In this stunning debut short story collection, Mary Jones uses her distinctive voice to examine the painful and occasionally surreal ways we say goodbye. The stories—which range from poignant, to darkly funny, to unsettling—will push you out of your comfort zone and ignite intense emotions surrounding love and loss. A woman camps out on the porch of an ex-lover who has barricaded himself inside the house; a preteen girl caught shoplifting finds herself in grave danger; a man hires a professional mourner to ensure his wife’s funeral is a success. Time and again, Jones’s characters find themselves facing the ends of things: relationships, health, innocence, life as they know it. The stories gathered in this collection are arresting, original, and beautifully rendered. The Goodbye Process packs a punch, just the way grief does—knocking us off our feet.

Here is the cover, designed by Anna Morrison.

Author Mary Jones: “I was hoping the cover would be minimalistic and beautiful, with a hint of quirkiness. I think this cover perfectly embodies those things, and more. I love the clean design, and the color palette which feels both sophisticated and playful. I like that the cover image is not explicit, but is open for interpretation, and everyone I’ve shown it to has had something different to say about it. To me it suggests that a conversation is happening, and maybe one person—the person with the colder cup—has been talking for a while, opening up. In all of the stories in the collection characters are at various stages of letting go of things—relationships, health, life as they know it. I feel like with this colder cup, and with the upward spiraling steam, Anna captures the feeling here that something is being released, let go of.”

Designer Anna Morrison: “Working on a collection of short stories can sometimes be a challenge, especially when trying to encapsulate a feeling that encompasses a range of different narratives. However, Mary Jones’s collection, The Goodbye Process, has a strong, overarching theme of loss and grief, with some humor intertwined in the writing. I also wanted to convey a sense of intimacy on the cover but with an unspoken loneliness, too. There are a lot of different perspectives in this collection, but I felt like the steaming cups of coffee could be the background to many difficult (or happy) conversations.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “The Goodbye Process” by Mary Jones appeared first on Electric Literature.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, […] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

Here is the cover, designed by Mary Austin Speaker.

Author Fady Joudah: “I wrote the bulk of this collection between October and Decemeber of 2023. I could not imagine a title for the book or for most of its poems in a time of extermination. The text of the poems already says enough. The text also betrays a necessary silence. And yet the silence in the book is the silence that the reader, listener, recipient should practice. In some moments I share this silence with them, and they with me. In many moments, however, the silence is solely their task. The ellipsis in brackets highlight the space in which a Palestinian speaks and others listen. The cover speaks to this silence as well as the survivance of Palestinians.”

Designer Mary Austin Speaker: “I worked closely with Fady on all aspects of […], and as we considered several busier cover designs, we began to see that this book required a minimalist cover in order for the pictographic title to be the focal point. This book is very much about silence— the majority of the poems in the book are titled, simply, “[…],” and we wanted a cover that offered that silence in a very direct, highly visible way.

I designed the package to carry the colors of the Palestinian flag when it’s viewed in full, and added a cloth texture not only to summon the flag but also to signify the interweaving of lives the book illustrates: what appears to be separate is actually woven of the same cloth. The front cover uses only green and black, while the back cover is a red field featuring a single poem. It was Fady’s idea to bisect the cover with two colors, which I agreed lent itself to the very idea of division that this book seeks to subvert with complexity, trouble, history, names, art—all the things that get subsumed by silence—represented here by the ellipsis in brackets as well as Fady’s name in both English and Arabic. The black field offers a space for grief, while the green field below represents land that remains alive despite besiegement. We made the decision to represent Fady’s name in both the English and Arabic letterforms in order not only to render Fady’s presence as Arab and as Palestinian American immediately legible to an American audience, but also to push the boundaries of book cover conventions—Arabic script is beautiful and illustrative, but of what? Printing the author’s name in Arabic invites us to try harder to overcome our gaps in understanding. It’s a start.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of […] by Fady Joudah appeared first on Electric Literature.

“A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.”

So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.

Here is the cover, art by Anja Niemi.

Editor Cian McCourt: “We used the Norwegian neo-romantic painter Harald Sohlberg for the cover for Will and Testament, which did a grand job representing the gravitas of that novel (and the painting helpfully featured a cabin). But with the next Hjorth novel we published, Long Live the Post Horn!, I wanted something that captured the very contemporary, very relatable angst in her fiction, as well as hinting at the humour in her writing, which often goes unremarked on. I’d loved Anja Niemi’s work for a long while, and when the penny dropped that she was Norwegian (and a fan of Vigdis, as it turns out), she was the clear choice.  And I’m delighted we can return to her for If Only. This new cover gets right at the heart of how a love affair, when played out in its most ardent, obsessive key, can unmoor you from your sense of self. I think it speaks to the awful ambivalence true passion begets.”

Author Vigdis Hjorth: “I like it immediately. I like it intensely. I like that it’s so red. I like that it is not naturalistic, that it is artificial. I like that the woman’s face is realistic in its expression, the horror at the sight of what may be her own future self.”

The design team: “We were thrilled to be able to feature the stunning work of Norwegian artist Anja Niemi on the cover. Like Hjorth’s brilliant novel, Niemi’s ‘The Socialite’ implores the viewer to investigate her relationship—not to her self—but to her selves.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “If Only” by Vigdis Hjorth appeared first on Electric Literature.

From 32 cover designs, here are the semi-finalists:

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, illustration by Angela Faustina, design by Natalia Olbinski Heringa, vs. Toska by Alina Pleskova, art by Katy Horan

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy, design by Will Staehle, art direction by Evan Gaffney, vs. Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith, design by Beth Steidle

From the Final Four, now we’re down to two crowd favorites:

We spoke to the author of Ripe and the designers of Ripe and Glaciers about creating their book covers:

Electric Literature: Tell us about your design process for this book cover and what you wanted to convey through the artwork?

Beth Steidle: The first edition of Glaciers, by Alexis M. Smith, was published in 2012. It was very well received, and the cover was well loved. Tin House wanted to celebrate this book and introduce it to a new audience with a reissue approximately 10 years later. The biggest challenge was to come up with a new package that still retained many of the successful elements of the first package (left): a vintage sentiment, elements of collage, a lightness, and femininity. However, for the new edition, we also wanted to visually highlight the overarching environmental concern and shifting landscapes that factor into the book, an element of the narrative that is so critical to our current national conversation. The most beautiful moment in this book, for me, is when the protagonist reaches out to touch a glacier, so that is the moment I focused on for this design.

EL: Did you have any interesting false starts or rejected drafts you can share with us or tell us about?

BS: This cover was not the cover that was originally approved. The first cover featured a vintage illustration of a woman wearing a green cardigan and sheath dress. The mountains and glaciers were superimposed over the woman’s dress. We loved that cover but there were concerns that the green cardigan could be construed as too old fashioned, so we opted for the more surreal design. It felt smarter and timeless.

EL: What’s your favorite book cover of 2023, besides your own?

BS: 2023 was a fantastic year for book covers. Ripe and Tomb Sweeping are both favorites of mine but, ultimately, Paul Sahre’s cover design for the paperback edition of The Employees by Olga Ravn, wins my vote for best cover of 2023. It’s such a creepy, compelling image, perfectly paired with that minimalist white background and off-kilter type. It tells you everything you need to know and also not nearly enough, which is what the best book covers should endeavor to do.

Electric Literature: Tell us about your design process for this book cover and what you wanted to convey through the artwork?

Designer Natalia Olbinski: The pomegranate, a symbol that structures the novel (each section is named for a part of the fruit), was a natural choice for the cover direction, and a preference of the author’s. The initial set of designs included the pomegranate fruit or seeds, depicted in a variety of ways: photographic and illustrative, some realistic and some very abstract, with some reference to a void or black hole. After that first round and a title change, I believe it was Sarah (or Jaya Miceli, art director) who had proposed the artwork of Angela Faustina, whose evocative oil paintings of close-ups of glistening pomegranate seeds and membranes are striking and even grotesque. We tried another round of covers using paintings from Angela’s series with different type treatments, and voilà! This composition was just right.

EL: Did you have any interesting false starts or rejected drafts you can share with us or tell us about?

NO: I typically need to try out all of my bad ideas to get to someplace interesting so I have a ton of sketches for this cover. Plus there was an abundance of visual references in the novel—of the tech industry, black holes—which were so interesting to play around with.  There’s one concept I never developed past a sketch which I liked, a floating pomegranate with a black hole shadow—flat and bold, just the shapes. But I think we got to the strongest solution with the current cover.

EL: What’s your favorite book cover of 2023, besides your own?

NO: The cover for Mister Mister by Guy Gunaratne designed by Jack Smyth reminds me of old school poster art in how dynamic and punchy the art is. I’d hang it on my wall. The cover for Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra, designed by Alex Merto, also puts a big smile on my face.

Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe:

Electric Literature: As an author, what was the book cover process like for you? 

Sarah Rose Etter: With any book, at least for me, we have a few rounds of cover ideas because I’m picky about a cover. I always tell the publisher that up front—I just love visual art so much that it matters to me a lot. 

During the pandemic, while I was writing Ripe, I was just deep in my pomegranate research—I was searching films, art archives, anything I could get my hands on. Angela Faustina’s art popped up and became something I returned to over and over again while I was drafting the book. At one point, I was recreating her paintings myself in between drafts, mimicking her style. 

Scribner asked me to send over a bunch of art that had inspired me while drafting—and of course, Angela’s work was at the top of the list. When the cover options were sent over, this cover jumped out and I was floored—it hadn’t occurred to me that Angela’s work would end up on the cover. But now it feels like kismet in a way—I got incredibly lucky with this cover. 

EL: What are your thoughts on the cover and how the artwork ties in with your book? 

SRE: Angela’s work is so visceral and unexpected. Her pomegranates make you look twice—the painting feels like it could be part of the human body or the brain, but it’s still beautiful. Since the last section of the book specifically is about seeds and the interior of the body, her work just fit perfectly as almost a foreshadowing of what is to come,

I think, too, sometimes you need a great title for a perfect cover—we were going back and forth with title options for the book, and once we hit on Ripe as a title, we really needed a juicy, glistening cover and Angela’s work was a perfect fit for that, too. The title and the font both work so well with the art—it just all came together. When Jaya [Miceli] and Natalia [Olbinski] sent this cover over, everyone got really excited—you felt that buzz of “Oh yes, that’s it!” The team at Scribner worked really hard to nail this cover so I’m really grateful to them. 

EL: What’s your favorite book cover of 2023, besides your own?

SRE: I honestly really love the cover for Glaciers—it’s bold, unexpected, always makes me look twice so that’s tough competition! I also love the new McNally editions covers. But this is an impossible question for me, especially with the number of art books I buy. Every Sophie Calle cover is incredible. I also saw there was a crazy galley going around in the UK where the entire book was hardcover and holographic with no title on the front—it was beautiful, but now I can’t remember the title of the book so I guess those wild artistic choices can backfire. It’s still a gorgeous book. 

The winner of Electric Lit’s 2023 Book Cover Tournament: Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, illustration by Angela Faustina, design by Natalia Olbinski Heringa.

The post Announcing the Best Book Cover of 2023 appeared first on Electric Literature.

2023 was the year things were supposed to go “back to normal.” Instead, it was the year we realized this was the new normal. 2023, the year ​​ “the ocean off the coast of Florida / reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit— / a toddler running a low fever, / the temperature of an average hot tub.” 2023 was the year the future became now. 

As soon as Erika finished reading, I asked her if I could have the poem for The Commuter. This isn’t usually how poetry comes to the magazine—we reviewed over 3,000 unsolicited submissions this year, and 92% of the issues we published came from those open and free submissions. But this situation was unique.

Not only did “The Shape of Progress” go on to be The Commuter’s most-read issue of the year, at 60,000 reads, it was one of the most-read posts across Electric Literature’s entire site. 

The editorial ethos of The Commuter embraces the strange, the absurd, the darkly comic. Hybrid forms, experiments, flow charts—if we love something, we do our best to find a way to overcome technical hurdles and make it work on the site. We are the home for work whose answer to “Is this too much?” is “It’s just enough.” We published 51 issues this year, including our 300th, featuring established writers like Lydia Davis, Mat Johnson, and Sam Sax—alongside not one, but four poetry and fiction debuts.

All 303 issues are available for free, and we pay all of our contributors. We’re skipping this week’s issue because of the holiday, but ask that you please consider making a donation before New Year’s to support The Commuter’s 2024 season, our sixth year of publication. 

Thank you for reading, and happy holidays!

Kelly Luce

Editor, The Commuter

“Sinéad O’Connor Was Right All Along” by Erika Meitner

This elegy by Erika Meitner was written shortly after the news of Sinéad O’Connor’s passing and is full of the pure emotion, resonance, and gratefulness many were feeling for the life and work of Sinéad O’Connor, combined with her music’s prescience in our modern time. It is the most popular piece on Electric Literature this year!

“My Mother Wrote Her Own Ending” by Arwen Donahue

In this graphic narrative, a daughter connects with her mother posthumously after finding an unpublished autobiography of her life in a cabinet of “tax records.”

God Has Definitely Forsaken Us by Madeline Cash

Madeline Cash’s short fiction is a satirical, hilariously brilliant, examination of a hopeless world and what happens in the aftermath of a society forgotten by God.

Literally Squeezed Out of the Market by Kim Samek

In this piece of flash fiction by Kim Samek, a list writer named Ant is squeezed out of the housing market—literally. After purchasing a skinny house in the city, he struggles to make room for himself in more ways than one. This humorous short story is a surreal and sardonic commentary on the struggles the property market poses to a new generation searching for housing security.

The Bluest Crab at Grandpa’s Funeral by Matthew Ryan Frankel

Chosen by Anthony Doerr as the winner of the 2023 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, the flash fiction piece “Carapace” by Matthew Ryan Frankel dives into an intriguing event (and dinner plan) at a family funeral.

The post The Commuter’s Most Popular Flash Fiction, Poetry, and Graphic Narratives of 2023 appeared first on Electric Literature.

Or it might be really misguided, as in A.M. Homes’s iconic story from 1986 about a sexually obsessive teenage boy who masturbates all over his sister’s Barbie doll. 

Another top read by Elisa Faison actually does contain good sex—until it gets emotionally complicated, as foursomes are wont to do. Or, if you’re interested in a (sexless) take on non-monogamous relationships, consider Marne Litfin’s story about a deteriorating throuple, aka a “murder.”

I would say that sex sells, except Recommended Reading is free. We published 52 issues this year—including our 600th—on topics as wide-ranging as repressed memories, existential dread, class privilege, stalkers, lost friendships, influencers, first loves, and acid trips. Our contributors included Paul Yoon, Ann Beattie, Alexanda Chang, Yiyun Lee, Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi, and Rebecca Makkai; and our recommenders included Deesha Philyaw, Elizabeth McKracken, Fransciso Goldman, and Lauren Groff. 

All. For. Free. 

You can find all 606 issues of Recommended Reading on our website, representing the largest free resource for literary short fiction outside of a library system. But publishing Recommended Reading isn’t free. Please consider making a donation to our year-end fundraising campaign. We need your support as we embark on Recommended Reading’s 2024 season, its 13th year of publication.

– Halimah Marcus
Editor, Recommended Reading

Here are our 10 most popular stories of the year, starting with the most read.    

“One-Hundred Percent Humidity” by Michelle Lyn King, recommended by Wynter K. Miller

Michelle Lyn King’s “One-Hundred Percent Humidity” follows a teenage girl, Faith, who is trying her best to be “the kind of person who says yes to things.” Faith’s mother has recently died of breast cancer, her father is dating someone new, and her friend Callie dictates the terms of their entire friendship. She is also beginning to understand that whether people think you did something matters more than whether you actually did. King’s writing is candid and emotionally unflinching. As Wynter K. Miller writes in her introduction, “She understands that markers of maturity, like sexual experience, matter—and she is aware that the noteworthiness of her virginity depends on the behavior of others. If she hasn’t had sex yet, it matters; if she’s the only one who hasn’t had sex, it matters more.”

“A Real Doll” by A.M. Homes, recommended and revisited by A.M. Homes

In 1986, A.M. Homes wrote “A Real Doll,” a story about a teenage boy who develops an intense psychosexual relationship with his sister’s Barbie. Homes remembers when she workshopped the story at NYU, her classmates thought it was “‘psychotic’ and that it was impossible to date Barbie ‘because she didn’t have a vagina.’” The story was eventually published in Christopher Street magazine along with two other stories from her collection The Safety of Objects, and it also spawned the anthology Mondo Barbie. In honor of the release of the Barbie movie, Homes revisits her iconic short story thirty-five years later.

“Group Sex” by Elisa Faison, recommended by Wynter K. Miller

“Group Sex” opens five years into Frances and Ben’s happy marriage as they contemplate opening it up for the first time. Their entanglement with another couple, Adam and Celeste, raises unforeseen questions about queerness, nonmonogamy, and the institution of marriage. Articulating the rich interiority of its characters, “Group Sex” gives voice to the messy joys of a foursome. Rather than just sex, as Wynter K. Miller writes, this story shines a light on “loyalty and betrayal, desire and grief, obsession and love. The story asks important questions about marriage and monogamy, and somehow, it makes the asking fun.”

“Connie” by Catherine Lacey, recommended by Lauren Groff

This excerpt from Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X forms part of a biographical detective story in which X’s widow C. M. Lucca, a former journalist, attempts to uncover the true story of her wife’s life. Lauren Groff describes X as the shifty and elusive “magnetic center” of the novel: “X is a writer of fiction, a visual artist, a filmmaker, and a songwriter and producer for David Bowie; in short, a Zelig of high art.” Lucca discovers that X employed different names, identities and personalities in a dizzying spiral of deception; despite her desperate attempts to discover X’s true identity, Lucca never quite comes close, and her search only illuminates the depths of her absence. 

“Live Today Always” by Jade Jones, recommended by Halimah Marcus

In “Live Today Always,” Lee is a copywriter for a PR firm that represents a problematic social media influencer. The only Black person at her company, Lee is tasked with writing the influencer’s apology for saying a racial slur, forcing her to contend with the fact that she has been compromising her own values. Fluent in the language of the Internet, Jones’s voice is at once compelling and natural. As Halimah Marcus writes in her introduction, “Life online is at once ephemeral and permanent: there’s a record of what you said, but it can also be deleted.”

“Julia” by Ada Zhang, recommended by Sarah Thankam Mathews

In “Julia,” a story from Ada Zhang’s debut collection The Sorrows of Others, a thirty-two-year-old woman named Esther prepares to leave New York after ten years. She is reminded of the intense, transformative friendship she once had with a woman named Julia as well as its eventual rupture. Sarah Thankam Matthews describes Zhang’s writing as “careful, faceted, gleaming in its insight and meticulous observation, its beautiful sentences. But it is also radiant, softly glowing as if lit from within.” The Sorrows of Others is a “pristine and lovingly carved jewel box of a collection,” filled with wisdom, insight and profundity.

“Wedding Party” by Christine Sneed, recommended by Elizabeth McKenzie

Sneed’s panoramic story “Wedding Party” explores the psyches of the disparate members of a wedding: “the scars of the wife-to-be, the secret yearnings of the groom, the screw-ups of the uncle, the fury of the groom’s brother, and the gnawing voids in the lives of those attending, including a kleptomaniac sister,” as Elizabeth McKenzie writes in her introduction. “Everyone is hungry, everyone is wounded, and, as custom demands, everyone must be merry nonetheless.” Sneed’s elegant, lucid and virtuosic prose expertly navigates individual consciousness in a masterful examination of the short story form.

“Communicable” by Daphne Kalotay, recommended by Rebecca Makkai

In “Communicable,” a short story from her collection The Archivists, Daphne Kalotay uses the backdrop of the pandemic and the technology of Zoom to navigate the minefield of human relationships. She accomplishes what Rebecca Makkai describes as a remarkable feat: She uses the pandemic as an organic plot device, writing a story that could only happen in lockdown—COVID is at the very center of the story—and yet it’s all simply scaffolding to the real story, which is about people who are both pushed together and falling apart.” Like the rest of the collection, “Communicable” is witty, transcendent, uncanny and unfailingly prescient.

“The Catholics” by Chaitali Sen, recommended by Danielle Evans

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Laurie and Sharmila feel betrayed by their country and react by making uncharitable assumptions about their new neighbors. In doing so, they push back against a culture that insists they don’t belong, but risk compromising their own values in the process. This story from A New Race of Men From Heaven is atmospheric and unnerving, capturing what Danielle Evans describes as “Sen’s gift for being forthright—for finding the precise language to capture even a fleeting feeling” as well as “her gift for restraint, her willingness to leave silence on the page, to let language be the best tool we have for forging connection or understanding and still, frequently, not enough.”

“Daisies” by Marne Litfin, recommended by Halimah Marcus

On a bright sunny summer day, the narrator and their friend Miller is on a road trip from upstate New York to Philly to visit the beach. On their drive, the two friends have both heartfelt and light-hearted discussions about their gender identity, changing bodies, and failing romantic situationships. In her introduction, Halimah Marcus describes reading the story as being “invited inside that friendship, and reminded that the greatest gift in any relationship, romantic or otherwise, is the freedom of being loved while also being yourself.”

The post Recommended Reading’s Most Popular Stories of 2023 appeared first on Electric Literature.

Editors work behind the scenes, but their impact is enduring, and widely felt. Editors influence who gets published, and how their work is ushered into the world. In her essay, Baker writes about having done that work, and feeling erased from the record. The impact of Black women in publishing, she argues, is slowly being rendered invisible. She asks a key question: “If you don’t exist, how can you even begin to tell your own story?” 

By now you know that Electric Literature is committed to publishing writers who tell stories that need to be told. Whether by soliciting work from emerging and underrepresented authors, working with a writer on in-depth, developmental edits, or creating new opportunities for authors to submit work, everything we do is geared toward supporting writers by providing a home for their most vital stories. 

At Electric Literature, helping writers tell their stories is our story. We take immense pride in guiding our writers through the editorial process, compensating them, and presenting their work to millions of readers, online, for free. 

But publishing Electric Literature isn’t free; supporting writers isn’t free. Please consider making a donation to support Electric Literature, so we can keep telling the stories that most need to be told.

Denne Michele Norris
Editor-in-chief of Electric Literature

Here are the most popular posts of the year by category, starting with the most read:

Reading Lists

1. 7 Cozy Mysteries To Curl Up With by Alice Bell

These warm and fuzzy whodunnits are perfect for fans of Midsomer Murders and Only Murders in the Building.

“Some might think of cozy mysteries as edgeless and old-fashioned, but that’s only the case if you want it to be. To my mind, the genre feels like a metaphorical warm blanket around the shoulders. Though the detective will be out to solve a murder, there’s usually (but not always) less gore on the page, and while I’ve used the word “detective,” a cozy crime is most often solved by an enterprising member of the public.”

2. 8 Long-Awaited Follow Ups to Beloved Books by Chris Vanjonack

Not all authors are as prolific as Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates. This list is proof that it can take decades for even the most acclaimed writers to produce their next work:

“The last few months have been an exciting time in the world of publishing, not only for the litany of debut novel and short story collection releases, but also for the publication of two long gestating, highly anticipated projects by Cormac McCarthy and Katherine Dunn.”

3. 7 Craft Books to Help You Become a Better Writer by Kyla Walker

Improving your writing doesn’t have to be a daunting task.

“Whether you are an aspiring writer, a Pulitzer-Prize winning memoirist, or a curious reader, these books on craft will change you and the way you think about the world—as well as literature—within the complex confines of beauty and truth.”

4. 7 Books to Devour if You Love Yellowjackets by Claudia Guthrie

Two words: erotic cannibalism. That’s all.

“Showtime’s Yellowjackets was the unlikely sleeper hit of 2021 with its dark, off-kilter narrative and female characters who are messy, deeply flawed (and sometimes just downright sinister)… The second season of Yellowjackets was even darker than the first.”

5. 7 Books That Use Fairy Tales to Reveal the Strangeness of the Real World by Rebekah Bergman

These contemporary works of fiction weave in fairy tales to subvert what we take for granted as normal:

“Imagine the dark forest set on a planet mostly destroyed by climate change, the magic mirror in a story of race and identity, or that enchanted sleep in a tale about the unrelenting passage of time. Suddenly, these age-old fairy-tale objects are speaking to us about our real world, showing us how very odd it all is.”

Essays

1. I Was My Mother’s Daughter, and Then I Was Stuck With My Dad by Claire Hodgdon

Claire Hodgdon writes about Apple TV’s Shrinking and the reality of being raised by a grieving single father:

“I have watched countless movies and shows that include a dead mother. Shrinking, though, is about the single dad that is left when a mom dies. It is about the parent who is still there, not the one who is gone. The trying-but-failing Jimmy is sometimes so recognizable to me I can’t watch. Jimmy wants to be a good dad more than he acts like one. He fumbles, and he betrays, and he is selfish, and—he tries.”

2. I Was Too Quick To Call Out Cultural Appropriation by Kavita Das

George Harrison went from chief villain to unlikely hero in Kavita Das’s story of how Indian music came to the West.

“Why had George undertaken this grand endeavor of a cross-cultural tour, the likes of which had never been attempted before, putting his own musical reputation and resources at stake, if not to promote Indian music and musicians and to demonstrate the power of musical collaboration?”

3. As a Cult Survivor, I Found Prince Harry’s Spare Surprisingly Relatable by Rebecca Woodward

Rebecca Woodward’s parents raised her as a Jehovah’s Witness. Decades later as an adult, she sees parallels between her escape from the religion and Prince Harry’s separation from the royal family.

“Like life in the royal family, Witness life was full of ever-shifting rules that often made little sense, but obedience to the men God had chosen to lead his organization was mandatory. In Spare, Harry is often as mystified by the arbitrary rules that dictated his life as I had been. Obedience, it seemed, was the only point for both of us.”

4. Black Women Are Being Erased in Book Publishing by Jennifer Baker

Jennifer Baker, a former acquisitions editor, saw her experience working at a Big 4 publishing house reflected in The Other Black Girl. The novel written by Zakiya Dalila-Harris tells a tried and true story of the challenges faced by Black professionals in the book world.

“Exclusion begins with erasure. Because if you don’t exist, how can you even attempt to tell your own story?… Being the only, or one of the few, is an unenviable position no matter the situation or occupation.”

5. We Need To Talk About Professional Jealousy by Benjamin Schaefer

For Benjamin Schaefer, embracing disappointment is healthier than resenting another writer for their achievements.

“It’s discouraging to see the thing we want, to be so close to it we can almost touch it, and then to be told it isn’t for us, not yet, maybe never. It resonates in the body…

How do we feel disappointment without avoiding it or offloading it onto someone else? Without giving in to the story about how we’ve once again overestimated ourselves or the value of our work? Without perceiving disappointment—and, by extension, desire—as a threat to our well-being?”

Interviews

1. The Quest to Uncover a Disappearance in the Biafran War

Lucy McKeon talks to Emmanuel Iduma about his memoir I Am Still with You and his return to Nigeria in search of the uncle he never knew.

“It was clear to me while I wrote the book that the real failure of imagination would be to avoid a reckoning with the histories that led, in part, to the protests. My sense is that political reckonings are cyclic in nature—an event sparks a reaction, a reaction leads to a flashpoint, again and again.”

2. Maggie Smith Finds Beauty in the Dissolution of Her Marriage

Hoda Mallone talks to Maggie Smith about her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful and letting go without forgiving.

“I wasn’t interested in writing a book in which I was the ‘good guy’—a victim, a martyr—and someone else was the villain.”

3. The Craft of Turning Video Games into Literary Essays

Summer Farah talks to J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado about how Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games came together.

“We were curious what people would have to say about how games fit creatively in writers’ lives. How do video games fit into a creative practice—or, do they?”

4. Kelly Link Makes Fairy Tales Even Weirder Than You Remember

Chelsea Davis asks Kelly Link why we’re drawn to folk tales and how superstitions shape stories.

“The patterns of fairy tales are so recognizable that introducing even the smallest piece of those patterns—’once upon a time,’ for example—means the language of the story that follows becomes charged. Readers will pay closer attention to the appearance of animals (talking or not), or colors, or, say, repetitions of three.”

5. Palestinian Poets on the Role of Literature in Fighting Genocide

In this roundtable discussion moderated by Summer Farah, Samah Fadil, Priscilla Wathington, and Rasha Abdulhadi talk about countering Zionist propaganda and mobilizing art into action.

“Literature can set the stage for the attempted annihilation of a people, and it is our responsibility to point to it. How often have I chosen a slow death in service of comfort? The truth is, I have never been able to look around a room and not see the genocidal escalation to come—if the vitriolic disregard for human life, for Palestinian life, did not permeate through to our most mundane of activities, over 18,000 Palestinians would not have been killed in the past 67 days, over 1.5 million would not be displaced from Gaza.”

—Summer Farah

The Misfits

(Articles That Didn’t Fit Into Any Other Categories)

1. Free or Low-Cost American Writing Residencies by Monica Macansantos 

Looking to get away to a quiet space to focus on your writing without any distractions? In this newly updated article, Monica Macansantos recommends free or affordable 20 residency programs across America.

“I was a young MFA student when I attended my first artists’ residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. I had heard of these places nestled in the woods or in small-town America where writers and artists were provided with a private bedroom and studio space, as well as meals or a meal allowance, with the only expectation that they spent the majority of their time working on their art.”

2. 10 Books Coming to TV and Film in 2024

Claudia Guthrie has the deets on the literary adaptations that we can’t wait to watch in the new year.

“From classics like The Godfather and Jaws to modern marvels like Game of Thrones and Crazy Rich Asians, many of history’s greatest films and TV shows began as novels. A well-written book provides the ultimate Hollywood source material, with complex characters and an engrossing plot that, when read, already plays like a movie in your head.”

3. 12 Literary Podcasts for Writers and Readers by Laura Schmitt 

Laura Schmitt writes about the book podcasts you should be listening to.

“Whether you’re a die-hard bibliophile in search of your next read, a writer seeking some inspiration for your work-in-progress, or simply someone who enjoys the soothing cadence of spoken words, there’s a literary podcast for you.”

4. 7 Newsletters That Will Improve Your Writing by Samantha Paige Rosen

Samantha Paige Rosen recommends newsletters that offer the best of craft and publishing advice, writing prompts, pitch calls, and encouragement and commiseration about the writing life.

“Email newsletters can offer emotional support, tips and exercises for improving craft, and resources for getting published that might otherwise be inaccessible, especially to writers beginning their careers.”

5. Predicting the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction by Bradley Sides

Bradley Sides shares his top contenders for the most prestigious award of American literature. Spoiler alert: he was right! Well… half right, since there were two winners this year for Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

“No matter how difficult it might be to figure out the year’s winner ahead of time, it’s still fun. It’s a way to reflect back on the literary year that was—and to uncover those works of fiction that might’ve been missed when they were released. 

In shaping my predictions, previous awards, critical acclaim, general buzz, and a little bit of plain intuition are the top factors that I focus on.”

Most Anticipated Guides

62 Books By Women of Color to Read in 2023 by R.O. Kwon

Novelist R.O. Kwon’s annual list of the most anticipated books by women of color is a perennial favorite of Electric Literature readers:

“Finding these books has become, in the last seven years, less difficult, and I continue to hope that American letters will become so inclusive this effort will become obsolete. But we’re still far from that point. I’ll keep hoping.”

The Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books for 2023 by Michelle Hart

Novelist Michelle Hart highlights the new and forthcoming queer books of each season:

“This is what queer art specifically does: it shows us that we have always been here and we always will be. Queer stories, like the ones listed below, do more than shine light on the shadows. They are the light in the shadows. They are living documents of our lives.”

Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Season by Wendy J. Fox

From summer to fall, fiction writer Wendy J. Fox recommends literary gems by indie publishing houses that should be on every reader’s TBR:

“What’s thrilling about the books coming out from small presses is the breadth of range—there are intentional and accidental murders, family drama and polycules, medical calamity, geopolitics, and a whole lot of finding one’s way through it all. It’s a marvelous time to be a reader.”

What You Should Be Reading This Season According to Indie Booksellers by Laura Schmitt

Each season, Laura Schmitt—a former bookseller at The Bookshop in Nashville—asks independent booksellers across America about the books they love:

“What lead titles live up to their hype? Who are the debut authors you won’t want to miss? Which literary novel will speak to your very specific brand of autumn ennui? There’s a lot to consider when it comes, but luckily indie booksellers have read like mad and are here to provide some guidance via their thoughtful and thorough recommendations.”

The Most Anticipated Irish Novels of 2023 by Lucie Shelly

Irish American editor Lucie Shelly brings her literary expertise across the pond with her recommendation of the best new novels from Ireland:

“With the blue-eyed boy Paul Mescal as an avatar of young Irish men, global audiences have come to see unflattering GAA shorts and emotional suppression as attractive. Mescal’s breakthrough was of course in the Rooney Toons, and who knows, maybe that show was the start of the most recent wave of Irish prominence in pop culture. But when it comes to literature, Ireland has always been a powerhouse.”

The post Electric Literature’s Most Popular Articles of 2023 appeared first on Electric Literature.

When Bernie answers Leah’s ad for a new housemate in Philadelphia, the two find themselves caught in an intense and unique friendship—for which art and artmaking are cornerstones. Bernie, a photographer, and Leah, a writer, share a drive to capture the world around them. 

When Bernie’s former photography professor—the renowned, yet drenched in scandal Daniel Dunn, dies—leaving her an inheritance, Leah accompanies Bernie on the road trip through America’s heartland, rural Pennsylvania, where they attempt to document the country through words and photographs. 

As Bernie and Leah chase everything—their own ideas, dreams, and answers to their questions—they come into contact and conversation with people from every corner of life. Along the way, they begin to reach for the limits of their capabilities, both romantically and artistically.

From the acclaimed author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, comes a debut novel of warmth, insight, and heart, a glorious celebration of queer life, and the redemptive force of love and art.

Here is the cover, designed by Lynn Buckley.

“As a queer designer, it was so exciting to work with a queer author dedicated to an authentic portrayal of queer life,” says Buckley. “I enjoyed making something that felt true to my experiences, and those of the characters in Housemates.”

Eisenberg agrees, noting that the cover feels like a love letter celebrating queerness, artmaking, and the book’s West Philadelphia setting. “I was hoping for a cover that conjured a feeling of being both close and far at the same time, home and away at the same time, together and alone at the same time, and this cover simply NAILS that twoness. The novel is about falling in romantic love and art love with your housemate (queer chaos!), about figuring out how to relate to the artists that came before you, and how to live in hyper close proximity to other people, so I love the way that the bright colors and graphic shape suggest the openness of the road while the blue houses suggest the joyful claustrophobia of the Philly neighborhood where the book is set.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal: Emma Copley Eisenberg’s “Housemates” appeared first on Electric Literature.

The bracket features 16 pairs for the first round. Vote for your favorites on our Twitter and Instagram stories throughout the week, with round two on Tuesday, quarterfinals Wednesday, semifinals Thursday, and the final face-off Friday.

Here are the best book covers of 2023:

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter vs. Rouge by Mona Awad

Welcome Me to the Kingdom by Mai Nardone vs. Innards by Magogodi Oamphela Makhene

Brutes by Dizz Tate vs. Close to Home by Michael Magee

Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis vs. Dances by Nicole Cuffy

Speech Team by Tim Murphy vs. Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois

Trinity by Zelda Lockhart vs. Fire in the Canyon by Daniel Gumbiner

Live to See the Day by Nikhil Goyal vs. Pedro and Marques Take Stock by José Falero, translated by Julia Sanches

Normal Women by Ainslie Hogarth vs. Toska by Alina Pleskova

Bathhouse and Other Tanka by Ishii Tatsuhiko, translated by Hiroaki Sato vs. The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar

A Plucked Zither by Phuong Vuong vs Tarta Americana by J. Michael Martinez

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy vs. This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes

Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith vs. Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang

Cravings by Garnett Kilberg Cohen vs. Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter

A Film in Which I Play Everyone by Mary Jo Bang vs. Earth Angel by Madeline Cash

How Not to Be a Politician by Rory Stewart vs. Starter Villain by John Scalzi

You, Bleeding Childhood by Michele Mari, translated by Brian Robert Moore vs. Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji, translated by Katharine Halls

The post Chose the Next Best Book Cover of the Year  appeared first on Electric Literature.

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.  

“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” KB Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?” 

Informed by Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other.”

Here is the cover, designed by Chip Kidd, artwork by Anita Kunz.

Author KB Brookins: “This book is unlike any other project I’ve attempted, so I wanted to make a necessary departure from my first two books’ covers (How To Identify Yourself With a Wound and Freedom House). When developing cover ideas, I thought to myself ‘how has birthing this book felt?’, and I kept thinking about breath, stillness, and balance—all things required to get to emotional clarity and own/reflect on the past. I also thought about how nerve-wracking it is to not hide behind a ‘character’ that isn’t me, and how sweaty I get when out in the Texas sun. Yellow as a background kept calling to me. I also thought about this book being my most vulnerable thing, and thought there was nothing more vulnerable to me than having a version of myself—with my skin showing—on the cover. So I took some pictures and sent those (along with summations of three ideas) to Chip and Anita, who knocked it out of the park. After some necessary input from Erroll McDonald (my editor), the idea that stuck is the one that felt most true and in alignment with the feeling that I hope the book evokes in readers—calm that has come from a Black, trans, beautifully chaotic lifetime of searching for peace. I feel so honored to have this brave book coming into the world with Knopf, and hope that readers feel as moved by the book’s design and words as I do.” 

Designer Chip Kidd: “The author basically art-directed this cover, which really helped. Once I read KB’s brief on what they were looking for, Anita instantly came to mind. Her lovely sensibility and skill was perfect for this astonishing, brave book. I just stayed out of her way and let her do the magic.”

Painter Anita Kunz: “I love painting portraits of extraordinary people and I was thrilled when Chip Kidd gave me this assignment. I read nothing but great reviews about KB Brookins and really feel that they are doing meaningful and important work. My main aim was to paint them in a beautiful and sensitive way, but I also wanted to add a tiny element of magic, so I added the tattoo bird which appears to come to life.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Pretty” by KB Brookins appeared first on Electric Literature.