It was more than five years ago when I first heard Jeremy B. Jones talk about the journals of William Thomas Prestwood. By many accounts, Prestwood might be considered a nineteenth-century everyman—except for a handful of facts. First, Prestwood recorded daily accounts of his life, and those journals miraculously survived almost two hundred years. Second, some of the events Prestwood recorded were a series of sexual relationships that seem scandalous even by current standards. Third, Prestwood attempted to keep his journals secret by encrypting them in his own invented code. But the final fact that drew Jones to this man who almost disappeared into history was that Prestwood was Jones’s great-great-great-great grandfather.
From Prestwood’s salacious appetite for women to the fortuitous way his code was deciphered, the narrative in Jones’s new memoir, Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries, is fascinating. So, too, is the sense of place that’s integral to much of Jones’s work. But what resonates even more is the unique way Jones holds his forefather’s life from the nineteenth century as a mirror to better understand his own existence in our also complicated twenty-first century.
Cipher is especially timely in this moment that finds our nation so deeply divided. Prestwood lived during the tumultuous time between the founding of the United States and the Civil War. Using Prestwood’s journals as a catalyst, Jones reflects on how questions of masculinity and racial equality still drive our politics and culture. And yet, Jones’s journey is intensely personal as he seeks to be a good father raising his sons into good men.
Jones and I connected over a series of emails, in which we discussed the process of journaling, what it’s like to be haunted, and whether the past offers any hope for our current times.
Denton Loving: Cipher is an exploration of history—your personal history, your family’s history, and the history of our country. But you also approach your subject from a host of different angles such as science, genetics, and encryption. How do you juggle all of that, both when you’re drafting and when you’re revising?
Jeremy B. Jones: You take ten years to write a book, that’s how. I struggled for a long time to find a shape for Cipher. It started as a long epistolary essay. Then I converted it to a collection of essays. Then I tried dividing it into thematic sections. A lot of the work to find a suitable form was, of course, also me trying to make sense of the content. I needed to figure out what I thought in order to figure out how to arrange it. Ultimately, I found that the more I researched, the more a potential shape appeared, and in the end, the idea of a double helix took hold for me. I conceived of the book as a winding together of my ancestor’s story and mine, each of our strands wrapping around the other. This structure began to tease out connections and parallels between our lives and other subjects that I only sensed at first but then began to find a way into. And because his story is naturally vulnerable—he never expected anyone to decode and read his diaries—my story was pulled in that direction, too: I figured I owed him to be honest and forthright about my life.
DL: What would William think about your extensive interest in his life? What would he think about others reading about his life two centuries later?
I felt compelled to chart possible futures of American masculinity.
JBJ: I’d like to think I know him pretty well after all this time with his recorded life, and yet, I’m not sure what he’d think about the attention. My suspicion is that he’d think it a waste of time. In a list of advice to his sons he writes, “There is more pleasure in private than public life.” It’s clear from his diaries that he never tried to make a name for himself, not in any major way. It is, in fact, a frustration that the codebreaker has. In the codebreaker’s notes, it’s clear he thinks that William is a “remarkable human . . . who never put himself forward.” Afterall, William spent his days dissecting animals and experimenting with atmospheric forces and charting planetary orbits and reading texts in Greek and Latin and inventing new surveying tools. In the codebreaker’s view, William could’ve been an important historical figure had he made an effort. I think, however, that William understood the value in living a contained, simple life. A private life. Because of that, I think he’d have shied away from too much attention on his life, but I also think—I hope—he’d be glad that I didn’t try to make him into something he wasn’t. He was both a “remarkable human” and, as the codebreaker also claims, “an everyman,” and I tried to capture both of those truths.
DL: When I first heard you talk about this project, one of the hooks was about the scandalous nature of William’s journals. Was it always evident to you that William’s sexual exploits were a way to write about masculinity?
JBJ: I’m sure the book would have always moved in that direction, but it became inevitable that masculinity would be a central thread of the book because of the moment in which I started writing. I began work on the book in earnest in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, when I was home on leave with our two small boys, and after the votes were tallied, I grew worried about what that outcome said about the nature of masculinity in America. What was this place I’d brought my kids into? I had one answer in the past—in the laid-bare life of my adulterous ancestor—and another apparent answer in the present—in the election of an open misogynist—so I felt compelled to chart possible futures of American masculinity. For me and my kids and everybody who comes after us.
DL: In the process of writing Cipher, you discovered white, Black, and multi-racial cousins, many of whom were also seeking answers about their genealogy. How has your family responded to reading and learning about William, who is also their ancestor?
JBJ: Most of my family saw the diaries like I did initially: as a curiosity. They’re interesting in their strangeness, but because they were written two centuries ago, no one seems to feel any real connection to William Prestwood. I’m anxious to see if that shifts for anyone once they finish the book. I have heard from a number of distant relatives who’d stumbled across the essay I wrote for Oxford American, and now that the book is out, more far-off kin are emailing. Most of those interactions have been comparing notes on historical and genealogical research.
The most wide-ranging and compelling conversations I’ve had have been with relatives connected to me by slavery. I write about some of this in the book, but as I encountered Black Americans with whom I share DNA, and we tried to pinpoint our 19th-century shared ancestors, I found so many of my initial questions splintering into more complicated and revealing questions. I continue to think about those conversations.
DL: Towards the end of Cipher, there’s a place where you write that the past rarely stays put, and that there is always more to uncover. How is that idea shaping your new work?
JBJ: I think place and all that it entails—including family history—will forever be a subject I’m exploring. I consider my first book a “memoir of place,” and Cipher is in many ways about how we inhabit spaces over time. I’m working on a novel now, and it’s nothing like Cipher or Bearwallow—it’s contemporary and leaning into conventions of detective fiction—but it’s still exploring unexpected connections to place and history and people. So, I suspect I’m simply tilling the same soil but with new tools and waiting to see what grows.
I tried to provide lots of on-ramps to consider the ways that that history still reverberates all around us.
That said, I’ve been writing some essays (in Garden & Gun and Our Stateso far) about our house. It was built in the 19th-century, and while we didn’t know it when we moved in, it was built by my fifth great uncle. This discovery isn’t quite as scandalous as William’s diaries, but I do continue to turn up surprising bits of family history in the walls and deed books of our home, and I wonder if I’ll find a book in there somehow.
DL: You’ve described Cipher as an American story precisely because it exposes early America’s complicated history with slavery and racial discrimination. What do you hope William’s story—and even more so, the stories of the enslaved people who were a part of William’s life—can contribute to the discourse in a time when museums like the Smithsonian are being criticized by conservatives for focusing too much on the “negative aspects” of slavery?
JBJ: One of the wildest hypocrisies around us right now comes from people who are upset about the removal of Confederate statues while, in the same breath, dismissing any talk of slavery because “it happened so long ago.” While writing this book, I thought often of people I know and love who don’t consider the repercussions of slavery in the 21st century—and don’t even want to engage in those discussions because “I never owned slaves.” In the book, I tried to provide lots of on-ramps to consider, if only for a moment, the ways that that history still reverberates all around us.
Whenever a messy subject comes up these days, people tend to retreat to their camps, digging into the trenches out of some team loyalty more than any real engagement with the issue at hand. I wanted my approach to some of these ideas to discourage that partisan retreat because the issues come within a very particular story—they’re not abstract or “political.”
I was talking to one of my cousins recently about the diaries and family history, and he asked, “So . . . we have this land because all we did was stay put?” We’ve been living on our particular plot of land for five generations—since the diarist’s grandson settled it—and none of us had to do anything to have it except be born. So, yes, our squatting there is, of course, part of the story.
The other part of that story—the part that I hope my book teases out—is that what we have is something most Black Americans can’t. Even if no enslaved people worked our land, this place is still tied to a history of slavery because it is a kind of generational inheritance that most Black Americans can’t access. Once you start to notice these kinds of sustained effects of that “long ago history,” then you start to notice them everywhere, and so my hope is that no matter the political stripe, readers might begin to step into these historical considerations simply by stepping into my own wrestling with them.
DL: William’s journals inspired you to try journaling, but you didn’t continue. What was the difference between daily journaling and the tools you use as a nonfiction writer?
JBJ: I failed at journaling and diary keeping, in part, because I’m not disciplined or consistent enough. But I think another part of this failure is trickier for me to sort out. When I sit to write in a sustained way, I tend to have a public end in mind. The essay or project may fail or go in a drawer, but my intent is always to put it into the world. E.B. White says, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that the essayist is “sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.” So . . . maybe my failure to successfully journal is ego. Unlike William, I want people to read my words. Another answer—one that’s less of a personal indictment—is that writing, and specifically literary nonfiction, is the art form I feel most pulled to, and so it’s not something that I’m also using to track my days or process my internal life. It’d be akin to a painter using canvas and brushes to make a grocery list.
As a country, we’ve survived horrific moments, so we can survive this one too.
I’ve become, despite my best intentions, a writer who needs large blocks of time to write. I have to sit in a space and get my bearings. And even then I move slowly, sentence by sentence. In other words, I’m not a daily writer. I am not currently living in a way that allows me to set aside chunks of time daily to write. Instead, I may block off half of a day once a week or stay up way too late to meet a deadline. I wish I could rush through an early draft or write some throwaway scenes in the car-rider line, but I am a word-by-word writer and so a successful few hours may only result in a few paragraphs. I don’t advise it.
DL: You’ve lived with William for many years now: reading his journals, writing him letters, trying to understand the choices he made in his life. You’ve even described your relationship with William like being haunted. Now that Cipher is out in the world, has it released his hold on you, or do you think he will always occupy as much space in your consciousness?
JBJ: I suspect he’ll always be there, for better or worse. In a very literal, genetic sense, he is a part of me, but in the psychic sense, his life has shaped my perspective and that can’t be undone. I still see things and wonder, “What would William think about that?” His presence is a kind of welcomed haunting, and I think he’ll probably be floating around with me until I’ve passed on behind him.
DL: Has your time exploring William’s life made you more or less hopeful in times like these?
JBJ: I think the oh-so frustrating answer is both. William’s life is bookended by the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, so I see him stepping into the early experiment of a country, and then I see that country arrive to a violent fracture. While I believe we’re living in unprecedented times politically, it has also been helpful to look at William’s life and recognize just how many terrible and unprecedented things were shaking out around him two hundred years ago. Strangely, there’s comfort in seeing that we’ve made it through some darkness.
Of course, making it through wasn’t all butterflies and rainbows. Emancipation, for example, required uprisings and war, so that’s the other side of my both answer. As a country, we’ve survived horrific moments, so we can survive this one too, but William’s diaries also show that this survival may get worse before it gets better. I hope we right the ship sooner than later, but the pendulum swing isn’t always quick.
In one episode of the anime Romantic Killer, a slice of strawberry cake is seen skating across the floor. The voiceover explains that because cockroaches are “unseemly,” the cockroach in the scene has been swapped with a dessert.
The cake is not to be seen, even if it isn’t
the real thing, but a representation,
once removed. Once, an aunt told me
to put a bra on beneath the t-shirt
I changed into after work, for my cake
showed, two dots, if I was to join
the men in the living room—my uncle,
step-father, cousins—for primetime TV.
“Husbands and sons,” she called them.
Cold, my cake bristles; warm, they soften,
turn slumbrous. Despite their wishy-washy
way of appearing, they did not pass
unnoticed. The objection is not to cake,
not to what cake represents,
but to the imprints on a piece of fabric
from which ideas may be conjured.
Cake is delicious—like the ripe,
plump strawberries erect on a bed
of rich cream—but denied airtime,
until they turn into feeding
instruments.
Narcissus
The plant blooms—its crown tugs its sepals. Under their weight,
the blossom droops, as if to deflect any advances, tucking in its ovary,
wasting its pollen on the mud. Likewise, the youth matures
but turns his face away— He will not concede when pursuers
coax him, “You are too beautiful to remain celibate.”
Does a flower ever escape from bees or a hand, like mine, ready to
tilt its head up and rub the stamens? I get the mythmakers’ sentiment:
recalling the boy who will not love me back, I, too,
would cast him as a character that turns vegetable,
would make him lose his favor with the gods and make him lose it
into the water. I, too, would rather he fell for himself,
or better yet, died beating his chest black and blue, alone.
I have a sneaking suspicion that for many of us, 2025 has been an exceedingly difficult year. Though I can’t speak for everyone, I can say with confidence that I am not alone in my eagerness to reach January 1st, 2026. In the first year of a political reboot—which, in the grand tradition of cinematic reboots, has managed to be far worse than the original—this year’s best novels have occupied an essential place in our collective literary imagination.
Katie Kitamura’s Booker Prize finalist, Audition, is the sort of slim novel that quietly injects itself into one’s veins, consuming readers, forcing them to navigate the friction between what is said, what is unsaid, what is fixed, and what is fluid. Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness, which I think might be the Great Millennial Novel, chronicles the friendship and sisterhood of four Black women growing into adulthood over two decades, and all the things they carry into their next era. And Dominion, by Addie Citchens, one of many spectacular debuts published this year, plunges heart—and headfirst—into the drama, humor, and tenderness of small-town Mississippi. These are but a few of the masterful books that populate this list.
While my own debut novel, When the Harvest Comes, published in April, is not eligible for consideration by EL because of a clear conflict of interest, it’s my great pleasure to celebrate so many wonderful novels that were published in a year of truly excellent literary fiction. Every book on the list does what a great novel is supposed to do, particularly during times of shared grief and political turmoil. Each book reminds us of our shared humanity, the aspiration of empathy, and the simple fact that our world is not confined, solely, to the here and now. Our stories must continue to be more imaginative, more expansive, and more beautifully, wondrously, spectacularly human.
—Denne Michele Norris, Editor-in-Chief, Electric Literature
A performance, a love triangle, and an unnamed actress quietly dissecting her internal world. These are the constituent parts of Katie Kitamura’s Booker Prize-shortlisted fifth novel, which opens with a young man declaring himself the nameless narrator’s long-lost son. Quickly, the book plunges into the murky territory of identity, where nothing is quite fixed or true. With sentences sharp as knives, Audition does everything possible to slip up the reader, asking: If identities transform, why shouldn’t stories transform too? Kitamura discussed the volatility of relationships and the reader’s input in her novel with EL here.
Ilana Masad’s brilliant novel follows an interracial couple confronted by an extraterrestrial while driving along a New Hampshire road in 1961. Separately, a lesbian writer of science fiction grapples with alienation and queer yearning in a series of letters she pens to her lover. And, finally, in the present day, an archivist attempts to make sense of those letters alongside the testimony of the first alien abductees. Braiding three interconnected narrative threads, Beings is ambitious, haunting, and filled with heartache and tenderness. You can read an excerpt in Recommended Reading of Masad’s most-loved work yet.
This extraordinary debut begins with the Reverend Sabre Winfrey Jr., his wife, Priscilla, and the youngest of their five sons, Emanuel, also known as Wonderboy. Wonderboy is beloved by everyone in Dominion, Mississippi—no one runs faster, or turns more heads. Caught off guard after an interaction with a stranger, Wonderboy is confronted with questions he’s never considered, and his response sends shock waves through the community. A soaring, yet intimate novel exploring how shame and secrets control and stifle our humanity, Dominion grapples with these forces, illuminating a different, freer path forward.
There’s a special excitement when a National Book Award winner releases a new book. Will it deliver? Won’t it? Flashlight, Choi’s sixth novel, does. It opens with Louisa, a ten-year-old girl, walking with her father, Serk, by the sea. Later, she is found, hypothermic, barely alive, and alone. What follows this strange, quiet tragedy is a multigenerational epic that explores Serk’s broken childhood, moving from Korea to Japan during World War II, to the aftermath of his death, considering the lives touched by such violent change. It is a novel that manages to burrow into the consciousness of a child estranged by geographic displacement and parental loss, while cracking open some of the twentieth century’s most horrific crimes and tragedies.
Sweeping from 2008 to today, this is a story of five Black women navigating the urban landscape of New York and LA, as well as the indelible interior landscapes that define every coming of age. Desiree and Danielle, sisters, alongside January, a banking analyst turned graphic designer, Monique, an aspiring influencer, and Nakia, a budding chef, navigate the acute precarity emblematic of millennials as they step into the proverbial wilderness of adulthood, moving together and apart in a choreography of friendship, chosen family, and familial strife.
Among the swastikas that litter the walls of the public housing where she’s raised, Nila—born in Germany to Afghan parents—develops a love of photography, philosophy, and sex. As she repeatedly disappoints her parents, she continues to search for her own voice as an artist. After meeting American-born writer Marlowe in the haze of Berlin’s party scene, she is quickly absorbed into his tightly controlled orbit as racial tensions grow. Eventually, Nila is forced to face herself and her future, and figure out who she wants to be. A powerful story of love, family, and surviving the foils of youth, Good Girl is a can’t-miss debut of 2025. Aber discusses the transcendence of hiding in nightlife here.
Lydi Conklin calls Hot Girls with Balls a “sharp, funny, lively book about the wildly horrifying transphobic, conservative politics of contemporary American society.” With its witty discussions of athletics, romance, and internet culture, Benedict Nguyễn’s debut novel is compelling, humorous, and genuinely fun to read.
An “unforgettable story of class, family, and community,” The Grand Paloma Resort is another compelling commentary on the wealth, entitlement, gentrification, and luxury associated with tourism and the resort industry. Fans of The White Lotus—which Natera discusses as being in conversation with the book—and Saint X will be stunned by Cleyvis Natera’s suspenseful second novel and its deeply accurate insight into the sinister mechanisms of inequality and exorbitant privilege.
Intelligent and articulate, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One is further proof that Kristen Arnett always has something insightful to say. In her newest novel, Arnett has become a true magician with a knack for spinning comedic gold and creating a thoroughly entertaining narrative that levitates with the power of its humor and honesty. You can read an excerpt of the book in Recommended Reading.
In Heart the Lover, a college student finds herself in the pull of two young men—a witty, ambitious, passionate pair of best friends—who break open her world. What could be a familiar campus story takes an unexpected turn in Lily King’s hands, launching off campus and into the future, a topic she discusses in her interview with EL. King’s mastery of complex, utterly unique characters and brilliant dialogue shines in this aching novel of love, the passage of time, and how those we meet in our youth continue to stay with us, even when we think we’ve moved on.
For admirers of epic historical narratives that sweep readers into another era, Homeseeking is a layered, fresh take on writing across decades. Bringing together themes of friendship, love, separation, and second chances, Karissa Chen has crafted a detailed debut that poignantly meditates on remembrance and moving forward.
While considering the place of Blackness in an art world entranced by the white gaze, Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures simultaneously paints a compelling portrait of a deeply intelligent and inquisitive artist. This novel celebrates the deep, unique connections and perspectives that can be forged through authentic creativity. In an interview with EL, Taylor, a former senior fiction editor for Recommended Reading, talks about his writing process, love of realism, and the inspiration he pulls from the art world.
When Mitch’s political and economic influence are threatened by a well-known activist aided by Mitch’s estranged sister, a political struggle plunges their homeland and tribe into disarray. The complexities of self-definition, power, politics, and family ties are at the center of this thrilling, quick-moving debut.
As a Nigerian immigrant who once lived in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina prompted Olufunke Grace Bankole to consider the impact of a devastating disaster on those living far away from home in a storm-ravaged city. The Edge of Water is a result of this consideration and the narrative explores fate and destiny in multiple voices and registers. Folklore, tradition, prophecy, and expansive generational narratives populate this epically complex debut novel, which Bankole discussed in an interview with EL.
As Vi Liu attempts to fit into her small town, her life is altered when she is presented with the opportunity to make a perfect boyfriend out of a sentient blob. With Blob, Maggie Su has crafted a narrative that insightfully intertwines the practicality of everyday routines with the shapeshifting nature of experimental surrealism. Readers of this hilarious and deeply intelligent novel will feel a sincere connection to Vi as she earnestly attempts to achieve love, acceptance, and self-knowledge. Read Maggie Su’s EL interview about Blob here.
Over the course of a year, the lives and dreams of Charo and Sal expand, shift, and adapt as they search for happiness in New York City. Throughout the novel, characters are given opportunities to find joy and resilience amidst instances of love, heartbreak, desire, and struggle. Loca considers what it means to be someone who breaks norms, chases dreams, and reconsiders tradition, as Heredia discussed in an interview with EL
The High Heaven traces the winding life of Izzy Gently—from her orphan childhood in New Mexico to a present existence haunted by the past. Wheeler’s debut novel considers the relationships between exploration and expansion, humanity and the universe, set against the breathtakingly mystical landscape of the American West. Read an excerpt of The High Heaven in Recommended Reading.
Imagine memory is a commodity—something that can be bought, sold, shared, edited, and manipulated. Imagine too, that some memories, the stories and truths they attest to, are banned. They’re too dangerous, too subversive. This is the world of These Memories Do Not Belong to Us. Set in a future dominated by the Qin Empire, Ma’s debut follows a young man who has inherited a collection of forbidden memories from his mother. The memories might be the death of him, but they might also sow the seeds for the empire’s downfall. Read Ma’s discussion of his book’s fragmented cover and the frightening pace of modern technology with EL here!
In Middle Spoon, a heartbroken narrator struggles to cope after being dumped by his boyfriend while simultaneously attending to his husband and children. Described as “visceral” in an EL interview, this epistolary novel will inspire readers to consider the restraints they place on themselves as they witness Varela’s characters remake, rework, and reconsider the limits of life and love.
The Summer House is a novel about Japanese architects quietly building a library. In it, a recent university graduate gets the unexpected honor of an appointment with a prestigious firm led by a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple. The aging master and his team relocate to the titular summer house, as they do every summer, and there, under the shadow of an active volcano, design a building for a competition to construct the National Library of Modern Literature. Locked in this story of quiet observations and fleeting romances is a tale of creation, destruction, and grandeur. Catch a tantalizing snippet of it excerpted in Recommended Reading!
When Emmett moves home to Kentucky and takes a job at Tempo, a fulfillment warehouse resembling another familiar eCommerce giant, his trajectory clashes with his half-brother’s, whose marriage is falling apart. While meditating on class, power, and privilege, Cole’s novel explores desire and the process of building a meaningful, fulfilling life. Read an excerpt of this layered narrative in Recommended Reading.
After a group of powerful witches welcome Wilder into their fold, they are threatened by an AI entity that has the capability to upend the world. Together, the coven considers how to stay united and fight against forces that wish to do them harm. Dedicated to “everyone who feels betrayed by J.K. Rowling,” Awakened is a novel that celebrates its queer and trans characters through magical prose and a fascinating narrative. Read about the creation of its wonderfully witchy cover here.
While others seek romance through dating apps, Linda, who believes it is her destiny to marry an airplane, quenches her lust for love through air travel. This hilariously scandalous novel investigates the turbulent juxtaposition between the merits of achieving our true desires and the risks of encouraging our own self-destruction. Readers should buckle their seatbelts to experience this high-flying story, which Kate Folk discussed in an EL interview.
In Kashana Cauley’s The Payback, the Debt Police are after Jada Williams, but she refuses to go down without a fight. A revenge plot—complete with collective action and plans to erase student debt—ensues. Described as “urgent” and “deeply felt” in Cauley’s EL interview, readers who enjoy heist movies, humorous social critique, and cheering for the antihero will be thrilled with this brilliant sophomore novel.
Earlier this year, I had the chance to listen to Melissa Febos and Alexander Chee talk about Febos’s new memoir, The Dry Season, a book that was voted one of EL’s top five nonfiction titles of the year. At the event, they discussed a common knock against memoir: That it’s so navel-gazey. “Navel-gazing? More like viscera-gazing,” Febos said. To look into oneself and poke and prod and put on the page something honest is challenging and sometimes ugly work—there is nothing easy or light about gazing at one’s own viscera, and we are all so lucky to have authors who are willing to not only do it, but share that process with readers.
Nonfiction does the difficult work of translating real life into something that helps us make sense of each other, of ourselves, of this increasingly chaotic world we are living in. As we wade through an era of intensified loneliness, in which money-hungry corporations want to capitalize on our disconnectedness by selling us AI friendships and therapists and lovers and even, or perhaps especially, AI that does your own thinking for you, nonfiction insists on connecting: to ourselves, to one another, to our personal and political histories. There is power in refusing to accept the idea that offloading the work of thinking to computers has value while the act of navel-gazing—viscera-gazing—is valueless. In Alligator Tears, Edgar Gomez crafts a humorous and graceful queer coming-of-age story that simultaneously unravels the American bootstraps myth. Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Halfexcavates the links between her recovery from the eating disorder that nearly killed her and her ancestral history of Palestinian displacement and survival. Through harnessing stories only they can tell—their stories—these authors insist on the importance of their own voices and experiences, telling something essential about the world around us in the process.
Good nonfiction books stand as a testament to the value of curiosity and thinking deeply about our lives, our world, and all the people in it. Below are our favorites of the year.
— Katie Henken Robinson, Senior Editor
P.S. Electric Literature’s first anthology, Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color, was not eligible for this list due to the conflict of interest. However, I’d be remiss not to mention that it’s a top nonfiction book of the year in our hearts!
The sophomore book by Lambda Literary Award and American Book Award winner Edgar Gomez, Alligator Tears is a collection of linked essays in turns—and often simultaneously—hilarious and heartbreaking. Through tracing their journey of trying to scramble out of poverty, Gomez lays bare the lies sold by the American Dream while also shining a light on the value of community—especially queer community. Whether writing about getting veneers or being kicked out of school, Gomez’s inimitable voice pulls the reader close and doesn’t let go, making each and every essay a knockout.
Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season tells the story of a year spent celibate while simultaneously delving into the history of other women whose journeys inform her own—from nuns and the Shakers to Sappho and Virginia Woolf. Throughout the book, her celibate period grows into something much greater than just abstaining from sex; it’s about Febos learning her desires, her impulses, and how to center herself. This deeply empowering memoir is a sort of map, one that shows how to seek true, sustaining pleasure and fulfillment within oneself and unlearning the tendency to let romantic and sexual connection consume all else. You can read an excerpt from the memoir here, and read Febos discussing exploring pleasure and joy through celibacy in her interview with EL.
I Want to Burn This Place Down by cultural critic Maris Kreizman is a sharp and deeply personal essay collection tracing Kreizman’s political evolution as a leftist. She charts her journey from a faithful believer in American institutions and life as a “good Democrat” to a more radical understanding of power, inequality, and cultural disillusionment. The collection captures one woman’s reckoning with an unraveling nation and her search for a new path forward. Read EL’s interview with Kreizman about the book here.
Lamba Award-winning poet Zefyr Lisowski’s nonfiction debut, Uncanny Valley Girls, is a memoir-in-essays that weaves theory into her nuanced critiques of horror movies—the author’s most constant comfort. A visceral collection of essays tracking Lisowski’s biography starting from her trans childhood in the south, the book explores gender complications, violence, and class ascension with a careful hand. Liswoski discusses these themes and more in her interview with EL.
In October 2019, Sarah Aziza had barely survived after being hospitalized due to anorexia. And then—in the hospital cafeteria—the hauntings begin, starting with the voice of Aziza’s deceased Palestinian grandmother. Finalist for the Palestine Book Awards, The Hollow Half untangles family secrets and traumas passed down from generations of Palestinian displacement and erasure, all with urgency and grace. Read an excerpt of the memoir here.
Aggregated Discontent is the debut essay collection from journalist and cultural critic Harron Walker. Across sixteen sharp, funny, and unflinchingly honest essays, Walker blends memoir, reportage, and cultural critique. Along the way, she examines everything from the gig-economy grind to the failures of U.S. trans healthcare, from the role of art to the messy contradictions of modern life.
Winner of the 2022 National Book Award, Imani Perry’s latest contemplates the color blue’s salient role in Black culture. Reexamining Blackness through the lens of a color so intertwined with melancholy, hope, and heartache, Perry presents readers with a bewitching portrait attuned to the most sublime aspects of our humanity.
Acclaimed poet and novelist Hala Alyan’s debut memoir I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a profound and lyrical story of addiction, motherhood, and Palestinian exile and displacement. Structured around the growth of her baby during pregnancy, who is being carried by a surrogate many miles away, Alyan prepares for motherhood through looking back on her personal, familial, and cultural histories. In fragmented, hypnotic prose captured beautifully in the memoir’s excerpt in EL’s Personal Narrative, Alyan weaves together an unforgettable narrative of survival in many forms. In an interview with Electric Lit, Alyan discusses the dissonance of writing this memoir during ongoing Palestinian genocide.
Inquisitive, and deeply reflective, Miriam Toews’s A Truce That Is Not Peace traces the path of a writer grappling with creativity and the question once posed to her at a literary festival in Mexico City: Why do you write? Through thoughtful meditations, she returns to family stories, formative moments, and the losses of her father and sister, both by suicide. The memoir offers an intimate portrait of a mind exploring its own patterns, testing ideas, and seeking meaning through the act of making art. Toews discusses the question of why we write in her EL interview.
Clam Down by Anelise Chen is a genre-defying memoir written in the wake of her divorce. When her mother’s repeated typo texts urge her to “clam down,” Chen imagines herself transforming into a clam, retreating, hiding, and protecting herself. Through reflections on mollusks and family history that includes a long-absent father, she explores what it means to withdraw into one’s shell and what true healing might look like. Read an interview about Chen’s process writing the book here.
Caroline Hagood’s Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir dives into the chaotic, uncanny terrain of being a woman, mother, and writer in a world teetering on the edge. Over a three-day period, a mysterious goblin pushes her toward chaos, curiosity, and unexpected freedom. Blending humor, surrealism, and the ordinary challenges of daily life, the memoir explores what it means to live with boldness and abandon.
In Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods by Jennifer Kabat, the author traces the history of flooding in her home in Margaretville, New York, while reflecting on the recent passing of her father. Along the way, she meditates on Cold War–era weather experiments, the history of the Mohawk Nation, and how Kurt Vonnegut’s brother may have caused her town’s catastrophic flood. The result is a rich meditation on memory, place, and the fragile intersection of nature and human action. Read an interview with Kabat about the book here.
In Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vauhini Vara blends memoir and cultural critique to examine how the internet, AI, and Big Tech shape the way we understand ourselves. Drawing on her own experiences, including childhood chat rooms, her sister’s death, and her work as a tech journalist, she reflects on the ethics, power, and influence of technological capitalism. By interrogating her internet life—from her Google searches to her use of AI—Vara probes whether it’s possible to reclaim a more humane, thoughtful relationship with technology. Vara discussed AI and its impacts in an interview with EL.
In A Silent Treatment, Jeannie Vanasco confronts her mother’s long, punishing silences, which could stretch on for months at a time. Through detective-like research and introspective reflection, she pieces together their fraught relationship, showing how silence can wound as deeply as words. The memoir is both a personal excavation and a meditation on communication, love, and the void left behind when someone refuses to speak, themes Vanasco discusses in her EL interview.
Known for her eviscerating criticisms of even the most highly-regarded artists, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu’s latest collects razor sharp reviews, critical essays, and personal essays unafraid to merge the artistic with the political. Acidic, yet exacting, Authority illuminates how to do criticism in an age of constant crisis and instability, something Chu also discusses in her EL Interview.
In Human/Animal, Amie Souza Reilly blends memoir and essay to intertwine a deeply unsettling personal story with reflections on the animal world. After moving into a suburban home with her family, she is stalked by the next-door neighbors—two older brothers whose harassment intensifies over three years. Throughout the book, Reilly employs animal metaphors, etymology, and her own sketches to examine fear, boundaries, violence, and what it means to be human in a world that often feels animalistic. You can read an excerpt of the memoir here.
Chances are you’re connected to the internet right now. Chances are you’re connected most of the time, actually. In her highly-anticipated debut collection of essays, Aiden Arata interrogates the space between our virtual and tangible selves with searing self-awareness and clarity. Grifting, content creation, doom fetishizing—Arata brings the sinister habits of the internet to consciousness, making readers finally start to blink twice at their phone screens. Read an excerpt of the memoir in EL here.
Before he’d become known for writing the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning book Gay Bar, Jeremy Atherton Lin escaped into London fashion shows, Berlin sex clubs, and a “city of refuge” with the boy with his dreams. Set in 1996 as a US Congress was hell-bent on denying same-sex couples federal rights, Atherton Lin’s Deep House questions gay marriage as an object of queer liberation through historical case studies and his own tender, but acerbic lens.
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro, is an urgent anthology of personal testimony, frontline reporting, poetry, and art documenting the ongoing devastation in Gaza. Contributors, including survivors, poets, journalists, and academics, share deeply human stories of loss, resistance, and political violence. The collection bears witness and calls for action, with all royalties supporting UNRWA. Read about the meaning behind the anthology’s cover, created in the style of tatreez, a Palestinian embroidery technique.
In How to Be Unmothered, Camille U. Adams explores her fraught relationship with her mother within the context of Trinidad’s colonial history. She reflects on generational trauma, her family’s legacy of abandonment, and her own survival through vivid memories from girlhood to womanhood. The memoir is a powerful reflection on building a self in the absence of maternal care through storytelling and connection.
In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li writes with stark emotional clarity and philosophical rigor about the suicides of her teenage sons, seven years apart. The book offers a moving portrait of two very different boys and the new life Li must build after parenthood. It is an unflinching reflection on living after unimaginable loss and the deliberate choices Li makes to endure. Read an excerpt in EL here.
In Bibliophobia, Sarah Chihaya explores how books have shaped her life, particularly during periods of depression and suicide attempts. She reflects on her cultural identity as a Japanese American and the ways literature intersected with her struggles. Through works ranging from The Bluest Eye to Anne of Green Gables, Chihaya interrogates the power of reading and the narratives that shape who we are. Read an interview with Chihaya about the book here.
In So Many Stars, Caro de Robertis presents an oral-history project featuring the voices of 20 trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and Two-Spirit elders of color. From trans activists to queer community leaders, the individuals featured in the book share how they survived crises and carved out space for themselves and their communities. The stories not only illuminate the lives that queer elders have built, but also offer lessons to younger generations following in their footsteps. In their EL interview, de Robertis discusses the process of putting together this oral history.
In Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, Mariana Enriquez chronicles her visits to cemeteries around the world, reflecting on history, memory, colonialism, and mortality. Her essays blend gothic sensibilities with historical and personal insight. The book is a meditation on the living and the dead, exploring what cemeteries reveal about our present.
In The Wanderer’s Curse, Jennifer Hope Choi explores the nature of her mother’s yeokmasal—the “curse” of being a perpetual nomad—and wonders if she’s destined to the same fate. Choi weaves a sharp and often hilarious mother-daughter story that probes questions of identity, belonging, and the places we call home. You can read an excerpt of the book here.
After the car accident the titanium rod they put in my leg got infected. The infection went into the bone. Osteomyelitis. There were twelve surgeries, multiple hospital stays. I lost my job, broke up with my boyfriend, moved back to Texas to live with my brother Jason. I’d just turned thirty-seven, and Jason was forty-two. He’d moved out of our parents’ house after they died, three years ago, Mom of pneumonia and Dad of a heart attack.
I was glad they never had to see me like this. It would have disturbed them, their daughter adrift. They would have wanted to take me in. I probably would have let them. Of course, if they hadn’t died, Jason would still be living with them, so it would have been the four of us together again, surrounded by framed pictures of us as much younger people.
Every Monday and Friday, I rode the bus downtown to the wound clinic of the county hospital, the only place in Austin that would treat people without insurance. There was a wound technician assigned to me named Luka. “Does it hurt?” he asked, kneeling before me as I sat on a chrome chair.
I’d taken my pain pills. I said, “Not too bad.”
When he leaned over me, Luka’s scrubs were loose enough that I could see his chest, which was mostly smooth, only a weedy patch of black hair bridging his pecs. He unwrapped my leg, then fired what looked like a clear water gun with a rubber dish at the tip. It was like a high-pressure car wash. The gun spit and sucked at the same time, through two different barrels. “Look,” said Luka. “That’s granulation tissue. Your wound is healing.”
Was there a tiny, hopeful island of pink in the dark gash of my wound? Maybe so. Maybe not. My brain was blurred by insomnia, my senses blunted. I felt half dead on my best days. I had dark rings under my eyes, bony arms, flabby muscles. The antibiotics loosened my bowels. My periods were long and heavy. Everything tasted sour. I smelled like old banana peels, like wet trash. “Healing” seemed like fantasy-talk, like a fake word.
“You’ll be back on the dance floor in no time,” he said.
I smiled at his little joke.
My wound was red and weepy after the wash-and-dry. “We’ll go for the silver nitrate,” Luka said, rubbing his hands together. He was peppy that way. I could tell he had a robust personality, a strong engine. He wore blue high tops. His biceps flexed as he maneuvered cotton-tipped applicators. His body seemed overengineered for such a detailed and fussy profession. I pictured him working on a dock somewhere, lashing giant metal contraptions together.
After the silver nitrate, he wrapped my leg in medicated patches and gauze. His hands were warm. I closed my eyes and saw purple and red shapes bloom and fold into themselves. Like cigarettes, Luka’s hands kept me going.
I’d read that a severe injury with a prolonged recovery might cause hypnagogic hallucinations—odd sounds, bizarre associations, or, in my case, expansive and shifting images when I closed my eyes. But when Luka touched me, the images changed in a way I can’t explain. Instead of holding me apart, the shapes pulled me toward them, until I became, for long moments, vividly part of them.
Dr. Peters, the rehab doctor who oversaw the wound clinic, walked through the privacy curtain. She had the pale, yellow complexion of a grub worm. She grasped my knee and rotated my hip in its socket, perhaps in order to save herself from having to squat. The way she handled me with her fat fingers made me think of my leg and myself as distinct entities, the former requiring attention and assessment, the latter—the me attached to my leg—superfluous. “Fine,” she said, then swept the curtain aside, left us alone.
Luka looked over his shoulder, adjusted the collar of his scrubs. “I know hospital insurance only covers two visits a week. Three visits would be ideal for this kind of wound. If you want, I could come by in-between.”
“Come by where?” I asked.
“Your place.” Luka clicked a pen and handed me a gauze wrapper. “Why don’t you give me your number?”
I have no idea what my facial expression must have communicated.
“I like to help people,” he said.
I felt a little pang at being lumped in with “people,” though he’d given me no reason to suspect I was dear to him.
I wrote down my number and gave the wrapper back to him. He slid it into his breast pocket. I had a sudden sense of being swallowed by that pocket, which was deep and directionless, an ocean. The baby blue material of his scrubs was so thin and pliable, I thought I could see it shudder with each beat of his twenty-something heart.
We said goodbye, and I limped toward the exit on my crutches. Behind me, Luka greeted a mute obese man in an electric wheelchair. The man grunted. He was a regular, with a fungal infection that turned the skin of his calves to bark. “Incurable,” Luka had once told me, his face boyish and bright, the face of a star pupil.
“Here? He’s coming here?” Jason asked. We sat on my bed, his living room couch in the daytime. In his ratty basketball shorts and yellowed undershirt, his thin hair swept up over his forehead and temples, Jason looked like a blond, washed-up Elvis. Wild gray hairs on his Adam’s apple caught the light from two windows that looked over a small park where a lady with pink hair sometimes cursed at me.
I told Jason that Luka probably felt sorry for me. A normal brother might have taken the opportunity to ask questions about my treatment, how I was doing.
“How old is he?” Jason asked. He had a tendency to fixate on age.
I shrugged. “Young. Twenties?”
His eyebrows shot up. “Sounds like cougar activity,” he said.
“Have you seen my crotchless panties?” I asked, trying not to let him get under my skin.
“That’s disgusting, Maureen.”
“That’s what cougars wear,” I said. “Crotchless everything. No crotches allowed.”
Jason scowled. “Stop saying crotch.”
I rolled my eyes. If I had likened myself to an animal, it would’ve been something less aggressive, more cerebral. Like a praying mantis. The quizzical stare, the bad posture, the pointy elbows.
“I don’t know,” Jason said, as if it were his decision.
“It’s not up to you,” I said.
“This is my apartment.”
I pretended to take this as a threat, though I knew he would never kick me out. “Maybe I’ll leave,” I said.
“You can’t leave, Maureen. Why do you say things like that?”
I felt no shame in threatening Jason. If anything, his anxiety at the idea of my leaving amused me. I was a child.
“Then it’s not up to you,” I said again.
“What you’re telling me is concerning.”
“He’s coming to clean my leg. It’ll take thirty minutes.” I was hoping for more like an hour, but it had been so long since I’d been touched outside the wound clinic, I’d take whatever I could get.
“Where is he getting the supplies?”
“Maybe from the hospital?”
“If he’s stealing them, you’re implicating me in illegal activities by using this apartment.” Jason lived in fear of the law, though I don’t think he’d ever broken it.
“The only way you’d be implicated is if you’re gaining something through the transaction,” I said. “But I’m completely freeloading off you.” I hoped abasing myself would guilt Jason into capitulating, though, of course, what I said was true; in addition to free room and board, Jason gave me a weekly allowance. Usually around one hundred dollars.
“Well, that’s true,” he said. “But what exactly is the transaction?”
“He cleans my leg. That’s it. I’m not paying him.”
“A transaction is a give and take. What does he get?”
“I don’t know,” I said, pretending not to understand.
“What does he want?”
I laughed nervously, surprising myself. “What do you mean? Maybe he just likes to help people.”
“What if he has an expectation, Maureen?” Jason sounded genuinely anxious. I wondered if he’d ever had anyone else in his apartment besides me. Probably not. I’d bought and stashed some new white towels because his had crusty, yellow patches that reminded me of eczema. The toilet hissed day and night. Half the electrical outlets refused to charge my phone.
“Expectation?” I asked. “That’s impossible. Have you looked at me lately?” I spread my arms and tried to rotate on my working leg, picturing a ballerina in a snow globe, but after a quarter-turn, I was completely exhausted. “And anyway, you’re here to protect me.”
“What am I going to do?”
“Kick some ass. Whatever older brothers do.” I smothered a laugh at the thought of Jason protecting anyone.
“This is ridiculous.” Jason got up and went to his room, paused in the threshold for a moment, as though balanced between his world and mine. Behind him, there were piles of poker books stacked nearly floor to ceiling. Three large computer monitors glowed. Pokémon, ninja turtle, and K-pop paraphernalia lined the walls. A life-size model of Beetlejuice stood by the bedside, with a hairstyle very similar to Jason’s; Jason had draped a pair of underwear over its outstretched fingers.
The door clicked behind him.
I had the same feeling watching him disappear that I’d had as a little girl in our childhood home. After all these years, his room was still his sacred place, a replica of the room he’d lived in with our parents for nearly four decades. Why didn’t he ever invite me in?
Luka called on Wednesday, and we agreed on five-thirty. I watched him exit his red coupe from our third-story window. He loped around to the driver’s side to pick up a lumpy bag. I hustled to finish my cigarette, then sprayed air freshener around the room and took a swish of mouthwash. I waited for him to knock before opening the door.
“Hey,” he said, flashing a smile and walking inside. The smell of the wound clinic followed him. He was in his scrubs. I wondered if I’d get to see that patch of chest hair. “Nice apartment,” he said with intimidating ease.
“It’s my brother’s. He’s in his room. Thank you for . . . ” I motioned to the bag.
As he hoisted it onto the hallway table, his sleeves rode up, and I caught the briefest glimpse of those biceps. “They throw out the expired stuff, but it’s still good,” he said, “and I brought the portable suction machine from the storeroom.”
“Aren’t you afraid of getting caught? I mean, if you do this regularly?” I asked, hoping he’d reveal that he’d never actually done a home visit before, that I would be his first.
“It’s a county hospital,” he said.
“Right.” I nodded, though I didn’t understand what he meant. Something about poverty, or waste. The moral underpinnings of social programs, etcetera. His politics didn’t interest me at all. I smiled. “I guess I should change?” I asked.
Luka produced a stack of hospital gowns from the bag. “I’ll set up in the bathroom and you can come in whenever you’re ready.”
I pointed him to the bathroom, and Luka went in and closed the door. There were four gowns, an auspicious number, suggesting multiple visits. I found myself remembering the moment I’d received a promise ring, pink with tiny plastic diamonds in the shape of a heart, from a middle-school crush.
I draped a gown over my shoulders, snapped three buttons, then stepped out of my sweats. I wore my newest underwear, faintly lilac and shimmery. I’d checked to make sure there were no stains. It felt important to keep this part of myself wrapped neatly, almost like a gift.
It was petty, but it felt nice to bring them back and then let them die again.
Jason turned up his music, the same way he had as a kid whenever I’d had friends over, or when our parents were trying to come to terms with each other. I could almost hear them now, yelling about my “defiance” or Jason’s “social problems.”
Sometimes I indulged the strange belief that they had died expressly to forget me and that by reliving some difficult part of our relationship, I could wake them from death, if only long enough for them to acknowledge me. It was petty, but it felt nice to bring them back and then let them die again. I liked that I could still be a daughter whenever I wanted.
I opened the bathroom door. Luka had set up the suction machine and attached the water gun. “Sit on the toilet,” Luka said. I admired the way he was wielding his authority: firm, but with a light touch.
He kneeled on the floor and unwrapped my leg. I’d hoped he’d do it more slowly without the pressure of a full day of patients, but he moved as efficiently as always. Perhaps he couldn’t shake the feeling of Dr. Peters supervising over his shoulder.
“Things are looking good,” he said. “I think the new tissue is a little shinier than last time. Can you see that?” He glanced up at me, full of juvenile enthusiasm. I shrugged. Somewhere down the line my leg had stopped feeling like my own.
I closed my eyes and felt his hands poking, patting, caressing. I willed time to slow down, to move with the same torpid pulse as the shapes that unfolded behind my lids. The whir and slosh of the gun. The crinkle of gauze wrappers. Luka’s breath, low and even. His soles squeaked once or twice as he shifted position. Even Jason’s music couldn’t break my reverie. My mind calmed. I wondered if by cleaning my leg in my bathroom, Luka was in fact claiming me. I opened my eyes in time to see him apply the adhesive tape.
My leg throbbed under its new wrapping. Womp-womp-womp, it went, echoing my heart. I had forgotten my pre-cleaning pain pills, but so what? Not even pain could interfere with this moment.
After bagging up all the trash and equipment, Luka turned and opened the bathroom door. “I’ll drop this in the dumpster on the way,” he said.
With no forethought, I sprung up on my crutches, lurched after him, andgrabbed his shoulder. He seemed startled and spun around. It wasn’t something I would normally do, but maybe the pain made it seem like an acceptable act. I pressed myself against him and nestled my head under his chin. His neck was hot. Had I licked him, I was sure he would have tasted wonderful. I clasped my hands behind his back, pushed my face into his chest, and took a deep breath. He smelled like raw biscuit dough and lime zest. I wanted to clean him like a newborn kitten.
He dropped the bag, which hissed, releasing the scent of my used bandages.
Jason’s door opened and he appeared in wrinkled chinos and a button down, his hair combed and parted on the side. I’d never seen him like that. “Everything okay out here?” he asked.
I backed away from Luka. I felt ashamed, then furious at myself. Was I not allowed to experience desire? “Jason, what are you wearing?” I asked.
Jason’s face turned red. “Regular clothes,” he said. We stood there in uncomfortable silence.
“Jason, this is Luka, from the wound clinic,” I finally said.
Jason stuck out his hand and Luka pumped it a few times. Their bodies making contact disturbed me, as though Jason might leave some kind of disgusting residue on Luka. “It’s so kind of you to help Maureen,” Jason said.
Luka pointed toward Jason’s room. “Hey, is that Beetlejuice?”
The underwear was gone. How odd. Beetlejuice’s naked hand looked like a tree that had lost its leaves. Jason made a weird expression with his eyebrows, like a crime scene investigator in a movie, someone who ponders unforgivable mistakes, coldly stitching them together using bloody clues as thread. “I invest in collectibles,” he said. “I’m a Tim Burton fan, hence Beetlejuice over there. This is my home office.”
Home office? Hence? How long had he rehearsed this speech? And why?
“What a coincidence,” Luka said. “I’m a huge Tim Burton fan. I’ve always had a thing for the Corpse Bride.” Jason snorted, then they both looked at me at the same time, and for a reason I couldn’t quite parse, I felt out of place. Jason’s stare had a particular intensity.
Luka held up the bag of trash. “I guess I’ll head out.”
“You’re leaving?” I asked. He didn’t seem to hear me. I glared at Jason, who followed me with his eyes. At the front door, Luka and I waved at each other, and then he turned awkwardly away. Before I knew it, he’d disappeared down the stairwell.
I closed the door and turned on Jason.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked.
“Doing what? I’m just standing here,” he said. “I was trying to be nice.”
“I can’t believe you would just jump out of your room like that, dressed like that. It feels like I’m in high school and Dad just busted in.”
“Well, to be honest Maureen, it looked like something was going on out here. It looked like you were . . . .”
“Nothing happened.” I located my pill bottle in the abandoned sweats lying crumpled on the floor and shook some out, then swallowed them dry.
“I’m pretty sure something happened,” Jason said.
“Forget it. Stop. Why are you wearing that?”
“Do you have a problem with my clothes?”
“You look just like Dad.” It was meant to be an insult, but Jason seemed oddly immune. Or maybe that been his intention, to look like Dad. The thought made me want to scream.
“I thought you’d like me to meet your friend in some clean clothes,” he said. “Was I wrong?”
“Stop being a meddling dick head!” I shouted. The volume made me feel slightly better.
Jason spread his hands. “What’s going on here? Do you have a problem?”
“Do I have a problem?”
“You’re hurting my ears.” He actually covered them.
“Stop, Jason. Stop being weird. A fucking weirdo.”
“Whatever, Maureen.”
Sensing a slight quaver in his voice, I felt inspired to hurt him even more. “Are you going to cry? Why don’t you cry right in front of me?”
He spun back into his room, slammed the door, and shouted, “Next time forget about me checking up on you! You and your friend can do whatever you want! In my apartment!”
“I know that,” I yelled back.
It was good that we were yelling again. We still had plenty of things to yell about. Since I’d come to live with him, I realized, we’d been pretending to be adults. Maybe now that we were finally yelling again, we could start being normal with each other.
“Sorry about what happened,” I told Luka at our next clinic visit.
“Don’t be,” he said. I waited for more, but he seemed absorbed by my leg. The damn leg always upstaged me. Or maybe he was afraid of being overheard. I strained to listen for the sounds of someone on the other side of the curtain; Dr. Peters usually announced herself with mouth breathing.
“Living arrangements are tricky in times of transition,” I said, hoping to draw his attention toward the rest of me.
“Makes sense,” he said, looking up briefly.
Something about his response and demeanor told me I should give him a little space, but I wasn’t about to heed this sort of intuition now when I had never heeded it before in my life. No, I was going to press Luka, compel him to react. Forcing a negative outcome would at least circumvent the nightmare of uncertainty.
“My brother came out of his room at exactly the wrong time,” I said.
Luka laughed and seemed to concentrate harder on his handiwork, rolling out moist pink gauze that he tightened around my calf in even, overlapping spirals.
What exactly did I want from him at this moment? Humor? Acknowledgement? I felt ravenous for emotional connection of any kind. “Things were just getting interesting,” I said.
He ignored me and instead looked very seriously at my leg. “Let’s talk about your leg,” he said.
“My leg.” Of course. What else would we talk about?
“Are you smoking?”
“No.” Smokers were always being forced into these situations where they had to come clean, but I wasn’t going to buy into all that.
“Are you eating a healthy diet? The one on the nutrition papers we gave you?”
Crackers. Half a can of beans sometimes. Coffee. Some stale candy corn from the laundromat. Were any of these staples allowed in the exclusive company of the four food groups? Probably not, but my stomach hadn’t been able to handle anything else. “More or less,” I said.
“The tissue doesn’t look healthy today. It’s grayer than we like. It feels like we’re backsliding. And if you’re not smoking, and you’re eating a good diet, we need to know what’s causing this.”
He left and came back with Dr. Peters. “We’ll need x-rays and some new lab work,” she said. “Lucky for you, your charity insurance pays for it.” She depressed my eyelid with her thumb, then lifted my hand and pressed my nail. When I yelped in pain, she smiled. “You’re anemic. You might need a transfusion. Transfusions carry risk.” She seemed to have decided to teach me a lesson. “And if you can’t stop smoking,” she continued, “we can’t guarantee your treatment at this clinic. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“I’m going to need you to tell me you understand.”
Furious, I blinked away tears. “If I don’t get treatment my leg will rot off, and I’ll die,” I said.
“Is that what you want?”
I tried to empty my face of anything resembling emotion. “To clarify, you’re asking if I want to die?”
Her mouth twisted and she straightened her back. “Is this a joke to you? Are you a teenager? Look around. Everything here costs money. Do you get it?”
I imagined stabbing Dr. Peters in the stomach with a scalpel, sewing her lips together, smothering her with saline-soaked gauze.
He needed to understand just how messy I was. Not just my leg, the whole me.
“I’ll talk to her, Dr. Peters,” Luka said. He sounded like a child redirecting an angry parent.
“I’ve heard a lot of talking in here, Luka,” she snapped. “Too much talking.”
She left. Luka handed me a tissue. I let the tears coat my cheeks, the snot congeal between my lips. It was good for Luka to see me like this. He needed to understand just how messy I was. Not just my leg, the whole me.
“I’m sorry,” he said, smiling weakly.
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
On Wednesday evening I took a shower and sat on the corner of the couch, watching the street. No red coupe. No knock on the door. Jason came out in his chinos and button down and stood there like an idiot—saying nothing, thank God—then went back in his room. I chain-smoked half a pack, dumped the rest into the garbage disposal, and flipped the switch. But the disposal only hummed. I’d forgotten it was broken. I found a green rubber glove and extracted the cigarettes, then squeezed them into a clump and threw it in the trash. I heard the thunk as it hit the bottom.
When I lay down for bed, Luka texted.
“I’m downstairs. Do you mind if I come up?”
I jumped up and limped into the bathroom to assess my appearance.
“I’m not really dressed,” I wrote, then erased it. “Sure. Give me five minutes.” I downed a couple pills, splashed water on my face, rubbed my armpits and crotch with a soapy washrag, and brushed my teeth. He knocked. For some reason, I wanted to cry, so I slapped my face a few times until the urge passed, put on a bathrobe, and went to answer the door.
Luka stood there with a little bouquet of blue flowers held together with a twist tie. “Dr. Peters found out I took the portable suction machine and I almost got fired. It’s locked in her office. I drove around to the medical supply stores but I couldn’t find the right kind.”
It had been a while since anyone gave me flowers. They were wilted, but so beautiful, with silky petals, bright yellow stamens. “I stopped smoking for real this time.”
“That’s great,” he said.
“I mean, I think I stopped. I smoked half a pack earlier, actually, but I put the rest down the garbage disposal.”
“Stopping smoking is one of the hardest things anyone can do.” He sounded like an honor roll student parroting some Reagan-era D.A.R.E. commercial, but I supposed it was true enough. I had stopped smoking hundreds of times.
“Do you want to come in?” The flowers seemed like a good sign, but I felt like I needed confirmation. My heart paused as I asked the question. He nodded. It restarted.
In the apartment, I put the flowers in a glass of water and took it with me to the bathroom. Maybe it was sentimental, but as I sat next to them on the toilet, those flowers made everything around them prettier.
As Luka cleaned my leg, I remembered that I used to think I had nice legs, a long time ago. Now even the good one didn’t look great, its muscle gone to fat. And yet, what did it matter what I thought of myself? I closed my eyes. What did it matter?
“Can you slow down a little?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. His voice sounded round and deep in the cramped room.
“Even a little slower?”
He slowed.
The temperature in the bathroom rose. The humidity skyrocketed. It felt like a sauna. My pits and crotch were all wet.
Then, right outside the door, Jason cleared his throat. I imagined what he would think of the expression on my face if he opened the door, and I kept my eyes closed, hoping he would disappear.
“Come in,” Luka said.
The door handle rattled and the cool air from the hall touched my face. “Hello,” Jason said. “I was wondering if Luka would like to stop by my room for a few minutes.”
I opened my eyes. Jason had that ridiculous side-part again, a smug look on his face. “Go away,” I told him.
“I’d be happy to visit,” Luka said, putting the finishing touches on my new bandage.
“Only if I can come too,” I said.
Jason pursed his lips and then, in a tone suggesting I lacked the grown-up capacity to reason, said, “This is more of a guys-only hang out, Maureen.”
“Oh? What are you guys going to do in there?”
Jason ignored me. I picked up the trash, and we all walked to Jason’s room. They went inside and Jason closed the door, leaving me standing there holding the trash bag. “Hurry up in there,” I said. In a moment I could make out Luka exclaiming over something. Who knew what Jason had shown him.
I opened the trash bag and sniffed—a whiff of dry sweat and death. I put my face inside it, sealing the edges with my fingers so fresh air wouldn’t interrupt whatever it was I thought I wanted. What did I want? I didn’t really know. The smell seemed to want something from me. I breathed deeply until there was no difference between the air in my lungs and the air in the bag. Perspiration, blood, rot, loneliness, and shame: everything equilibrated. I took the elevator downstairs, hobbled outside on my crutches, and arced the bag over the dented lip of the dumpster.
Luka’s coupe was parked nearby. It was so small and red that it looked like a toy. What was it with men and toys? I tried the handle. It opened. I dropped my crutches, bent down, and collapsed into the passenger seat. I closed the door and listened to the sound of my breathing, which seemed too fast. I opened the center console, turned around to survey the backseat. I tried to see everything, memorize it. I closed my eyes, felt the pull of the revolving, the collapsing, the dilating. I felt tired, but I resisted sleep. I would never fall asleep in a car again, I told myself, if only to hold it over the head of the self who had fallen asleep in a car once before. I’d been driving home after a waitressing shift. I had no memory of the accident. I’d ended up in a ditch, apparently, upside down, bleeding from a lacerated liver, ruptured spleen, shattered tibia.
I opened the door, but I didn’t get out of the car. “Fucking bitch,” someone yelled. I jumped. It was the pink-haired lady sitting on a bench across the street. I flipped her off. She seemed surprised to be acknowledged. Maybe she’d thought her voice existed only inside her head. I felt a horrible impulse to cross the street, but then she smiled, and I was afraid that she might see me as a friend.
I sighed and let my head fall back against the headrest.
“Hey,” Luka said. He was kneeling beside the car.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Maureen,” Luka said. “It’s me.”
“What is it?” I repeated. I was still half-asleep. “What time is it?”
“Almost midnight?”
I sat up.
“I haven’t played video games in years,” he said, looking back at the apartment. “I wanted to come out, but I could tell he really wanted me there. What are you doing down here?”
I shrugged. “Looking for a cigarette,” I said. “It’s all I can think about.” It wasn’t really a lie. I was always looking for a cigarette.
“Stopping smoking—”
“Is one of the hardest things anyone can do.” I mimed sucking a cigarette, blowing air in his face.
“That’s right,” he said. “And you were looking in my car?”
“It was unlocked.”
“Did you find any?”
“Not yet. But I haven’t checked the backseat.” A silence passed between us. I let my eyes and shoulders relax completely. I forced myself to keep looking at him. He gulped, held out his hand, and helped me up. He popped the front seat, revealing a tiny compartment, hardly big enough for us both. I followed him in and closed the door. I let him put his hands wherever he wanted. His tongue was hard. Our skin stuck together.
“Hey,” I said. “This isn’t serious.” It was a pathetic reflex, this declaration of non-seriousness, but he didn’t even seem to hear me. He pulled off my clothes, my bandages.
“Is this okay?” he said. He was in a kind of trance. Was it okay? Of course it was. He owned this leg.
“Yes,” I said.
He had so much energy, a sprinter at the starting line. His sweat dripped into my eyes, my mouth. I wondered if he could crush me. How would that feel? Out of nowhere, I made a noise like a dying cow: guttural, unattractive. I couldn’t remember ever having used my vocal cords so honestly. Was this my mating call? When it ended, Luka had stilled. He palmed my face on both sides and smashed his nose against mine. His eyelashes poked the fleshy corners of my eyes. “Can you pretend you’re dead?” he asked.
I could have asked: what? Or maybe: why? What came out of my mouth was: “How?”
He traced a scar on my side with his index finger. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just want you to pretend.”
For the first time, I remembered the accident—really remembered it, not just as a thing that happened, but as a thing that happened to me. I remembered the sound. A roar. I rolled my eyes back, opened my mouth. My body felt very light. Waves of electricity moved down my inner arms to my wrist and the tips of my fingers.
“That’s good,” he panted. “But not justdead—undead.”
Undead. What did he mean? I scratched his chest, yanked his little black patch, hissed and growled. “Like this?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
Drool ran down my cheek as my head hit the door rhythmically. I forced my eyes to stay open. I didn’t want to think at all.
Afterwards, we tried to find our clothes. Everything was slimy and smelled like half-price produce. I could barely move. “Can you pull up my underwear?” I asked, weakly lifting my pelvis. With one hand he stabilized my hips in the air, with the other he worked my underwear up my legs, carefully untwisting the material.
We crawled out of the car, and I stood up slowly, trying to straighten myself. Luka handed me my crutches. He seemed to be searching my face for clues.
Back upstairs, I sat on the couch and he rewrapped my leg. He looked uneasy. “That wasn’t too weird, was it?” he asked.
“No,” I said. I felt protective of him. “People are weird,” I said, raising his chin with my finger. I thought maybe I’d say something else, but that was it, all I had, the full extent of my wisdom.
He leaned forward and kissed my knee, turned his cheek and rested it there.
From the window, I watched his taillights blink on and off down the road.
I limped to the kitchen, got on my knees, and reached down into the bottom of the trash, past the coffee grounds and banana peels, and pulled up a dense, damp clump the size of a fist. I only wanted a smoke, but there on the kitchen floor, I held the decomposing heart of a zombie woman. My heart.
I pulled it apart, separating out the wet cigarettes, ordering them from most to least disgusting. I chose the last one, heated it in the microwave until it was dry, then lit it. I inhaled until my lungs hurt, opened the window, stuck my head out, and blew the smoke as far as it would go.
When I woke,Jason was making pancakes. I pulled up a stool. He dropped bits of fruit into each cake as it sizzled on the pan. He sprinkled powdered sugar on a healthy stack and handed me the plate.
“So, I guess you had a lot of fun with Luka last night,” I said.
“It was fine,” Jason said. He flipped a pancake. His tone seemed to indicate he had something more to say.
“Did you like him?”
“We were mostly playing video games.”
“What did you think?”
“I could tell he knows I have a lot to teach him.”
“About what?”
“Life,” Jason said, gesturing to his room.
“He’s not going to come over and hang out with you all the time.”
“You’re not his parents.”
“You’re not his brother.”
He shook his head. “I need to get to work.” He went to his room and shut the door.
He’d left a white envelope in the same place he always put it. I picked it up, opened the flap, and counted the money. I needed a haircut. I needed to go to the laundromat. Maybe I’d buy some new jeans. Some new shoes. Something nice.
I caught the 10:20 bus downtown. The pink-haired lady was on it, and I walked past her and sat a couple rows back. As the bus started again, she turned and said, “Hello.” Her voice sounded completely normal. I thought about whether or not to say hi back, and we looked at each other for too long, as though we had some sort of actual relationship. Finally, I looked away.
A group of girls in school uniforms walking on the other side of the street caught my attention. They were swinging their arms, laughing, dancing. Suddenly, one of them tripped and stumbled toward the curb. I felt sure she would fall into traffic. She would be killed. Her parents’ lives would be ruined. It seemed horrible that I would be the person with this last glimpse of their child.
But just in time, the girl caught herself, and stood perfectly still, her arms spread behind her with their fingers splayed, her toes jutting past the lip of concrete. Then the bus moved forward, and I lost sight of her.
Electric Literature is one of the only—if not the only—publications that puts together a best of the year list dedicated to short story collections, the commercial underdogs of the publishing industry and perhaps my most favorite literary form.
I love short stories for their efficiency and precision, for the way they contain an entire world in a mere few pages. Sometimes they are funny, enlightening, strange, or surprising. Often they are devastating. This year, it’s especially fitting that the EL staff and regular contributors selected Marie-Helene Bertino’s collection Exit Zero as our favorite collection of the year. We first published Bertino in Issue No. 3 of our weekly fiction series Recommended Reading,fourteen years ago. Recommended Reading recently published its 700th issue, adding to a completely free archive composed mostly of short stories. Bertino’s most recent novelBeautyland was voted EL’s best novel of 2024.
Bertino is an example of the many writers whom Electric Literature has invested in long term: Lydia Millet first appeared in our pages in 2014, Samanta Schweblin in 2012. The list below is wide-ranging, and includes relative newcomers, as well as masters of the genre, like Richard Bausch, Paul Theroux, Lynne Tillman, and Jonathan Lethem. The enormously influential Osamu Dazai, who lived from 1909 to 1948 is featured, as is the contemporary Tamil author Jeyamohan, translated into English for the first time. Wherever you dip in, a world awaits.
— Halimah Marcus, Executive Director, Electric Lit and Editor, Recommended Reading
Many great writers are recognizable, even without a byline, at the line level—in the cadence of their sentences, the structure of their plots, the voice of their characters. Marie-Helene Bertino’s work is unmistakable for its intelligent charm and startling originality. A unicorn appears in a backyard in New Jersey. An escaped tiger visits a department store. A vampire navigates eternal middle age. In one particularly endearing story published in Recommended Reading, a 70-year-old woman spends her first day post divorce with a stolen painting of Cher. In Exit Zero, Electric Literature’s favorite collection of the year, Bertino asks her readers to suspend their disbelief and step into a brighter, if sideways, world. We suggest you do.
Readers of Torrey Peters know her for her distinct voice, and for writing that excavates the depths of trans identity and longing. In her newest book, Stag Dance—comprised of three short stories and a novella—Peters’s voice careens towards both intimacy and cruelty: “Infect Your Friends and Love Ones” tracks a virus released by a group of trans women; in “Stag Dance,” a lumberjack dismantles and then reconstructs his gender through the duration of an isolated winter in the wilderness. Equal parts vulnerable and remarkably weird, Peters transcends the binaries of language to focus on the underlying feelingsthat inform identity, shame, and connection—themes she discusses in her interview with EL.
In her introduction for “The Gap Year,” a story from Are You Happy? published in Recommended Reading, Kristen Arnett discusses a phenomenon she credits with attracting readers to Lori Ostlund’s work. In book reviews, critics unintentionally circle the same phenomenon, describing Ostlund’s stories as worlds “not comfortable to inhabit,” “where devastation stands at attention” and “happiness is elusive.” In “The Gap Year,” a couple navigates the death of a child. It’s a story about grief—it is, absolutely, yes, devastating, not quite comfortable, suffused with sadness. And yet, the reader can’t—does not want—to turn away. This is, of course, the Ostlund effect, and not only can it be found in every story of the collection, it’s also on display in EL’s interview with the author.
Samanta Schweblin’s work can be accurately described as equal parts uncanny and hyperreal. In Good and Evil and Other Stories, Schweblin’s characters grapple with the very real terror of occupying a human—and therefore inherently destructible—body. In one story, a child swallows a battery and the tracheotomy that follows punctures the connection between father and son. A woman drowns herself only to discover that suicide is not an escape from life. A writer flees her husband’s illness but finds herself stymied by writer’s block in a world without him. All of Schweblin’s stories, like all of her fiction, irradiate our deepest, slipperiest fears without once losing purchase in the “real world.”
In his recent 23 Questions Interview with Electric Literature, Ed Park shared his penchant for surrealism and unlikely sources of narrative energy. His newest short story collection reflects these preferences: In the title story, one man’s isolation compounds an apocalyptic, pandemic-struck New York City; another imagines a university course on aphorism as an allegory for fragmented connections. Park approaches the mundanity of contemporary life with humor, absurdity, speculation, and nods to his genre influences.
Electric Lit’s Additional Favorite Short Story Collections
If there’s one thing that characterizes Lydia Millet’s work, it’s her unwillingness to look away, to return to business-as-usual in a continually disturbed (and disturbing) world. In “Therapist,” published earlier this year in Recommended Reading, the titular character is plagued by the neuroses, climate concerns, and maladaptive coping mechanisms of her patients, unable to shrug off a mounting sense of disquiet. Millet’s attention to contradiction, denial, and palliative responses makes Atavists a deeply human exploration of our most base impulses, and the role they play in shaping our surroundings.
Robyn Ryle is a self-described “lover of small towns,” but even if you didn’t know this about her, you would feel it in her prose. All of the stories in Sex of the Midwest orbit a mysterious survey—“Sexual Practices in a Small Midwestern Town”—sent to the inhabitants of Lanier, Indiana. The characters’ reactions to said survey, though varied, consistently push against any assumptions you might have about small towns. In one bracingly funny story published in Recommended Reading, small town denizen Loretta steadfastly ignores “the stupid sex survey” and confronts instead the encroachment of the outside world into her hometown, beginning with the wiener vendor. She isn’t interested in the survey, isn’t interested in change, isn’t interested in the hot dog guy’s mystery meat. “There were no hot dog carts when she was growing up and there would be none now.”
In Where Are You Really From, Elaine Hsieh Chou takes a familiar, reductive phrase and turns it on its head, returning the question to the reader with a philosophical bent. Chou’s characters encounter doppelgangers, covet (and plot to cook) their neighbors, and transact with the currency of identity. She is interested in the conflict and jealousy that arises in dyadic relationships, infusing her stories with honesty, aspiration, and what it really means to grow up and assume responsibility for one’s place in the world.
These eleven stories consider the reality of living, connecting, and searching for home as a Black American in the Southern United States. In conversation with Rickey Fayne, author Carrie R. Moore spoke of her struggle to convey multiple ways of being, and her approach to imbuing each character with a particular emotion. The result is a series of fully-populated stories: a sensory landscape that captures the conflicted intimacies of place, and attends to both the historical ley lines and resilience that accompany being Black in the South.
Mariah Rigg’s debut collection is an ode to the legacy and impact of place. Born and raised in Hawai’i, Rigg brings her own personal and ecological knowledge to these stories, deconstructing the all-too familiar history of destructive tourism, displacement, and imperialism. These stories treat Hawai’i as a living entity of its own, with care and intense feeling for the many species and communities under threat, and recognition for the challenges that come with adapting and forging a path into the future.
Osamu Dazai’s work is bleak—there’s just no other word for it. His protagonists are embedded in worlds characterized by despair and alienation, possessed of perspectives that might generously be called pessimistic. The narrators in No One Knows are self-pitying and self-absorbed. “Chiyojo,” featured in Recommended Reading, begins with a declaration embedded in a monologue: “I’m a stupid person. Genuinely stupid.” And yet, like Dazai’s prose itself, his characters are also decidedly compelling, even charming.
Originally published in 2011 and translated from the Tamil by Priyamvada Ramkumar for the first time, Jeyamohan’s Stories of the True feels as poignant and prescient as ever; these twelve stories excavate the class, caste, religious, and gender issues that characterize Indian life, with a resounding, hopeful voice. “The Meal Tally,” featured in Recommended Reading, follows a young man who finds literal and spiritual nourishment with a man named Kethel Sahib, whom the boy calls a djinn—a resourceful spirit—for his unbidden kindness. This encounter, amongst many others in the book, reveals an undercurrent of idealism set against the fraught context of Indian society, and speaks to the transfigurational power of care and connection.
Selected as the winner of the 2023 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction by Manuel Muńoz, an chang joon’s God-Disease is a haunting collection that turns darkness into an irresistible indulgence. Through five stories set in an otherworldly Korea, joon’s debut contemplates identity, mortality, and denial with a deftness both rare and shocking. Best described as “Southern Korean Gothic,” God-Disease unnerves, rattles, and curses characters and readers alike. Challenging and unsentimental, joon’s stories enlighten us by probing the sharpest horrors of being alive.
Body horror is all the rage in 2025, but rarely is it juxtaposed so elegantly with humor, surrealism, and the buoyant force of faith. Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s characters are on the hunt for meaning amidst uncanny forces: One character grows a tail with a mind of its own; another reckons with a recent cancellation at a haunted punk show. These stories remind us that the body is a stage for our most gruesome psychic conflicts, and the systems of belief we develop to surmount them.
Ayşegül Savaş is a master of displaying the intricacies and follies of human connection. Like her 2024 novel, The Anthropologists, which followed a couple building a new home together in a country far from their families, Long Distance reckons with the effects of chosen separation. Across a series of relationships fractured by space, characters must consolidate a complex network of loss alongside the igniting pursuit of new life.
The newest collection from literary giant Jonathan Lethem offers seven newly published pieces, and several more short fiction triumphs from the past three decades of his career. Lethem consistently subverts genre, distorts the real, and elevates the everyday. His unique style and speculative play on themes of mortality, relationships, and technology makes this one of the most surprising collections of the year.
Demree McGhee’s debut, Sympathy for Wild Girls, reconsiders the meaning of girlhood for Black and queer women and girls. These fifteen stories explore intimacy, belonging, and ferality as a response to internal and societal subjugation. For the women in McGhee’s stories, wildness is a tool to reshape a world that has fought to flatten them. With a strong, poetic voice—attuned to the potential for magic in a world ruled by realism—Sympathy for Wild Girls contends with yearning, asymmetrical opportunity, and a premonition-turned-actual apocalypse.
In his introduction to Paul Theroux’s “First Love,” published in Recommended Reading, Ryan Murdock describes Theroux’s archetypal character as “usually male, often a writer—trying to solve a problem.” One could go further to say that in The Vanishing Point, Theroux is less concerned with the solution than with the circumstances that bring a character up against a problem in the first place. “First Love,” explores the relationship between an estranged grandfather and his eleven-year-old grandson, Ben, upon whom he projects his own experiences, “reminded of the habitual evasions of my younger self.” We come to understand the distance from his son and daughter-in-law through omission, through what the narrator does not seem to realize about himself. This is Theroux’s written gift: The careful placement of empathy, the ability to lift the blinders of ego, and the careful detailing of how life emerges in response to love.
Richard Bausch is concerned with the most cruel and remarkable moments that define us. Recently featured in Recommended Reading, Bausch’s short story “Blue” follows a painter who witnesses a horrific car accident and lives with a mosaic, image-driven recollection of the event: A web of burst capillaries are described as “one night-dark shade of blue, the skin itself a purplish midnight blue.” The narrator resumes his day with an overwhelming sense of displacement; “It’s a warm, sunny morning on Earth,” but the peace of his former reality is irrevocably fragmented. Bausch’s ability to marry the truth of unprecedented loss with mundanity is what makes him one of the greatest contemporary fiction writers, and what makes The Fate of Others one of the most notable collections of 2025.
A collection of selected stories from eminent novelist and essayist Lynne Tillman, Thrilled to Death captures Tillman’s serrated edge and eye for mundane discomfort. The tonal and formal variation in Thrilled to Death is astonishing: Tillman revives and inhabits old Hollywood stars (Clint Eastwood, Marilyn Monroe, Sal Mineo); unwinds the self into menu courses; deconstructs her identity as merely a pen name. With Postmodern inventiveness, Tillman’s collection teems with wit, prescient social critique, and a voice that abstracts itself.
Whites offers both an ethnography and evisceration of white hegemony: from white supremacist school shooters and Q-anon conspirators, to white liberals in denial about the violence they perpetuate. In the title story, a seemingly beneficent nonprofit manager is publicly skewered when a video surfaces of her accusing a Black teenager of stealing her iPad; in another, a chronically online white supremacist teen plots a school shooting, only to die by his own hand (by literally slipping on a banana peel). Doten’s searing critique is sharpened by humor, internet fluency, and self-awareness, which he discusses in a recent interview with EL. He positions whiteness as a condition of obliterative self-pity, one that cannot be expunged through efforts to be labeled as “one of the good ones.”
My Prisoner and Other Stories takes a personal interest in the inhabitants of late stage capitalism and the systems in place to perpetuate it. In one story, a girl sees a prisoner’s arm waving from a cell, and attempts to piece together his life; in another, a man writes letters to his cousin, who is incarcerated for murdering several of their family members. The Rust Belt, where many of the stories are set, is the perfect setting to unravel the isolation, carceral superstructures, and systems of violence in our country. With empathy, tenderness, and specificity, McAndrews not only excavates a framework of systemic adversity, but the complicated individuals who inhabit it.
Sara Jaffe’s sophomore work hints at some of the writer’s perennial preoccupations—if one looks closely, for example, music and musicians permeate more than one story. The narrator of “My Sleep,” published in Recommended Reading, is a guitarist struggling to stay awake long enough to make it through band practice, and through the minutiae of her life. Ada, the main character of “Ether” is haunted by a song she has only heard once; the titular Arthur of “Arthur Why” is a musician obsessed with gamelan; Helen from “Earth to You” is transfixed by a musician she can hear but not see. Sara Jaffe has said she wanted to write a collection that focused less on theme and more on a cohesive aesthetic. She succeeded; Hurricane Envy reads like a post-punk mixtape.
In this debut collection from Max Delsohn, a series of young trans characters traverse the superficially liberal, discreetly hostile landscape of 2010s Seattle. Delsohn’s characters come of age for the first (or second) time and navigate newfound desires and responsibilities, all while interfacing with a complex system of structural and interpersonal aspersions. A young trans man is asked an invasive question by a work superior; a comedian—drawn from Delsohn’s own comedy ventures—parses the unexpected effects of starting T. Unabashedly funny, honest, and nuanced, Crawl depicts a multitude of trans experiences with startling authenticity.
Guatemalan Rhapsody considers the duality of a place marked by both beauty and suffering. Jared Lemus writes to capture the complicated reality of his ancestral home, consolidating the warmth and community of his childhood visits to the villages of his parents, with the violence and systemic oppression found in the cities. Lemus’s characters are diverse, coming from different social sects, education backgrounds, and belief systems. It is through these closely-inhabited perspectives that we come to see the intense beauty—and deep scars of imperial subjugation and Indigenous deracination—that characterize Lemus’s Guatemala.
2025 has been a year of contradictions: hyperconnectivity and loneliness, political theater and private reckoning, a collective desire to scream without forgetting how to whisper. Each collection on this year’s list speaks to that tension.
In Taylor Byas’s Resting Bitch Face, anger threads through joy and poems continually return to the charged moment when honesty becomes a superpower. The poems in Blue Opening by Chet’la Sebree are about being and beginnings: chronic illness and motherhood, where we all came from, where we might go. Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth tackles heat in all its prickly forms—political, personal, or atmospheric—and examines what happens after something essential goes up in flames. Helen of Troy, 1993, Maria Zoccola’s debut, reimagines The Iliad‘s heroine as a 90’s Tennessee housewife to brilliant and hilarious effect. And Cathy Linh Che’s Becoming Ghost gives us infinite, global layers of context to what might first seem like a simple family drama.
In a moment when everything is compressed, accelerated, or fed through an algorithm, these poets insist on depth. The insistence on messy humanity feels like resistance. These books remind us that where we place our attention is still a personal choice, and that language can slow the world’s turning long enough for meaning to appear.
Taylor Byas’s sophomore collection interrogates the relationship between Black feminine bodies and artistic creation across media that range from the classical to the pop cultural. In sections named for stages of the painting process, Byas considers the violence of male artists capturing muses in ways those muses may not have consented to, and the power of Black women artists to turn their own critical gazes back on that history.
In Blue Opening, experiences associated with Black womanhood and motherhood inform discussions of origins, beginnings, and creation. Throughout the poems, Sebree attempts to get to know the unknowable by looking at her past, peering into the universe, and shaping and re-shaping language. Readers will be enthralled by the array of forms and modes of communication utilized in this collection.
In her sophomore collection, Cathy Linh Che recenters Vietnamese experiences in the story of her parents, who fled the Vietnam War as refugees only to be cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film about the conflict, Apocalypse Now. As contributors to the film, they were denied both dialogue and credit. Writing in her own voice and those of her parents, Che also grapples with the pain of telling family stories after being disowned by her father.
A collection that rises from the ruins of divorce, Scorched Earth brims with deeply intimate and romantic poems that explore themes relating to Black womanhood, sensuality, and queerness. Clark’s meditations on possibility and hope ring clear and true throughout this stunning, intricate collection.
Maria Zoccola’s debut collection reimagines the Homeric Helen of Troy as a larger-than-life housewife struggling against the strictures of small-town life in early-nineties Sparta, Tennessee. She marries a man she calls “the Big Cheese,” has a daughter she isn’t ready to parent, and embarks on a chaotic affair, giving the chorus of Spartan women who voice some of the book’s poems plenty to gossip about. Two poems in the collection, “helen of troy makes peace with the kudzu” and “helen of troy feuds with the neighborhood,” were originally published in The Commuter.
Electric Lit’s Additional Favorite Poetry Collections:
Disintegration Made Plain and Easy, the funny and surreal debut collection of frequent Electric Literature contributor Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, explores themes of nudity and death because, as the poet puts it, “Death is the soul getting naked.” A series of “about the author” poems allows the author’s humor and identity to shine throughout.
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, this collection of career-spanning poems is a striking addition to Patricia Smith’s oeuvre. The collection embraces the many possibilities of poetry, amplifying neglected voices through rich storytelling and boundless language. Oscillating perspectives on beauty, race, conflict, death, belief, and deceit turn these poems into reservoirs of knowledge and insight. After experiencing The Intentions of Thunder, it will become clear to readers why Danez Smith refers to Patricia Smith as the “greatest living poet.”
I Do Know Some Things, a National Book Award Finalist, is Richard Siken’s searing collection of 77 prose poems written in the aftermath of his stroke. Abandoning traditional line breaks, Siken lets the text unfurl in dense prose blocks that mirror the fractured cognition and halted speech of his recovery. The result is a raw, autobiographical reckoning with childhood trauma, loss, and the fragility of the body, delivered in a stark and unornamented voice.
Night Watch by Kevin Young is a deeply elegiac collection that explores personal grief, collective memory, and American history. Its four sections move through meditations on the moon and birds, Young’s Louisiana roots, the story of the enslaved conjoined twin singers Millie-Christine, and a Dante-inspired descent into the underworld. Through rich, musical lines, Young blends lyricism and existential inquiry into a powerful meditation on loss and meaning.
In The New Economy, meditations on desire, change, and adaptation result in poems that speak to the most secret parts of ourselves. Fans of Calvocoressi’s exuberant poetry will fall in love with this newest collectionand its meticulous unravelling and reorganizing of aging, death, grief, joy, and gender.
In Agrippina the Younger, Diana Arterian excavates Agrippina, a lesser known Roman empress from a powerful political family, to reveal the structures that inform our present world. In pursuit of detail, Arterian plumbs historical accounts and museums for relics of Agrippina, haunted by the fact that Agrippina’s own son ordered her execution. Arterian’s poems imagine lost moments from Agrippina’s life, offer prose snippets of the immersive research process, and meditate on the elusive nature of power. She dove into the books and historical legacies that inspired her writing for EL here.
New and Collected Hell: A Poem is a book-length poem that reimagines Dante’s underworld through a contemporary lens, complete with HR-style intake interviews and hellish fax machines. Modernity aside, McCrae charts a man’s descent into an unrelenting hell of suffering, eternity, and demons. The poem takes readers to deeper levels of eternal damnation than they can possibly imagine, delivering an unforgettable, blood-soaked reading experience.
Algarabía is an epic poem following Cenex, a trans being living on a colony of Earth in a parallel universe. Cenex undertakes a transformative journey to find a new body and a place to truly call home. The edition presents two texts, one in Puerto Rican Spanish and the other in English, exploring the complexities of language, identity, and colonial legacy. These dualities are also captured in the collection’s gorgeous cover, which Salas Rivera discussed with EL.
Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin is a debut poetry collection that draws from her experiences as an undocumented person. It reimagines her parents’ precarious journey from China to Brazil to the United States and explores growing up in a Christian fundamentalist household. Lin’s poetry is written in a confessional style that blends intimate reflection with sharp observations about displacement and exile.
Cosmic Tantrum, Taylor Byas writes, is a collection of poems that “…reminds us that a tantrum is often a result of our own inattention and neglect.” With its curated array of cultural touchstones, fairy tale tropes, and pop culture icons, Sarah Lyn Rogers’ first full-length collection coalesces into a clear criticism of a transactional and oppressive world. Rogers gathered the astrology symbols and books that occupied her mind as she wrote these poems and discussed the process with EL.
Patrycja Humienik’s new poetry collection maps the experience of immigrant daughterhood through place, ecology, and the language of the body. The central motif of this collection is the river, weaving readers through themes of disrupted lineage, the precarity of beauty, and the relationship between memory and migration. Check out our interview with Humienik, where she discusses process, place, and the key themes of the collection.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s debut collection TERROR COUNTER takes the Gazan tunnel as its own invented visual form. It engages with imperialist legal texts in order to decompose their words and narratives, opening up space for new meaning and visions for the future to burst forth. “If poetry is anything,” says Tbakhi in his interview for EL, “it might be a way of acting like a termite and moving through the foundations of this colonial language we live inside of.”
In this debut collection, queer Palestinian diaspora poet Mandy Shunnarah blends archival research with their family’s personal experiences—from their grandparents’ displacement in the Nakba to their father’s opioid addiction and their own search for community and belonging in Appalachia. Shunnarah’s poems reclaim a Palestinian identity that often felt contingent to them growing up, while also interrogating and rejecting Western media biases to assert the wholeness of Palestinian humanity. In their interview with EL, they shared their process of writing and working through questions of identity.
In murmurations, Anthony Thomas Lombardi traverses themes of addiction, sobriety, grief, and the liberation of surrender. Many of the poems explore an alternate reality where Amy Winehouse made a successful attempt at sobriety. In an interview with EL, Lombardi describes his process: approaching Winehouse through second-person, transmitting her stepwork journal, and imagining quarantining with her during the COVID-19 lockdown. With care and attention to the cacophony of voices and spirits that inspired each poem, murmurations is honest about how both loss and the potential of alternate endings might haunt us.
Language is defined by inversion and duality. In Wildness Before Something Sublime, Leila Chatti juxtaposes imagery and emotion with their opposites, rendering a sensational landscape that invites reflection. Whether drawing on a long tradition of women poets or plumbing the body’s potential for loss, Chatti approaches loss with patience and an understanding that there is a vast measure of light behind the darkness. That light comes through in these poems, like pinpricks of distant stars.
Las Vegas, Before an Election by Monica Macansantos
On my first trip down the Strip, while sitting inside the car of my mother’s friend, I find myself performing the futile activity of counting hotel room windows floating above me at night. My imagination does the work of multiplying the number of people inside their climate-controlled rooms switching on their faucets, taking showers, and disposing their take-out containers, as though to punish my mind into acquiescence. In the daytime, the land is bone dry, floating upwards and sticking to the soles of my shoes, the membranes of my nostrils. And yet this city maintains a boundless faith in what many have called the American Dream, bullying the land into supporting an illusion of limitless resource and wealth.
“Welcome to Las Vegas,” my mother’s friend says behind the wheel.
I let go of a chuckle, allowing my apprehensions to fade beneath these blinking lights.
A few weeks later, on what I’ve been told is an unusually warm October evening, I follow a new friend’s lead through a maze of gambling tables and slot machines, guided by signs that direct us to the casino’s back garden where a circus tent takes shape behind a decorated archway. We step outside the casino’s air-conditioned air into the Las Vegas heat, and weave through a crowd of tourists before walking beneath the archway where guards check our IDs. A large fake tree invites me and my companion to take a selfie together beneath its neon canopy, before we claim an empty table. We wait for my companion’s friend, an acrobat who performs for Absinthe, a show that takes place nightly beneath the circus tent. He can get us in for free, according to my companion, a writer who’s doing research on Chinese acrobats in Las Vegas. I notice the softness of the plastic turf beneath our feet, how it sinks under my heels like an indoor carpet. A few days later, while I listen to the local NPR station, a man begs Las Vegans to stop using artificial turfs—they contain carcinogens, he says, that float into the air as the plastic material disintegrates in the desert heat. But on this evening, I have no clue about the carcinogens I may be inhaling, and my cluelessness allows me to be simply astonished by this fake garden in the desert, as I stare at this tree that glows instead of providing shade.
Like many new migrants to the city, I came to Las Vegas to chase an opportunity made possible by its wealth.
My companion’s friend materializes in a t-shirt and jeans, and insists on putting our dinner on the company tab before disappearing into the tent to fetch us bottles of water. When he returns, he sets down the bottles in front of us with a proud nonchalance before taking his seat, leaning back in his chair while the broad muscles of his torso push at his t-shirt’s material. He and my friend have spoken before, and they speak to each other in a mixture of English and Mandarin before my friend turns to me and shares that her friend has worked as an acrobat since the age of ten. Apparently, this isn’t unusual for Chinese acrobats who perform in numerous acrobatic shows across the Strip: They are initially recruited by the Chinese government to train in state-run acrobatic troupes, before eventually being lured to Las Vegas with the promise of better wages. For our acrobat friend, it all worked out. “They pay me well and I get to choreograph my own routines,” he tells us, eager to share his immigrant success story. “I bought my own home, and I brought my mom to this country. She’s an American citizen now, and she’s very happy.” He possesses the athletic grace of a ballet dancer as he matches his fluid gestures with the limpid resonance of his words. Speaking in English, perhaps for my benefit, he talks about investing his money because, as he says, “Taking risks is the only way you can build wealth.” I think about the gamblers we walked past on our way to this artificial garden, cloaking themselves in cigarette smoke while sliding dollar bills through slot machines and slapping them onto tables laden with chips. The glowing tower of Ceasar’s Palace looms above us, pushing itself into the darkening sky with an audacity that doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.
Later that evening, my companion and I are sitting inside the circus tent, watching our acrobat friend and his female partner holding each other by the hand while forming various shapes and lines in the air. I find myself holding my breath while they catch and release each other, their bodies in perfect sync as they flow as one. How many accidents have these acrobats had in their years of training, before finally pulling off these feats without distrusting themselves, their partners, or the air in which they rise and fall? The pair ends their routine, rising through the air and through the tent’s eye to the sound of our clapping, and I ask myself why I’m here, in this tent pulsating with lights and music, surrounded by drunk tourists who scream and cackle at the bawdy jokes of a bowtied emcee.
Like many new migrants to the city, I came to Las Vegas to chase an opportunity made possible by its wealth—though in my case, it’s a writing fellowship hosted by UNLV, offering me support for a new book I’m writing, and not a job in a casino or in the city’s various resorts and restaurants. This isn’t my first time in America, since I have been to this country for graduate school, as a visitor on writing fellowships, and during my childhood, when my family accompanied my mother while she pursued her PhD on a Fulbright. I navigate my new home with a mixture of familiarity and a newcomer’s wariness. My first few days in Las Vegas have me pulling out the accent I acquired during my graduate school years in Texas, and performing day-to-day tasks with the feigned confidence of a newcomer who nervously awaits the inevitable mistake that will lead to their exposure. I know the assumptions Americans make of people with foreign accents who don’t have the usual catchphrases at hand when purchasing an item or talking to someone on the street: these are assumptions my own parents have had to deal with during their own visits to America, cementing their status as outsiders when navigating the most quotidian of interactions.
My accent gives me a tentative pass, but also creates confusion: My chatty Uber drivers are in disbelief when I tell them that I came here straight from the Philippines. I fill the uncomfortable silences that follow with convenient explanations: that I’d lived in Austin, and had spent my childhood in Delaware. “So you’re from the East Coast,” one driver says, which seems to make him feel better. He then tells me about the other cities where he has worked as an Uber driver before finally ending up in Las Vegas: Like many Uber drivers I’ve talked to, he’s a fellow traveler, finding a home in this city that welcomes more than its fair share of drifters. “The money’s good, but you wouldn’t believe how many weirdos I’ve picked up,” he says, steering us down the sinuous, illuminated curves of Paradise Road. “Two weeks ago, I picked up a guy who’d completely forgotten his name.”
I knew there were Filipinos in Las Vegas, as there are in other cities outside the Philippines where I’ve lived—we are a nation of voyagers, bravely packing up our lives and chasing opportunities in far-flung parts of the world. Throughout my own travels as a writer chasing grants and fellowships to support my writing, I’ve met Filipinos at ice cream parlors in Austin, inside restaurant kitchens in rural Maine, and in thrift stores in Nashville. But I didn’t expect to encounter the largest Filipino community I’d find abroad in Las Vegas until my program director took me to Seafood City, a Filipino grocery chain in the US, after picking me up from the airport. I didn’t quite know what to feel when I saw a country I had left behind nearly twenty-four hours before represented in nearly identical form as I stepped into the supermarket’s entrance, spotting familiar chain restaurants and bakeries before taking a cart and pushing it down aisles stocked with familiar products. I’d run into Filipinos in the days and weeks that followed, at the fitting rooms of clothing stores and inside a crowded bus, at restaurants and pharmacies where I found myself blurting out words in Tagalog to cashiers and waiters, who’d likewise respond in kind.
Back in the Philippines, I’d sometimes hear of Filipino immigrants going straight to Las Vegas to find work at the casinos upon their arrival in America, and as I walk across casino floors, I see Filipinos, mostly women, stationed behind gambling tables in their regulation bowties and black vests. I do not get the chance to talk to these dealers since I’m not a gambler, and usually just find myself in these spaces because of a restaurant or show inside a casino that I want to get to. But during one of my Uber trips, I get the chance to talk to a Filipino driver who worked at a casino upon his arrival in Las Vegas in the early nineties. “The money’s good, and the benefits are also good,” he tells me in Tagalog. “I had a friend who was a journalist back home, and came here looking for work before becoming a dealer. He went up the ranks very quickly and is now a cash manager at a casino.”
“And so you can just go in with zero experience,” I say, while we make our way from Seafood City. I have been in town for about two months by now, and taking a bus to Seafood City before returning home in an Uber with my bags of groceries in its trunk has become a regular routine for me. This grocery run, however, has been made surreal and dream-like by the shock of meeting Bill Clinton and shaking his hand while waiting for my Uber beside a cartload of groceries.
“All of us had zero experience,” my driver continues, steering us past rows of orange cones sweeping across Maryland Parkway, the same way he steers clear of Bill Clinton’s visit to Seafood City with a deftness that I nonetheless notice. “And that’s the beauty of working at a casino. They don’t expect you to know anything, but they know you can pick things up on the job.”
“Did your friend ever practice journalism here?”
After a short pause, he says, “No, as far as I know. But he was a journalist back home.”
It’s one thing I notice about Filipinos overseas, whether I meet them at a party or at a store, in the dry, open landscape of Austin, Texas or in the lush, rolling hills of Wellington, New Zealand: an eagerness to name the occupations they once held in our motherland, or else a curiosity in regards to the roles I once occupied in a country they also unhesitatingly call “backward,” “corrupt,” and “poor.” Sooner or later, their criticisms of our shared homeland fall away, revealing a sentimental attachment to the lives they left behind and the identities they shed to survive in a land that promises new beginnings. They may be Uber drivers or salespeople in this new country, but in the Philippines, they were engineers, accountants, bankers. Those who tell me, “Pride can’t feed you,” when they begrudgingly learn that I’m an artist in this country, and not a nurse, will also randomly mention the prizes they won for their research back home and the businesses they helped start from the ground up, their eyes turning wistful as they stare into a past that remains invisible to other people’s eyes. If they’ve resigned themselves to taking their pride down a few notches in these faraway lands, their memories of their past selves remain intact, waiting to be pulled out like museum pieces preserved in glass when they meet a fellow countryman who carries a similar burden of memory, and knows the full weight of their loss.
All the Trump signs I’ve seen behind car windows and draped on fences won’t disappear, even if I close my eyes.
My Uber driver then says, “You’re a writer. I assume you’re good at giving speeches, that kind of thing.”
“I get by” I say, unprepared for this sudden turn in the conversation.
“It’s just that I want to improve my public speaking skills,” he says, while turning into my downtown neighborhood. “Do you have any advice as someone who’s good at that?”
Amused by his overestimation of my skills at public speaking, a task I often loathe, I tell him about my experiences as a college instructor in the Philippines before mentioning Toastmasters, a group I’m hoping he joins to get the answers I cannot provide. “It’s a skill you get better at over time, just like driving. At some point, it becomes second nature to you,” I say, as we approach my building.
“And it’s a skill all of us should have,” he says, before pulling up in front of my building’s entrance. “Who knows,” he adds with a smile, “It might come in handy when we decide to run for president.”
I try to stay calm when I’m walking with two writer friends down Fremont Street and we see a large mural with Trump’s face rising, God-like, from an ocean wave of stars and stripes. “Don’t look,” a friend says, and I turn away, but not without stealing a quick glance at the mural. I tell myself that the mural will still be there even if I look away, and that all the Trump signs I’ve seen behind car windows and draped on fences won’t disappear, even if I close my eyes and pretend they’re not there. I am afraid when I see these signs, but I must also acknowledge this hate and fear when it makes itself clear to me.
My cousin, her husband, and her childhood best friend fly in from the Bay Area for a weekend getaway. While my cousin’s friend feeds hundred-dollar bills into a slot machine at the Venetian, my cousin complains about her parents, lifelong Republicans who have been sucked into conspiracy theories about vaccines and the federal government.
“This is what makes me scared,” I say, as I watch the dollar amount at the bottom of the screen slowly rise to the tune of a button push. “Normal people believe these things.”
“I’m hopeful,” my cousin’s friend tells us, pivoting on her swivel chair to briefly face us while images of fruit, treasure chests, and gold numbers cascade down neatly drawn columns on a screen. Her words give me some hope, even if she eventually loses all the money she has fed into the slot machines. She proceeds to lose even more money at craps before staying on to recoup the money she has lost.
I attempt to live frugally in this city of many temptations, having witnessed how one’s luck can easily run out.
My cousin and I leave her, finding our way toward the elevators in this maze of gambling tables and slot machines. There’s nothing about her friend’s losses that makes me doubt her optimism for the elections, which I find slipping from my mind amidst the cheery, jangling sounds and bright, colorful lights. After taking the wrong elevator that takes us to the wrong set of floors, we take another elevator back to the ground floor and get onto the right elevator, which takes us back to my cousin and her husband’s hotel room. I take a seat beside a window that offers panoramic views of the Wynn’s golf course thriving in the 100-degree heat, and I listen to my cousin as she reports her friend’s losses to her husband. It’s only later, when I’m back at my campus office, regaling officemates with this anecdote about my weekend on the Strip, that I begin to wonder if this woman may have wound up losing more money. “There’s a point where you just have to cut your losses and walk away,” the director of my program says, and I agree with her.
The promises of this city remain glimmering in the distance, out of reach but never quite out of sight, as I sit in my bus heading back to my apartment from the university, watching the towers of the Wynn and the Encore turn gold in the waning afternoon light while blue collar workers, some still wearing their company uniforms, settle into the seats around me after their daylong shifts. Maryland Parkway runs parallel to the Strip, a row of imposing casinos and resorts that rises from the city’s flatness to slice through the sky with its gleaming metallic lines. Along that thoroughfare, I see run-down strip malls, trash-strewn bus shelters, and men and women who drag scuffed, dirty suitcases containing their life possessions like travelers with nowhere to go. A woman in shorts and tank top crosses the street in front of the bus like this, her pale skin clinging to her bones while the wheels of her suitcase judder across the sidewalk, sending quivers through her skeletal face. A woman I’ve come to know as a regular on my bus line bobs up and down over the handle of her metal cart, her wrinkled mouth twitching helplessly over her toothless gums. I tell myself that turning away is a form of respect, and that these people with visible markings of drug abuse on their bodies do not want their own degradation to be turned into spectacle. I’m like others in this bus who stare outside the window or at their phones as we sit and stand beside everyday signs of despair. For many of us, we have our own personal struggles to grapple with, leaving us with little energy to contend with the sufferings of others. I hear a man seated behind me mention to his friend that he has just been released from prison and is looking to start over, while I overhear from another man in a blue Greyhound uniform, who has offered his seat to me before spending the rest of his trip standing, that he hopes to hold onto his new job for a while because he has three kids to feed. When fights break out at the back of the bus, many of us keep our gazes fixed ahead, sharing the implicit knowledge that the shouting will ease before one or both participants voluntarily get off at the next stop, if the driver doesn’t kick them off. Some of us are simply more vocal in our frustrations, and this, too, we learn to accommodate in this cramped, shared space.
I can afford to buy a car with the money my host organization pays me, and even have a parking spot delegated to me in the gated apartment complex where I enjoy free housing. And yet I choose to take the bus to campus for my weekly office hours, ever mindful of the money I’m able to save while taking public transportation. This is the most I’ve made as a writer, and I attempt to live frugally in this city of many temptations, having witnessed how one’s luck can easily run out. If I were driving a nice car past the many homeless encampments that dot the streets outside the Strip, I wonder if I’d merely be deceiving myself about the invisible line that supposedly keeps many in this city safe from the bad fortunes of others.
I begin taking early morning walks around my neighborhood, getting my body to move in the open air before the intense desert heat begins to beat down on the pavement. I am warned by people working at my host program, as well as by locals I meet, that the neighborhood in which I live isn’t the safest, but I cannot stand the sense of disconnection I have from my new surroundings when I keep myself sequestered inside my apartment.
The building is new, the neighborhood is generally quiet, and my fully-furnished unit contains all the conveniences of first-world living, making housework easier, even soothing, when I take breaks from my writing to cook, clean, and do laundry. There are trees in the complex’s fenced courtyard and a bookstore downstairs, inviting me to peruse its shelves for books that are hard for me to find back home in the Philippines. It feels like a far cry from the dangerous neighborhood I can already see another new friend visualizing with slightly narrowed eyes, when I mention where I live at the tango festival where we meet a few weeks after my arrival in the city. “Are you sure you feel safe there?” she asks me, while pairs of dancers swirl past us beneath low lights. “Because it’s not the safest neighborhood.”
The usual morning hush envelops the streets when I step outside for a walk, and I am comforted by the sight of trees and manicured bushes planted in the front lawns of law offices occupying what were once residential homes. That they’re almost all accident and injury law firms amuses me: one wouldn’t suspect, by the emptiness of these streets, that it’s a city where their services are needed. Perhaps it’s the deceptive sense of safety I draw from the law’s heavy presence in this neighborhood that helps me briefly forget the troubles of this place. When I see traces of unhoused lives on these streets, like an empty plastic tray and dirty fork tucked beneath a manicured bush, or a pile of clothes hastily shed, I remind myself of what a friend whose brother was unhoused for some time told me: The vast majority of homeless people aren’t violent, but are simply forced to live out the most private aspects of their lives in the open.
It’s when I come across an abandoned encampment with an assortment of glass bottles and needles that I put a halt to my morning walks. “You should find a gym,” the assistant director of my program says, when I tell her what I saw.
I feed my body’s hunger for movement at the university pool when I’m on campus, and at a pilates studio in the arts district where I seem to be the only student who doesn’t drive to class. I pump my muscles and strain my lungs to the sound of energetic pop music issuing forth from stereos tucked away from sight. I grow addicted to this rush of endorphins as I push my body towards an invisible goal, in this country of enormous swimming pools and cheerful pilates instructors who gently prod me past my limits. As I float on my back at the university pool, darting through the water with every kick and stroke, I can almost feel my spirit pulling my body toward a future that this country, with its seemingly infinite possibilities, has opened up for me.
I carry this optimism with me when I come home to my apartment and return to my desk, no longer feeling like that version of myself from my graduate school days who felt watched and monitored when I sat down to write. I have moved past that, or at least this is what I believe while I sit in an apartment I could have only dreamed of living in when I was younger. I slowly come to accept this apartment, my position, and the respect people have for me as a power I now hold. I am reluctant to call it this, but it’s the only word I can find that describes my newfound confidence in what I do. While I watch the afternoon light sharpening the fringes of the mountains beyond from my window, I feel a renewed hope in myself, in this country that has allowed me to harbor this hope, in this city that, for all its nauseating excesses, has thrown some of its luck at me. Is it possible to share this luck with everyone, including the people who sleep rough right outside my apartment when I slip into my warm, comfortable bed at night? I struggle to reconcile what I want to believe with what I have seen, though I want to convince myself, based on what America has been willing to provide to a foreigner like me, that this country is also capable of shining its grace on those who have rarely felt it.
I’m not sure if I should be reassured or frightened by the veneer of politeness that Trump supporters maintain while openly wearing the codes that communicate their spite. Nonetheless, I am shocked when the friendly, chatty Black man seated at the back seat of my shared Uber gets off at a Trump rally, which is the first time I see the red hat he’s wearing.
Then again, don’t I have Filipino relatives and family friends who are Trump supporters, who justify their political leanings by launching into rants about “illegal” immigrants sitting around and getting free housing, healthcare, and education, while they sacrifice everything to reap these benefits for themselves and their children? I have seen this selfishness before, from people who haven’t necessarily been left untouched by the munificence of the American Dream—I’ve sat inside their large houses as a welcome guest, while they complained about how unfair it was that they’ve had to pay such steep a price for the life America has given them, while others, by virtue of their disadvantage, have it easy.
Must the fulfillment of a dream come at the expense of other people’s happiness?
I’m reminded of a visit I once paid to a family friend in the Houston suburbs more than a decade ago, during which she complained that her son’s high school classmate could go to college for free, “just because his mother’s a drug addict,” while her son had to take out onerous loans from Sallie Mae. “I’ve been a law-abiding citizen throughout my life here, and this is what I get,” she said, while we sat inside her high-ceilinged living room. I remember its windows above us letting in so much light, it almost felt like a church, though I hesitated to ask what god this was all dedicated for.
Though I’ve tried to reason with my countrymen who complain about the sacrifices they’ve made to give themselves and their children a fair shot in this country, I’m unable to get past their unwillingness to see past their own struggles. When they think about America, they don’t think about the people they share this country with, but about the promises this country has made to them that have only been half-fulfilled. They left behind careers, friendships, and possibilities in the old country to chase a dream America promised them from afar, and so I understand their disappointment when America extracts even more from them to make a fraction of its promises come true. But must the fulfillment of a dream come at the expense of other people’s happiness, those who can only afford to catch glimpses of that dream while struggling to get by?
Thanks to someone who works at my host program, I get tickets to another show on the Strip, and I bring along another new friend, a Filipina I met at a book club I am organizing as part of my fellowship. I wait for her at a busy alleyway beside the Linq Hotel on the evening we’ve chosen to see the show, and just as the sun is beginning to set, I see her striding toward me, past a tall topless woman with tasseled pasties on her nipples, who asks us if we’d like to take a picture with her while my friend and I embrace. We ignore the topless woman while we turn in the direction of the restaurants lining the alleyway, and we exchange the usual pleasantries, asking each other what we want for dinner and how our day has been. With the elections a few days away my friend mentions seeing AOC at the university museum where she works. She knows I shook hands with Bill Clinton the previous week at Seafood City, and we talk about our shock when meeting these stars of the Democratic Party in the flesh—with the polls being so close, though, we understand why they’re flying across the country to talk to people and get out the vote. We talk about this before conversation inevitably takes us down another route, in the direction of what we hesitate to say aloud.
My friend is afraid, and so am I; while we walk past twinkling restaurant signs toward a giant Ferris Wheel that dominates the sky, I tell her about a scene in Buster Keaton’s One Week where he and his new wife cover each other’s eyes while a train rushes toward their portable prefab home. “That’s how I feel,” I tell her, as the evening deepens and the lights around us shine brighter. She seems distracted, and I can’t fault her: I, too, find myself distracted by the cheery music floating toward us, the sound of laughter, the smell of food.
At the restaurant where we choose to eat before the show, I complain about the size of the quiche I’m served, which was an item I chose from the menu because it was listed as an appetizer. “You’re not used to the sizes of the servings here?” my friend asks me, a question I get asked no matter how many times I visit the US. It’s true that I can never get over the portion sizes here: It’s as if they’re made intentionally to taunt the capacities of our stomachs. The portions are impossible to consume, and we’re made to accept this excess as a fact of life as our leftovers are carried away and disposed of far from our sight.
My new friend trained as a folk dancer in the Philippines before putting her training on hold when she immigrated with her family to America. She’s excited about this show’s unique premise as we make our way to the entrance and I pull up our tickets on my phone, because it will give her the chance to dance on an illuminated floor, alongside the show’s regular performers. Disco music from the ‘70s pulses around us while we walk up a glimmering staircase that takes us to a ‘70s-themed bar. While we look for a spot in the room to get settled, performers on roller skates begin encircling us, performing tricks on a spot on the floor that the audience obediently vacates, before they guide us toward the dance floor at the other end of the hall. But we aren’t allowed to walk through its doors before a drag diva extends us a formal invitation. While I listen to her profanity-laced spiel, I tell myself that the world will be all right, as long as we keep telling each other jokes and laughing at the people who attempt to stamp out our joy. With a glittery swish of her gloved hand, the diva proclaims that disco’s not dead, and we loudly give our assent before she leads us inside.
After the performers retreat to the corners of the square stage that surrounds us, I try to match my friend’s fluid moves with whatever I can think of, while the dance floor continues to flicker and pulsate beneath our feet. My friend shows no signs of fatigue as other audience members begin their shy retreat to the door, and I try to match her energy with mine, moving with the music while I go through my limited repertoire of moves. We dance like no one else is watching us, like the DJ will never run out of songs to play, like the illuminated squares beneath the glass floor will never stop coaxing our bodies into joyous movement. I hold onto this moment for as long as I can, before my friend yells, through the music, if I’d like to get dessert at the restaurant outside.
in grade school we dissect, this time store-bought chicken wings, uncooked pounds our teacher brought in for science. boys grimace. we girls peel skin back, seeking sleek, slim bones inside. laughter, none of us phased—deeper and deeper we go into slimy flesh though no one has given us the talk yet, about getting used to insides coming out each month, sometimes in clots.
twenty-two years later, a therapist proclaims don’t let it define you. about my illness. as if it does not already, as if it would not, even if i tried listening to her. she is chicken, it turns out, afraid of the word sick. but open a dictionary, and words have many definitions. the best trick: hold onto them all in the same sentence. the confusion of that, an MRI, the reading of a body flooded blue with contrast, when not all organs are shaped the way of textbook drawings.
there is more to you, therapist says, than sick, as if sick—my blood leaving a pretty pink oval in a toilet seat, my hair dropping from my scalp in fistfuls of question marks, my skin stretching into long fissure-like striae, a record of what has been—is not reverence in the worst of it. as if sick—my husband offering to sink needles into my skin if need be, my doctor tender behind the stethoscope, my vegetarian mother serving chicken from her own stove if it’s all i can eat—is not love, more forgiving than anyone imagines it to be.
in grade school, we learn how best to shed medical gloves. one off, inside out, the other, tucked into that one. the pull of it, skin slipping off wing meat. simple, clean. a method i will use, after finishing a stool test at home. but we girls can’t foretell the use of such skills. giggles echo in a taupe bathroom. we wash our hands of stray chicken fat. the boys threw out their raw experiments early but we sank our fingers in, begging for more time. if only because we sensed we were understanding something. on our way, unafraid to see it all.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of multiple novels and memoirs, including Touching the Artand The Freezer Door. She is also the editor of a wide range of books including Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future, and Nobody Passes. Her new novel, Terry Dactyl, is the story of a trans woman who grew up during the AIDS crisis, looking back on those years while going through the COVID pandemic in 2020. Both take place during formative points in Terry’s own life, moments when ordinary behavior suddenly means something very different.
Reading about Sycamore’s activism, one often finds phrases like “anti-assimilationist” thrown around for how she writes about gender nonconformity. Those ideas are a part of the novel, in particular adult Terry’s relationship with her two moms, but Terry Dactyl is a work of art above all, one that is epic and personal in equal measure. Just as it toggles between the AIDS pandemic and the COVID pandemic, the book is about the club scene and the art scene. About gender freaks and assimilationist respectability. About New York and Seattle. About activism and acquiescence. About how there is always more than one choice. Terry Dactyl is a book that understands that family and friendship change over time in unpredictable ways, that we are shaped by and tethered to the past in inescapable ways, and that survival can mean many things.
It is a book about queer joy and possibility that got me emotional when reading it, and got us both emotional talking about it. We spoke by phone about how we deal with the contradictions of our lives, club culture, and how no matter what our childhoods were like, they’re always normal to us.
Alex Dueben: Where did the book begin? How do you typically work as far as writing fiction?
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: It began with the character. It was in 2020 or 2021 and I was going on a lot of walks. Somewhere at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic I just thought of this character and I kept obsessing. I would find this house and I’d think, okay, that’s where Terry Dactyl grew up. Or I would imagine different scenarios. I was still finishing Touching the Art. I was like, I can’t work on this now, so it just kept spinning in my head for months and went in all these different directions. I started thinking about things that I wanted to include in Terry Dactyl’s life. That’s where it started. Because I had so much in my head when I started writing, the process was very organic. What ended up on the page wasn’t necessarily what was in my head, but it would come from that, I had all the background information.
AD: It’s interesting that it began with Seattle and was so place-based. She spends the first half of the book in New York before moving back to Seattle during Covid.
I wanted to show the contradictions of the club world, of the art world, of survival.
MBS: The first half of the book is looking back, so it’s in past tense. It’s 2020 and Terry has been working at this gallery in New York for more than twenty years. During Covid lockdown in New York, she’s ruminating on her formative moments. I wrote it in the order that it’s written. I think my writing in general is very place-based. I want that sensory aspect, that multi-dimensionality of place, to come through in the writing.
AD: Terry is this club kid and uses a lot of drugs and partying.
MBS: Terry is living in the reverse reality of club culture where everything takes place at night. Also in the reality of: You create your own self on your own terms. Her world for about fifteen years from the early ‘90s on is fueled by drugs—her immersion in drug culture and club culture and the pageantry of getting dressed up and going out. Also in this chosen family of gender freaks who are living outside of conventional norms of gender and sexuality and refusing the terms of the nine-to-five world. Even though she ends up working in a gallery, to do that she has to stay up all night in order to get to work. It becomes the continuation of her nightlife during the daytime.
AD: I wish the novel had more scenes between Terry and Sabine [the owner of the gallery where Terry works] because they understand each other and don’t understand each other in a way that was very interesting.
MBS: I always love when people say they want more of something because that means that I’ve succeeded. I think that relationship is a really interesting one because here’s this art world insider. She’s a Rothschild who changed her name to Roth so that no one would know she was a Rothschild, and therefore everyone knows her as the Rothschild who changed her name. She’s been in this art world for so long and has played by the rules, but is ready to do something else. She offers Terry a structure that allows her to play and create these really over the top shows that become the toast of the art world almost accidentally. Accidentally to Terry, not accidentally for Sabine.
What Terry knows about is club culture. She knows about getting dressed up and creating some outfit that is so mesmerizing and scary that you can’t possibly avoid being mesmerized. She’s applying that skill to the art world by bringing club kids who also have these wacky ideas and allowing them space to create. The first show, which she calls Club Kid Diaspora, happens when all the clubs are being shut down by Giuliani so she brings the club into the gallery. Instead of white walls, she takes every piece of garbage she can find at the thrift stores and glues it all to the walls. There are these neon installations by another club kid who’s in her circle. There’s a DJ playing essentially a loop, just taking the music and breaking it down to the elements, fracturing the sound into abstraction. Club Kid Diaspora becomes a sensation and then Terry has her own space in the art world.
AD: The book is titled Terry Dactyl, but it’s defined by her relationships with people and about this large community and family over time.
MBS: I think friendship is the defining theme of the book. There are a lot of people that Terry loses. There are a lot of people who die of AIDS or people who disappear or people who abandon her, but there are other friends that remain. Sometimes the ones who remain aren’t the ones you would expect. She has a line where she says sometimes the most selfish people are the most generous. This is a theme in the book, all the contradictions that form a life and can even sustain you.
It’s not a linear narrative—it starts in 1991 on the dance floor at the Limelight; in the next chapter, Terry is in high school in Seattle; the chapter after that, she’s at the gallery in the present-day of the book, which is 2020. It’s moving around very fast, and this is because of panic. Terry’s panic at this new pandemic and all of her formative experiences of growing up in the midst of the AIDS crisis and being in these worlds where she’s lost so many people. Even though in reality she’s by herself for so much of the book, so much of it is about those relationships. She’s 47 in the present day so it’s going from childhood to 47. It’s this narrative about a trans girl who survives, and the people around her who also survive, and what happens when you survive.
AD: That idea of who survives and who stays, and that it’s not always who you expect…
There’s a lot of pageantry in the book, a lot of glamour, but there’s always an undercurrent of grief.
MBS: I wanted to show the contradictions of the club world. The contradictions of the art world. The contradictions of survival. And also of friendship. The person who, in the present day, is Terry’s closest friend is Jaysun Jaysin, another club kid. Jaysun ended up moving to Seattle with a boyfriend who got him a job at Amazon. In the book it’s never named, it’s always the Evil Empire. [laughs] Jaysun became the embodiment of bougie gay consumerist culture. At the same time, Jaysun has a critique. It’s complicated. Their relationship is based in the awareness of these contradictions that Jaysun actually flaunts.
AD: It’s a very emotional book, a book where you look at grief in a lot of different, interesting ways. The AIDS assembly at school where Terry starts talking about people she knew who have died. The long scene after Sid dies and you detailed the days that followed when Terry is lost in that sort of numb haze. You have a line that’s specifically about COVID but it describes grief in many ways too: “The way time broke open and closed open and closed and you had to figure out how to do the things you’d always done but with all the risks that before weren’t risks.”
MBS: The book is structured by emotion, emotion is what drives it. That generational aspect that you’re pointing to. Terry grows up in Seattle. Her mothers are dykes, they’re party girls, and all their friends are queens. They have after hours parties at their house when Terry is like three, four, five, six, seven. She wakes up in the middle of the night and goes downstairs and dances with these queens. Then when she’s about 10, 11, 12, 13, all these queens start dying of AIDS. That’s her formation. Because it happens when she’s so young, she doesn’t know anything else.
The assembly you mentioned is when she’s at school and they’re having an AIDS awareness assembly—she thinks an AIDS awareness assembly means talking about all the people you know who died. Everyone else thinks it means how to put a condom on a banana. When she starts talking about all the queens she knows who have died, everyone is shocked. It separates her from everyone else. That separation from the world is a different generational experience than you expect. The experience you expect is the experience of all these dancing queens. Not that of a child in those worlds, realizing she’s a trans girl through her relationships with her mothers, and all these queens. For me, that relational aspect is both generational and about the ways that different kinds of friendships form you. Also the ways that trauma forms you. These larger structural experiences that are very felt. There’s a lot of pageantry in the book, a lot of glamour, but there’s always an undercurrent of grief.
AD: There’s a scene towards the end of the book where one of Terry’s moms says, “Sometimes I regret that we didn’t provide better role models.” Terry says, “Don’t say that—they were perfect. Those were the girls who taught me how to live.” Terry’s other mom says, “but they didn’t live.” It’s just one of the most heartbreaking lines in the book.
I don’t believe in resolution in writing. Our lives might have resolution when we’re dead, but they don’t tend to be resolved before then.
MBS: Thank you. You’re making me emotional. I really wanted that intergenerational experience. Also that experience of addiction. Her mothers are addicts when she is a child. One of them ends up going to rehab. That’s their response to seeing all their friends dying. Terry just grows up with it. It doesn’t bother her to see a bottle of liquor on the table or to see everyone drugged out in the morning because that’s literally what she grows up with. She doesn’t feel like she was ever in danger. The book tracks the mothers’ trajectory too because they were party girls. In a way they were a model for what Terry becomes. Terry as a child realizes that she’s a dyke. Her mothers are like, that’s not possible. [laughs] She’s like, but you taught me. How could you tell me it’s not possible? The mothers response once they get sober is to assimilate into the lesbian and gay power structure.
AD: They become very “respectability politics.”
MBS: Exactly. They become entrenched in that world. It’s a world that Terry does not understand, and doesn’t want to understand. She’s shocked by it. So there is this tension and this different way of experiencing personal history and legacy and the AIDS crisis, and queerness as well, that always is present in their relationship and becomes more pronounced as Terry gets older.
AD: The book opens on the dance floor and closes with Terry dancing. You write these long sentences that run the length of a thought. You wrote it in a way that is all about the constant present that Terry lives in.
MBS: I want the language to shift with the emotion. Dancing is a place of freedom, and a place of escape. For Terry, the dancing at the beginning or in the clubs is fueled by drugs. Later on, it’s Terry really dancing by herself, in the world. Again, as a kind of survival mechanism amidst this new trauma, this new pandemic, where now it’s dangerous to be together. Terry has saved herself by being together and also by being very solitary at different times. Both of those things seem unworkable in the context of this new pandemic. When Terry moves back to Seattle, within a month or two there are the protests after the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor. She’s in this world that allows her to self-actualize politically in a way that she did not have access to before because club culture is so depoliticized.
AD: In Terry Dactyl, and I feel this is true in some of your other work, there is this tension between place and community and family and belonging. There’s never really a resolution, but that’s one of those themes that runs through so much of your work.
MBS: I agree. I don’t believe in resolution in writing. It’s something that I’m desperate to find in my life, but in writing, I think resolution often ruins it. Because it doesn’t feel organic. It feels like it’s being imposed by an outside force. I want the writing to really have its own pulse. Our lives might have resolution when we’re dead, but they don’t tend to be resolved before then. [laughs] I want to keep all of the loose ends, all of the questioning, all of the brokenness, all of the searching. Terry is always searching, right? Searching for a way to survive, searching for intimacy, searching for a way we can hold one another, a way to grow in a world that isn’t really offering that. You have to make it. I write into the gaps. I’m not writing into the gaps to close them, I’m writing to open them up more and see how that opens up experience. I think it’s that openness that really allows for everything to come through.
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