What happens when the most intimate relationship in nature—mother and child—is perverted and twisted beyond recognition? Nobody has more power to harm than the one entrusted to nurture and protect. So observes Dr. Lily Patel, the strange psychiatrist in You Know What You Did:  “The mother-daughter bond is one of the strongest in nature. When you’re young, it keeps you tethered, protected. Later the same ties can hold you back, strangle you.”  This aptly describes the conflicted relationship between the novel’s main character Annie Shaw, who is an artist, wife, and mother, and her ..read more

There’s a video that made the rounds online a few years ago: in Chechnya, a mother films her son pulling a sheep free from the drainage ditch it wedged itself into. Three glorious seconds of freedom follow for the liberated sheep, at which point it leaps majestically and comically back into the drainage ditch, stuck once more.  A similar moment occurs in the Irish author Caoilinn Hughes’ brilliant new novel The Alternatives when one of the characters comes across a sheep jammed in blackthorn shrub. “The poor thing was worn out from the ridicule of life… Rank stress wafted off the animal ..read more

Death in Fiction by Scott Cheshire I saw Steven Baxter the day before he died. I was ten years old. It was 1983. He was in his middle twenties, and walked toward me on the block where my family lived. His home was not far from ours. His face was heavily made up. This was the 1980s, and I was just a kid. I’d never seen a man in make-up before. My stomach flipped. Despite the make-up, the red cheeks, the lipstick, the eye shadow, I recognized him immediately, and, now I can say his make-up was not only frightening. His face was mysterious, even alluring, unlike anything I’d ever seen in my clois ..read more

I have always loved the versatility of the short story, how it can so easily take on the forms of other things. There are playlist short stories, recipe short stories, diary and epistolary-style short stories. There are flash fiction stories, short short stories, and long short stories that invite you to argue for them as novellas. There are linked short stories that allow you the swift closure of the form while keeping you tethered to characters or place. My short story collection, A Kind of Madness, is deeply rooted in place—I like to think that these stories would not quite exist as they a ..read more

For weeks I throw up every day. I can’t smell the diaper bin or the dishwasher without heaving. I can’t exercise without churning my nausea. I go to sleep at 7:30 pm. In the mornings, I log in to meetings where my male colleagues don’t know that just off-screen, I’m beginning to show. They don’t know, either, what it feels like to be in a body like this: to ache and retch and long to collapse, and still to show up for work; to manage a household, with its tedious chores and consuming mental labor; to welcome a toddler from his grandparents’ at sunset, fatigued by the force of his energy and c ..read more

This spring, we’re celebrating the return of verdancy and color: the trees covered with dots of pink and white blossoms, and a field of tulips and daffodils awakening from dormancy. Along with re-emergence of blue skies and green grass, it’s been a bountiful season for books. To find out which new and forthcoming releases we should be reading, we reached out to indie booksellers across America and here are their recommendations: Editor’s note: If you’re a bookseller interested in participating in a future edition of this feature, please email books@electricliterature.com Memory Piece by Lisa K ..read more

Horror has always been deeply personal to me. Our obsessions can often come to structure and shape our inner lives while at the same time rendering the most intimate parts of ourselves illegible to those who don’t share them, and my love of horror as a child was a kind of closet where I could hide before I understood that I was already living in one as a queer boy who wanted nothing more than to the conceal desires I believed marked me as a monster. My memoir, The Long Hallway, uses the language of horror to construct a critical frame around my coming-of-age and family story. The familiarity o ..read more

When Kristine S. Ervin was eight years old, her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was violently abducted from a shopping mall parking lot in Oklahoma and murdered. Though Ervin’s debut memoir, Rabbit Heart, does include an eventual resolution to the case in which Kyle Eckardt was convicted, the narrative is not categorizable as true crime, and it is not a story that centers itself around the pursuit of a perpetrator. Instead, Ervin seeks answers to a different set of urgent and moving questions: What power does language have to harm and to heal, and where do we turn when there is a pain that cannot be ..read more

“Authenticity Games” by Laura M. Martin I discovered Connection Games in 2021, after moving out of the townhome I shared with a man I’d met in my MFA program. I left the relationship and the confines of the small conservative town I worked in (though I kept the job, academic work is hard to come by) and moved to a house in a bigger city an hour north. It was a relief to be alone, to stretch big in the bed and eat dessert every night and sleep whenever I was tired. I was so happy to be single, to be free, to be unruly and strange. I was content to live alone. I stopped treading quietly, threw o ..read more

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Homeseeking, the highly-anticipated debut novel by Karissa Chen, which will be published by Putnam on January 7th, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here. An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland. A single choice can define an entire life. Suchi first sees Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood when she is seven years old, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship ..read more