I occupy a corner of the internet where I’m largely secluded from a cis audience’s reaction to I Saw the TV Glow, the second feature from director Jane Schoenbrun. Instead, I see trans people dunk on fellow viewers who — with varying degrees of innocence — are unable to put their finger on the film’s […] The post In “I Saw the TV Glow,” Obsession Is a Coping Mechanism Destined to Fail appeared first on Electric Literature ..read more

Novels-in-stories contain their own specific joys. One is the sense of partnership they can foster between the reader and the book. In the “off-camera” time between story-chapters, the reader gets to fill in what transpires. As a writer, it takes trust to leave that space—a kind of trust the reader can feel. In writing my […] The post 9 Books That Blur the Boundaries Between Novel and Story Collection appeared first on Electric Literature ..read more

If Sarah Manguso’s new novel, Liars, can be categorized in any genre, it is probably best characterized as a horror story. It tells the intimate, blistering story of a marriage that seemingly begins as a fulfilling partnership between John and Jane, who ostensibly share artistic aspirations and mutual ambitions, but quickly devolves into a relationship […] The post Sarah Manguso Says Wifehood, Not Motherhood, is What Really Fucks Women appeared first on Electric Literature ..read more

Dialing In by Heidi Diehl Remembering this time feels as though I’m listening to one of the callers, to a message from a stranger who is also me. At the start of summer 2001, I responded to a Craigslist ad for “Phone Actors.” I’d just turned 20, and I needed extra income to supplement my summer fellowship at a nonprofit, which paid for my quarter of a subletted apartment on West 108th Street in Manhattan. Bennett and Frank, a couple, my college pals, had one of the bedrooms, and my friend Laura and I shared the other. All four of us were constantly seeking odd jobs. The week before, Frank had ..read more

For me, queerness has always been related to imagination. Like many of us, I grew up without a blueprint for a queer life. In the evangelical household I was raised in, I had to dream my queerness into existence, conjure a life that was forbidden to me, claim it because no one was ever going to give it to me. This has been true for so many of us, now and in the past, as we’ve existed outside of and beyond the boundaries of what our world calls normal and good. There is a long lineage of LGBTQ+ people who came before us, crashing against the barriers erected around them and finding ways to make ..read more

Hell, Michigan Click to enlarge How to Steal From the Gods During the Commercial Break Click to enlarge The post God Only Exists in Hell, Michigan appeared first on Electric Literature ..read more

Because athleticism is often regarded as the antithesis of intellectualism (the jock/nerd dichotomy remains commonplace), books about sport get overlooked as being non-serious, non-literary, or unimportant. People think they’re just fun. And they are fun. Sports are fun, so why wouldn’t the associated novels be? And they’re usually wonderfully structured—the training camp, the game, the season: they all translate perfectly into narrative structure—which can make them a pace-y read. But sport novels are never only about sport. As sport exists as a product of our political and politicized cultu ..read more

The post Language is a Power Broker in the Hong Kong Thriller “Tongueless” appeared first on Electric Literature ..read more

It begins with a desire to escape. Travel is an elixir, Shirley Hazzard wrote, a talisman. And what is the act of opening a book, if not an act of travel, of transportation? If not, something alchemical? A charmed amulet.  When I wrote my debut novel, The Nude, set on a fictionalized island off the southern coast of Greece, I didn’t seek to write about a wide-eyed American wandering abroad and finding her true self amongst the sparkling, specular water of a Grecian seascape. In other words, an escapist book for the sake of escapism. As The Nude circles around questions of cultural theft ..read more

Suzanne Scanlon’s book, Committed: A Memoir of Finding Meaning in Madness, is a memoir unlike any I’ve read. Scanlon returns to the landscape of the past, reflecting on her experience of being committed in the New York State Psychiatric Hospital while a student at Barnard in the late 1990s. Scanlon explores her own history with the granular attention of a novelist, beginning with her mother’s death when Scanlon was a child, tracing the ways this grief remade her and her family in different ways. But what I found most compelling about Committed is Scanlon’s attention to the larger narratives o ..read more