drugs, and her love of Emily Bronte, David Bowie and Iggy Pop, then she quickly sank back into the shadows. She liked it that way.