My personal shorthand for describing the place I grew up—New Port Richey, Florida—is to say that the culture is defined by the absence of culture, but this isn’t quite true. To be more precise, it feels like there’s no culture because no culture has won the day, no way of being has outstripped the others for supremacy. There’s such varied competition when it comes to manners, customs, and values that the atmosphere remains a rich, even static of influences. This still holds true for parts of Florida like mine, and was even more true in the 90s, when Penalties of June, my new book, takes place—coastal Pasco and Hernando counties are not rural since no one farms, not urban by a long shot, not small-town charming like places in Mississippi, not suburban since people don’t drive to Tampa for work or possess the wherewithal to follow the fashion trends, gritty but not particularly blighted (except to some degree by meth and pills, like a lot of places), not ritzy, not even beachy. The Long Islanders act like Long Islanders. The Carolinians act like Carolinians. The Minnesotans like Minnesotans. The Cubans like Cubans.
For a writer like me who has always believed in a bit of random wantonness when it comes to plot, who wants characters to say things the reader could not have expected, who wants both the zany Florida-man brand of crime and the ruthless, efficient heights of organized crime, Florida has always seemed the American state with the most narrative latitude. Anything can happen. Anyone can be there. No religion or philosophy or commercial ambition seems unlikely.
When I was in high school, native Floridians were rare. It was, and largely still is, a state everyone moves to, rather than a state people have roots in. This self-selection regarding being Floridian causes, necessarily, an abundance of risk-takers, of escapees from other lives, of schemers and opportunists, of people in recovery from something, of people who believe the grass might be greener (it might be, if you keep the sprinklers pumping day and night)—in short, Florida is, decade after decade, flooded with a disproportionate glut of human beings who are not meek nor content nor predisposed to toe the line.
Pratt, the main character of Penalties of June, grew naturally out of my home territory in that he has no roots—his parents are deceased and when he emerges from a stay in prison, he’s faced with starting his life over. He grew out of this place because he’s beset by contradictions: Bonne, the crime boss, is at once the person who helps him most and the person who puts him in the most danger; Kallie, his not-quite-old-flame, is everything beautiful in the world and also his greatest worry; the most morally sound of his acquaintances is a pawn shop owner, and the most devious is a detective. The only thing clear is that he’s going to have to do something bad in order to do any good.
The nine books I’ve selected comprise a dizzying tour of divergent Florida experiences and styles whose kinship, if they share any, is tied up in heat and crime and displacement and unpredictability.
I’m equally likely to run into someone who’s never heard of Charles Willeford as someone who says he’s their favorite crime writer. I chose this of the four Hoke Moseley novels because it’s the oddest. It breaks the conventions of the detective novel to a shocking degree, but it succeeds precisely because it breaks those expectations. In short, all the domestic and romantic strife Willeford puts Moseley through, all the bureaucratic mire, all the unglamorous random hassles—all these things, combined with countless idiosyncratic details that seem too random to make up, create the disconcerting feeling of real life (real, but much more interesting than yours).
I was first introduced to this book in a dialogue class. Open at almost any page, and you see characters talking to other characters. Hurston was trained as an anthropologist, and has a great ear for accents and dialects (phonetic dialogue is rare enough these days that it might take readers a few pages to get used to it, but it’s worth it). The book was received coldly by critics upon its publication in 1937, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the book—for example, Richard Wright and other black writers and scholars thought Their Eyes Were Watching God wasn’t political or bitter enough. In later days, it became celebrated. The story is consistently entertaining, and when it’s sad it’s really sad. It’s the story of one woman’s coming-of-age through the narrative scaffolding of three marriages—the old husband she leaves, the rich husband she hates who dies on her, and the poor husband she loves who she’s forced to kill.
One of the best attempts made to untangle the knots that tied 1960s-1980s Miami to Washington and Havana and Moscow and Nicaragua. For those in exile, Miami was a place where paranoia couldn’t really exist; if you were involved with la lucha, somebody was out to get you. Didion’s reporting spans from dry congressional reports to poetic descriptions of the physical and spiritual atmosphere of the tropic metropolis. She takes on racial strife and cultural difference, from events as serious as the McDuffie Riots to the following amusing account of what Cubans thought of Americans:
[They] never touched one another, nor did they argue. Americans did not share the attachment to family which characterized Cuban life. Americans did not share the attachment to patria that characterized Cuban life. Americans placed undue importance on being on time…they were by temperament “naïve,” a people who could live and die without ever understanding those nuances of conspiracy and allegiance on which, in the Cuban view, the world turned.
This book is from a time (the early 70s) when literary zest and passion and abandon and individuality were valued as a commodity in themselves and considered well worth sacrificing clean plotlines and easy themes for. I’ll say this: this guy is a wizard in the tight spaces of sentences and a wizard in the commonplace darknesses of the human psyche. The book’s jacket (my edition anyway) quotes somebody named L.E. Sissman, who says it better than I can: “McGuane shares with Celine a genius for seeing the profuse, disparate materials of everyday life as a highly organized nightmare.” Literally, the book is about Thomas Skelton, a prodigal son come home to Key West to be a fishing guide, and his conflict with the already-established top guide Nichol Dance. More importantly, it’s about Skelton finding a way to stay sane despite the cultures of both America and the Keys deteriorating around him. 1
Joy Williams is my favorite writer. A dangerous writer to adopt as a model because she intentionally eschews overarching, suspenseful plotlines in favor of what she does so damn well, which is let interesting and peculiar characters be interesting and peculiar. She’s a writer to savor sentence-by-sentence—to really enjoy her, one has to surrender the comfort of knowing where the greater narrative is going. In B&E, Willie and Liberty are a young couple that keeps a roof over their heads by breaking into vacation homes while the rich owners are away. From the first page, a bit of Williams’ magic for making characters in no time:
“Liberty and Willie saw the guard each morning. He was an old, lonely man, rather glossy and puffed up, his jaw puckered in and his chest puffed out like a child concentrating on making a muscle. He told Willie he had a cancer, but that grapefruit was curing it. He told Willie that they had wanted to cut again, but he had chosen grapefruit instead. He talked quite openly to Willie, as though they had been correspondents for years, just now meeting. Willie and Liberty must have reminded him of people he thought he knew, people who must’ve looked appropriate living in a million-dollar soaring cypress house on the beach.”
Based on the true horror story of the Dozier School for Boys in the Florida panhandle, this is simply one of the best books I’ve read. An instant classic. It succeeds on every level a novel might—complex, compelling characters; vivid, charged setting; heart-wrenching plot; narrative inventiveness—and at the same time illuminates real historical events. For my money, it easily outshines Whitehead’s other Pulitzer-winning novel, The Underground Railroad. Elwood Curtis, the protagonist of The Nickel Boys, is one of the best drawn and most genuinely sympathetic main characters you’ll come across—the devastation you’ll feel at his (and all the boys at Nickel Academy) treatment is only magnified by the fact that the real place only closed down in 2011.
Cracker Westerns is a series focused on the cattle culture of the frontier days Florida is a jungly place to raise cattle, and so cows were constantly getting lost in the thick vegetation. The rough-mannered cowboys hired to extract them (who often went into business for themselves, corralling and overbranding the wayward livestock) were called crackers because of the extra-long whips they carried. (In later days, people started calling anyone born in Florida a ‘Florida cracker.’) These books are meant to be light entertainment—Alligator Gold features a secret trove of treasure and a villain named Snake—but as light entertainment goes, they’re some of the best around.
If you grew up on the lower side of middle class in pre-smartphone Florida, the details and atmosphere in this collection will leave you stricken with their accuracy—the retention ponds; the juvenile delinquency at shopping malls; hopping from bare foot to bare foot on hot pavement. This book feels grounded in the real, the gritty, the physical, the desperately routine, and yet something big is always happening: suicide and miscarriage and cancer and violent muggings and eaten pets and the fetishizing of feet and threats delivered via handjob. Moniz’s greatest strength might be her ability to fully, sometimes shockingly inhabit the mindsets and attitudes of her usually female and often adolescent/teen protagonists—within a page, she can sink you completely and unquestionably into the psyche of her main character, and from there does with you what she wishes.
This is a novel, but if it didn’t say that on the cover, you’d think it was an odd sort of memoir. Sometimes it’s an essay. Occasionally, a treatise on speculative neuroscience. You have to earn your readerly footing. At the beginning, the book hides its narrator—there’s a 1st person voice, but we don’t know who it’s attached to; a girl is spoken about in the 3rd person, and then we realize that girl is the 1st person narrator, a first-person narrator that imagines other people’s lives so fully that those characters sometimes get POV. Many of the described events (especially toward the beginning of the book) feel deliciously theoretical, and the timeline is mostly in order but that order feels incidental and unimportant. Amazingly, the narrative gymnastics never outstrip Corin’s intellectual agility, her uncanny talent for turning a seeming tangent into exactly the relevant passage you didn’t know you needed. The world of the novel feels both real and unreal, perhaps due to the larding of mythical and fairytale and historical references—Repunzel and Cinderella and the Venus de Milo; griffins and Egyptian gods and Joan of Arc; Anne Boleyn and the Grimm tales and eventually, yes, Leonard Lake and Jeffrey Dahmer and Danny Rolling. It’s Hollywood, Florida some thirty-five or forty years ago, described with familiar details—orange groves, last-gasp strip malls, white-out-sniffing—but also it’s Corin’s unique creation.
As a side dish, the short documentary All That Is Sacred chronicles the period when Key West was not yet the ordered vacation spot it is today, when it was crawling with ragged outcasts and drugged-fueled artists (Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, and Thomas McGuane among them) and when tarpon fishermen numbered in the tens rather than the hundreds. ↩︎
One of the great joys of working for Electric Literature is the opportunity to celebrate the best books of the year. It seems that every year produces better and better books; or perhaps readers continue to fall more in love with reading. Or maybe two things, or many things, are true. Either way, what I know to be true is that every year, our most-loved novels are filled with extraordinary characters who soar into your hearts, burrowing into them, and remaining. They are original, unforgettable, un-put-downable, and we are lucky to have them.This year’s list features a number of well-known authors and their best-loved books, as well as remarkable debut authors, whose voices we will luxuriate in for years to come. These books wrapped themselves around us, warming and comforting us in a time of great turmoil. If you haven’t explored these novels, do so as soon as possible. You won’t be sorry, you’ll simply fall deeper in love—with reading, and with books.
The novels included on this list were chosen by a vote from the EL community. Here are Electric Lit’s Top 5 novels of 2024, followed by the best novels of the year.
How would an alien in Northeast Philly record observations of earth? Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland contains a simple answer: using a fax machine she found discarded on the street. The story of Bertino’s third novel follows Adina, an alien, born on earth who is sent to record humanity’s happenings. The result is a tender, incisive reckoning with what it means to be human.
Martyr-obsessed Cyrus Shams is haunted by a number of tragedies when we meet him, high and drunk, in the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!. His father recently suffered a stroke and died. His mother was killed in the late 1980s, when the U.S, Navy shot down a flight she was on over the Persian Gulf. So, he decided to craft a book about historical martyrs and along the way discovers Orkideh, a terminally ill artist, who spurs questions about Cyrus’ mother. Short-listed for the National Book Award, the fresh family saga ask what it takes for life and death to be consequential.
This multilayered sapphic road trip novel is a delightful surprise that plays with the themes of queer ancestry, embodiment, American politics, photography, and the artistic life. Bernie and Leah’s drive across Pennsylvania is inspired by a real-life historical trip taken by photographer Bernice Abbott and art critic Elizabeth McCausland, but Bernie and Leah are ultra-modern and grounded in the concerns of the frantic present. The characters’ journey toward both relational intimacy and artistic collaboration guides the trajectory of this enthralling debut novel.
An international bestseller, Vanessa Chan’s incredibly gripping debut novel is set in World War II and follows Cecily, a Malayan housewife who agrees to act as a spy for a general that dreams of an “Asia for Asians.” When Cecily finds her nation crumbling years later, she does everything in her power to save them. This historical fiction novel effortlessly leaps through time and its central family’s perspectives to deliver a story of secrets and survival in times of tragedy.
A multi-generational family saga, City of Laughter centers on a Jewish woman, Shiva, whose family has been visited by a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years. Shiva travels to Ropshitz, Poland, colloquially known as the “City of Laughter,” to learn more about her family secrets. The tale deftly moves between perspectives, capturing the family’s joy, shame and everything in between.
After a decade of writing her supposedly groundbreaking second novel—what her husband calls a “mulatto War and Peace”—Jane’s efforts and expectations fall flat. In a bid of desperation, she turns to Hollywood, thinking it may be her way out of her precarious lifestyle as a novelist. Danzy Senna’s latest novel, Colored Television, is a hilarious and sharp take on the racial-industrial complex, ambition, and reinvention.
Ko’s sophomore novel tracks three lifelong friends, roving from their 1980’s girlhood to their Y2K-era years in New York to their adulthood in the dystopian 2040’s. Though starkly different from one another, the women are brought together by their identities as outsiders who find comfort on the fringes. Refreshingly honest and driven by female-centric relationships, this novel digs into questions about documentation and survival at the edges of society.
In his National Book Award winning novel, Percival Everett reimagines the (in)famous Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. When he hears he is going to be sold, and thus separated from his family, he escapes to an island to form a plan. While many of the same beats of Huckleberry Finn can be found, James brings the story into an entirely new light, showcasing Jim’s agency, compassion, and wits as he takes back control of his life.
An RA aspires to buy a home. A visiting writer starts an affair with a student after secretly mining private conversations for a Money Diaries-esque column. A disgraced batton twirler tries to find community as a transfer student in a new state In her zany, sophomore novel, Kiley Ried skewers assumptions about race, class, and American university culture.
The titular Anita de Monte is one of three narrators in Xochitl Gonzalez’s sophomore novel Anita de Monte Laughs Last. After de Monte is found dead in her apartment, her work as a conceptual artist is nearly forgotten until Raquel Toro, a graduate student in art history, begins uncovering her story.
The National Book Award finalist All Fours follows an unnamed artist as she seeks reinvention. Confronting middle age and menopause, she embarks on a journey of self discovery that forces her to reevaluate her ideas of family and intimacy. Described as frank, captivating, and irresistible, the novel reckons with what does (and doesn’t) change as we get older.
The magic of this novel lies in the hyperrealistic dynamic between sisters Jules and Poppy: their constant push and pull, their paradoxical desire for both personal space and intense closeness. Tanner’s prose has a unique, captivating beauty as she traces the sisters’ meandering journey through their twenties in New York City, shadowed by their overbearing mother and by the specter of the Internet.
Our unnamed narrator has migrated from Palestine to New York City after the death of her parents, pursuing a semblance of the American dream. The narrator struggles against the hypnotic pull of capitalism but finds herself scheming with her situationship, a homeless man called Trenchcoat, to resell Birkin bags to the wealthy. The nonlinear, unraveling story of her movement through the city includes meditations on the environment, individualism, the body, and the accumulation of wealth.
The premise of The Anthropologists is simple: Asya, a documentary filmmaker, and her husband Manu, an employee of a nonprofit organization, search for apartments in a foreign country. Like so much of our daily lives, the moments that seem mundane are filled with profundity. The Anthropologists is a great love story about aging parents, romantic love, and what it means to call a place home.
Jiaming Tang’s stunning debut novel is an engrossing portrait of gay men in rural China — and the women that marry them. Opening in a movie theater known for being a pickup spot for gay men in 1980s China, the novel tracks criss-crossed lovers as secret romances are exposed, and as desperate treks to America are taken. Cinema Love aches with tenderness and heart as it explores desire, immigration, grief, and survival.
Vinson Cunningham, a former Obama campaign staffer, introduces us in his autofictive debut novel to David, a Black man (and Pip figure) working for an unnamed presidential Candidate who closely resembles Obama. Cunningham’s prose sparkles with energy and offers juicy tidbits about the less-than-glamorous reality of the campaign trail. The story raises resonant questions about privilege, the intersection of race and class, and authenticity in the political realm.
Longlisted for the National Book Award, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection is a novel-in-stories that satirizes the rejects of our world. Described as a modern classic, Tulathimutte is unrelenting as he explores the delusion and desire of our time through seven linked portraits.
This generational saga set in the fictional Texas-Mexico border town of La Cienega traces a family curse from the 1940’s to the 1990’s. The driving voices of the braided narrative are two equally proud, obstinate women who address the injuries of the past and embrace their futures. Fuentes writes captivating dialogue and cinematic scenes that arrest the reader’s attention throughout this entertaining debut novel.
Following the tale of a secret resistance helmed by Black women in pre-Civil War New Orleans, this gripping historical novel explores hope, resistance, and the triumphant power of community. After being separated from her mother, Ady—a sharp and curious enslaved woman—must embark on a journey toward liberation and self-discovery. Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s latest is riveting, inventive, and inspiring.
Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange’s follow up to There, There, begins with survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek massacre Jude Star. Star, who is part of the Cheyenne tribe, is forced to learn English and assimilate into Christianity. The novel follows his descendants, eventually landing on the Red Feather family, familiar to readers from There, There. In the present day, the novel examines how the family copes with inherited trauma, addiction and the pains of assimilation.
Sally Rooney’s fourth novel follows brothers Peter and Ivan. A lawyer and a chess prodigy, respectively, the men are reeling from the loss of their father and Rooney deftly chronicles their misadventures in life and love. Peter is unable to choose between two women: one older, one younger. Ivan meets Margaret, an arts program director, and the two begin a secret relationship.
This debut, from Booker Prize-winning translator Jennifer Croft, trodes on familiar material. The titular character Irena Rey brings eight translators to her home to translate one of her books. Then, she goes missing and a surprising, remarkable tale ensues.
After the death of her younger brother, Akúa flies from Canada to Jamaica to spread his ashes, reconnect with her sister, and revisit significant locations from their childhood in Kingston. Akúa’s journey brings her to question her ethnic identity as a member of the Jamaican diaspora and as a lesbian pushing back against a restrictively religious family. Drifting across continents, Broughtupsy is at once a queer bildungsroman, a tale of displacement, and a tender family saga.
If Jin doesn’t keep her old familial curse a secret, she risks losing everything she has. And yet, this doesn’t stop her from confiding in Lidija—a woman she’s found a sudden, intense connection to, and who helps her explore her deepest, most hidden desires. This hypnotic and sensual narrative is razor sharp as it explores rebirth, identity, pain, and pleasure. R.O. Kwon writes with an urgency like no other.
Blurring the lines between tragedy and humor, past and present, John Vercher’s latest novel follows our biracial narrator as he inherits land from his estranged white grandfather. While he expected to resell the land, things take a turn when he discovers he is now the Black owner of what used to be a plantation, passed down for generations. With raw honesty and aplomb, Devil Is Fine dissects the relationship between legacy, memory, and destiny.
The holidays just got a whole lot more exciting—our fifth annual Book Cover Tournament kicks off on Monday! For an entire year, we’ve judged thousands and thousands of book covers, and the 32 designs below represent the very best. But in the end, there can only be one winner.
Now, it’s your turn to take the reins! Head over to our Twitter and Instagram Stories next week to cast your votes in the most aesthetic showdown of the year. Want to up the fun? Download the full bracket, predict your winners, and follow the drama as it unfolds.
Here’s how it works: 32 books, 16 pairs will face off in round one. Voting begins Monday for round one, Tuesday for round two, quarterfinals on Wednesday, semifinals on Thursday, and the grand finale on Friday.
Click to enlarge
Here are the best book covers of 2024:
Left: Design by Alicia Tatone, art by Shannon Cartier Lucy Right: Design by Jaya Nicely, art by Zack Rosebrugh
Below is a list of the 475 writers Electric Literature has published so far in 2024. Every single one, from Aaron to two different Zoës.
We need to raise $25,000 by December 31, 2024 to keep Electric Literature going into next year, and we are almost there! Please help us down the homestretch by making a donation in honor of one of these writers. You will be prompted to add their name when you make your contribution.
It’s amazing how quickly you get used to thinking your mother may never wake up again.
A week ago, my uncle woke me up from a post-dinner nap to tell me my mom had a stroke. We – my small collection of immediate family – assembled at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens, the hospital forever known to all Queens natives as Booth Memorial. We slept huddled in chairs, hoods over our heads, and listened to the ghost-like sounds of early early early morning news broadcasts while they ran tests and gave her scans; we were told in the actual morning that she would have a minimally invasive craniotomy that night.
All I knew was that ‘minimally invasive’ did not sound like words that should go anywhere next to ‘craniotomy.’
No one really knew what would happen after that. All I knew was that “minimally invasive” did not sound like words that should go anywhere next to “craniotomy.”
It’s a week later and the lobby is vibrating at 7 pm. Shift change. It’s begun to feel like I have never lived a life before Booth Memorial, always feeling vaguely nauseated, and with the expectation that every person wearing scrubs is coming to tell me that my worst fears have been confirmed: that this is how it will be forever. My family and I are waiting for some signs of “waking” – a word I have learned that has a spectrum of meanings and interpretations that you can collect while watching someone recover from a brain injury.
But I can’t put off my job forever. So now, on this particular shift change, I’m balancing the thin paper cup of hospital coffee in the same hand that’s holding my cell phone; my wallet is shoved under my arm as I scan the seating outside the lobby cafe. On the connected shoulder, my school bag straps buckle under the weight of my laptop, its charger and extension cord, and the pile of still ungraded papers I carry with me at all times. My other arm is wrapped around the books I brought from home that I did not have time to shove back in my bag when we were ushered out of the ICU and I piled into the elevator with other patients’ attendants to find a place to kill an hour somewhere in the more public areas of the hospital. Draped over that same arm is also my puffy down coat that I use as a blanket. The revolving doors and picture windows do not insulate well against the New York March nights.
This is my personal version of the copyrighted fitness routine that builds muscle through schlepping a collection of sundry, seemingly found, heavily weighted objects from one end of the room to the other. But instead of piles of tires, I weigh down my body with student writing I’ll never read, novels I’m teaching, and the monographs I need for dissertation research as I move through the six-mile triangle perimeter of my commute through the various neighborhoods of Flushing: from my childhood home, to the Queens College campus where I’ve taught for three years, and to Booth Memorial (or Queens-Pres, or whatever).
I manage to find a table near a wall outlet – I depend on this time to charge my computer, since the outlets around my mother’s bed are, you know, generally spoken for. When I drop my belongings on the table and its surrounding chairs, I spill some coffee out of the pin-sized hole inexplicably located at the center of all disposable cup covers. I run back to the counter holding scratchy, one-ply napkins and flimsy plastic cutlery while still wearing my bag, not so much because I’m worried about the financial loss of a stolen computer, but more because I don’t know the last time I backed up the files of my long-abandoned dissertation chapters that I still call “in progress”.
I settle at the table, organizing my papers into piles of priority, neatly stacking books on top of papers to protect them against the wind-suck of the revolving door, and – with some risk to the machine – I open my computer in the pocket of space still open. I untangle the charging cable and stretch it to the outlet. But the table is farther from the wall than I had originally thought and I can’t move it closer without disrupting the people sitting at the table next to mine.
I recognize them: a middle-aged woman and a man who has the same nose and looks a few years younger. They belong to the patient on the ventilator in the corner of the ICU room that is diagonally across from my mother. The woman, I presume the patient’s daughter, is at the hospital all day, every day. She usually wears the same yellow fleece hooded sweatshirt and unfitted jeans. Her hair is dyed light brown with untouched gray roots and is always tied into a frizzy ponytail with a dark green scrunchy.
This is her hospital uniform.
Everyone who takes the dayshift at someone’s sickbed has a hospital uniform.
The base of mine is my formerly favorite jeans that have lost their luster and gained a hospital disinfectant smell I can’t wash out, my tops are an awkward layering of sleeveless tanks under long-sleeve t-shirts under sweatshirts under my winter coat and blanket scarf, so I’m ready for any permutation of hot or freezing in any part of the hospital. My hair is always tied back into a bun when it is out-of-the-shower wet, straight enough to force all of it into one hair tie.
Though the rest of my family with “normal” jobs don’t make it back to the hospital until after night shift change, Yellow Sweatshirt’s companion – presumably her brother – comes at six, around an hour before. He always looks tired, but it’s the tired of a man who now has to go to the ICU after a days’ work. It’s not the same vacant expression of someone whose thinking is interrupted all day by the staccato rhythm of the sound of twenty respirators, that beep in temporary, often unnecessary alerts, in unsynced rhythm. He’s always wearing a dress-shirt and slacks, and I wonder how long he has to wear those clothes in this new workday schedule that includes nights in the ICU.
At night, before my day at the ICU ends, I frequently catch Yellow Sweatshirt and her brother out of the corner of my eye, sitting with their mother. Unlike my own mother, theirs is mostly awake throughout the day, but she cannot speak because of her intubation. She wears the same puffy white mittens on her hands that my mother has on her left hand. The mittens are meant to keep the patient from pulling out their tubing. They seem like their own form of torture independent of having machines breathing for you.
I constantly find myself making assumptions like this about what it must be like to be a patient in the ICU. To find yourself with new disabilities, to live in (dis)harmony with the life-supporting technologies and prosthetics that the hospital provides. And then I constantly find myself realizing how ableist I sound, how clueless I am, and how much useless guilt I feel as a liberal scholar in an intensive care ward who has studied these questions of medical care in the safe sterility of the academy without ever having to live them myself.
My mother has only one glove because only her left hand is a threat to her intubation. The right hand is motionless next to her, and has been since her stroke. When I stare at it, I think sometimes that I see a finger move, the same way when I was a kid I would think I finally saw the picture embedded in a Magic Eye image after desperately staring at it for minutes.
After this first week, I have grown tired of voicing these visions of reflexive wrist flicks and finger tremors out loud. Because while you’re worrying about whether your mother will ever wake up again, if she’ll talk again, if she’ll breathe on her own again, you also have to worry about constructing yourself as a reliable witness: a witness for the doctors who don’t spend hours at her bedside observing her every move, for the friends who call everyday and feel comforted in their own pessimism, and for the family members who need your observations to gel with their sense of medical expertise.
My mother’s eyes are not open, but I’m sure she’s aware of the glove. She stretches her left arm across her body, trying to find leverage anywhere to pry the velcro open.
I should note here that she never went for her tubing, just for the glove.
Her attempts to get her glove off interrupt the cyclical movement of her left arm that started a few days after her surgery. Eyes closed and seemingly unresponsive to all stimuli except for the glove, she moves her left arm off the bed and draws it back in a straight line, until it arches and lands next to her head, forearm now resting on the pillow. She waits a minute and then lifts the arm again, bringing it in reverse motion back to her torso. She can repeat this motion for hours. It’s so casual, so graceful, and so bizarre that it seems like it must be purposeful, so repetitive it seems automated.
Earlier today, before the shift change, I asked her nurse, Bernadette, if I could take the glove off.
“So long as you don’t let her pull out the works, honey.”
I pulled her hand out from the netted glove, and I could feel the dampness in the fake woolen padding that supports the imprisoned palm. It smelled like sweat, dead skin, and rancid body lotion. I tried to turn the glove inside out to let it dry before I would have to put it back on my mother’s hand when I’m kicked out for shift change. The glove is meant to be cushy, but it is stiff as a board, and un-manipulatable. Admitting defeat, I left it on the nightstand next to her bed and tried to tent the opening so that the inside of the glove could air out. The material kept folding in on itself and – having spent too much time in the effort – I refused to give up.
Finally satisfied that it would at least stay open for as long as it took me to turn back to my mother, I looked over to see her arm back at it. It was in mid-descent, heading back to the thin plastic hospital mattress. In mid-rise though, her hand stopped to feel the guardrail next to the bed. Her hand climbed up the metal fencing until it caught the fabric of my t-shirt. It moved around my belly, crawl-gliding up to the bottom of my ribcage and then back down to where my stomach met the railing.
She continued that exploration for much of the afternoon. When I sat in a chair next to her, and my face was closer to the rail, her hand moved up and down my face, spreading across my mouth so I couldn’t breathe, grabbing my nose, cupping at the top of my forehead, grabbing at the ugly nineties-wide headband I was wearing to keep the hair that had curled out of my bun close to my head. She spent the day pawing at my face and stomach, once traveling up my body and grabbing my boob on the way to my face.
I called her rude. She honked my nose and lowered her hand.
I don’t know how – or whether – to assign this squeeze any meaning. What I think is agentive action, I’m later told, is no sign of anything at all.When one day I think she is making more conscious action, the next will follow with no seemingly deliberate movement, save for the constant sway of her left arm, but without its conscious exploring. I am comforted when her hand clasps my nose, but I don’t know if I have any right to be.
When I was told to leave for shift change, the glove was still wet, despite my best efforts.
Now, in the Booth Memorial lobby, I become desperate to find a table that’s even closer to an outlet. I turn into the woman in the big plastic glasses hopelessly holding her charger’s extension cord, eyes combing the room for empty chairs and hidden outlets. I only have half an hour to restore my computer battery before I have to go back up to the ICU.
“Miss! You can sit here!”
I don’t realize he’s talking to me until the fourth “Miss” catches my attention. I turn around and I see Yellow Sweatshirt’s brother waving at me. Yellow Sweatshirt herself is pointing at the empty chair at the table.
I’m terrible at talking to strangers.
But I also really need the outlet.
“I don’t want to bother you, and I have so much stuff with me.” I gesture with my head at my piles of books and papers on the table I had already claimed.
“Nah, you’re fine! Bring it all over here!”
I turn around to organize my piles into a slightly more draggable formation. Aware that they’re watching me, though, I panic and cram as much as I can carry into my bag so I need as little of their table as possible. A pile of loose paper is jutting out on a diagonal from the pouch of my bag, my wallet is just barely secure in a front pocket, and when I hook the bag under my shoulder the spines of two library books dig into the fleshy part of my tricep. Another file of papers is shoved loose into a folder and I drop that and another book on top of my laptop. The charger is now looped and bulging through the back of my bag and once I drop everything onto the table, I realize I left my cell phone behind. When I turn back after it, I see Yellow Sweatshirt’s brother picking my jacket off the floor. I’m not even sure it ever made its way onto a chair.
At least I didn’t spill my coffee.
Yellow Sweatshirt introduces herself as Yolanda and her brother as Jorge. Yolanda is a retired teacher – she recognizes me as a fellow traveler when she sees my loose papers and fancy grading pens – and Jorge runs a nonprofit formed in response to the most recent hurricane in Haiti. The lobby is too loud and his voice too soft and deep for me to hear the more detailed description of his work and I’m too nervous to ask him to clarify.
They ask where I teach, what I teach, my research interests, and as usual, I give an answer that’s too long for polite conversation.
In a hospital lobby.
When we’re each thinking about our respective mothers in the ICU.
And then there’s the awkward silence when we run out of out-of-hospital small talk, and we almost compulsorily transition to the in-hospital version that is in no way small and no one really wants to talk about.
Yolanda breaks the silence. “Is that your mom?” Her head gestures back to the elevator bank we’ll all return to when we go back to the seventh floor in forty minutes.
“Mhm. And you?”
“Yes.” A pause, and then Yolanda answers the follow-up question I didn’t ask. “She was actually here for a broken leg. On the fourth floor. And then…something happened. She couldn’t breathe. They intubated and moved her to the ICU.”
“And they don’t know what happened?” They both shake their heads. “Or what to do now?”
Jorge adds, “They want to put in a trach; she’s been intubated for too long. But the doctor says that because of her age, once they do, it’ll be permanent. She won’t be strong enough for them to remove it. Ever.”
I don’t know what to say. The finality is suffocating. “I’m so sorry.” I think longer, like there must be something else to say. But of course there isn’t.
“We want to get a second opinion,” Yolanda adds. “There must be other answers out there.”
‘These doctors don’t know anything.’
I agree immediately, but I also don’t feel much hope for them. It’s true that I, too, don’t have much faith in Dr. Ramirez, the daytime ICU attending for our side of the room. But I also don’t have much faith in the state of geriatric intensive care in any other hospital across the country. I join them anyway in the usual chorus you hear among family members of hospital patients: “These doctors don’t know anything.”
And I feel this. In this one week we’ve met four different doctors from four different specialties with four different predictions for how long it will take her to wake up and what we will find when she does.
“She’ll wake up tomorrow and she’ll have full mobility back in six months,” her neurosurgeon told us the day of her surgery. Five days later and she’s still not awake.
“She may never breathe again on her own,” Dr. Ramirez said last night, surprised it had never occurred to me.
Because it hadn’t. She was breathing on her own when she was brought to the ER and was only intubated as a precaution against aspiration (doctor for choking on your own spit). I had spent nights thinking about whether she would be able to speak, to walk, to come home. But I had found comfort in her ability to breathe when she was in the emergency room. Like one certainty was ticked off the master list of unknowns.
Tears streamed down my face with the weight of the unanswerable questions I had yet to consider. If this were any day before my mother’s stroke, I would have excused myself elegantly and found a private place to cry.
But there is no privacy in this hospital.
I learned this on the day of my mother’s surgery, the afternoon after her stroke. I could count on my hands the number of times I’ve seen my father cry that didn’t involve Holocaust documentaries. And when I walked in on him crying over my mother hours before the procedure, I couldn’t handle it. I was standing inside the doors of the ICU and turned back on my heels to go back out the same door I had just walked through. I found the floor’s one public bathroom and turned the handle.
It didn’t budge.
I pressed against the door again and it still wouldn’t move. I knew some poor person was in there and I didn’t care. I banged angrily on the door and shouted at the crappily laminated bathroom sign.
I desperately searched for any corner out of the way, but the intensive care floor is cruelly open-concept. At the other side of the elevator bank is a nine-foot high plastic “7”. I ducked between the wall and the leg of the seven and sobbed. It was only once I was done that I had the presence of mind to realize I would have looked less conspicuous just crying on the floor in the middle of the family lounge, with everyone else.
I tried the bathroom again and the knob turned. The lights inside were flickering; the walls and floor were the same gray tile and some of them were starting to peel off; the mirror hung at a slight angle like it was about to fall at any minute. I looked so hard into my own face that I couldn’t really see where my eyes were anymore, and the flickering lights made me seem like I was a side character about to die in a B-rated horror movie, or like I had become the monster myself, my pale skin already made to look sallower in the light now turned waxy and ghoulish, like it should signal my eventual decline into haunted barbarism. I sighed so hard that I felt my lungs rattle and my belly shake, and I thought to myself that I must remember how I look on this day, at this moment, because I may never again have the opportunity to know exactly what I look like when I’m scared shitless.
I never cried in that bathroom or next to the “7” again.
At this point, though, in the fishbowl of the Queens-Pres ICU, crying felt like sweating. It was something you’d rather not do in public, but was ultimately uncontrollable and relatively excusable.
Ramirez disagreed, apparently. One could assume that he would be used to family tears as an ICU attending. Maybe it was my own lack of shame he found uncomfortable. He stood there for a few seconds watching my shoes before turning to the nurses’ station to grab a thin box of hospital tissues. The box was bright pink with purple trim and purple hearts. Nothing quite says Valentine’s Day like one-ply tissue paper.
He didn’t even hand the box to me. He left it on the table at the foot of my mother’s bed where they leave the plastic water pitcher that’s standard across US hospitals. Returning his gaze to my shoes, he said, “For when you’re ready to clean yourself up,” and went back to the computer bank next to the door.
These doctors don’t know anything.
“What happened to your mom?” Yolanda asks.
“Stroke, last week.”
“She hasn’t woken up yet? I shake my head.
“What are they saying?”
“Who knows? Everyone says something different.”
And it really is everyone. It’s not just the doctors. It’s everyone.
Everyone with Google access. Everyone with doctor friends. Everyone who sits next to a doctor on Saturday morning in synagogue. Everyone with PubMed credentials.
We’re Jewish. Not to lean into stereotypes, but that’s…a lot of people.
“The neurologist in my office says she should be awake by tomorrow,” my uncle says on the phone.
“I’ve read a bunch of articles that suggest it should be another three days,” my sister writes over text.
“The guy who sits next to me in shul says your mom will be just fine! But the man who sits on the other side of me says she should be dead already.” I admit this is fake, but if I had slipped it into the daily list of assurances and warnings I repeated to everyone who called, no one would call bullshit.
“Your mother came to me in a dream and said she’s fine.” Lots of people called bullshit on this one: the dream of a friend from my mother’s hippie days, a friend she met thirty years ago in line in a natural foods grocery in Fresh Meadows.
At first I judge myself for finding this last assurance to be the most comforting, but I eventually accept that if no one has answers, I’d rather go with the dream version of my mother than with a collection of MDs who put their name on a study published five years ago. Any version of my mother would probably know her body better than any doctor. And no version of my mother could tolerate being wrong.
“These doctors don’t know anything,” Jorge says.
“Well, they all seem pretty certain they do.”
He laughs. “At least they’re confident.”
“We see you reading to your mom. It’s so sweet,” Yolanda says.
“I don’t know. I’m hoping she’ll eventually wake up just so she can beg me to stop.”
Yolanda laughs, not surprised to hear that Victorian literature is not unanimously popular with my students.
“Our mom’s awake, but she can’t talk because of the intubation. We bought a white board, but it only came with one marker and it’s run out already.”
I sit up straight. Finally, after days of useless sitting, I have a purpose.
“Do you want markers?” They’re so taken aback by my enthusiasm that they don’t answer right away. But already I’m rifling through my bag. I’m not even looking where I put my hand, just shoving my arm further inside, pawing around until I feel the smooth, cool plastic of my pencil case.
I start pulling board markers out of the case and placing them side-by-side on the table. There are the colors that come in any small pack you can buy in the limited school supplies aisle of a pharmacy: red, green, and blue. Knowing how quickly they run out, and how quickly I lose them, I also invested in a “mega” pack this semester that included 24 markers with two shades of every color. I pull a pink and yellow out of the case.
“Don’t take the yellow. No one can ever see it. I’m really just taking it out now because I keep forgetting to throw it out.”
They’re still staring at me, silent: confused, I assume, by my excitement.
“No, we can’t take these,” Yolanda says, “you’ll need them.”
“No! Take them! I have loads!”
I then go on to search the random places I tuck away markers when I’m rushing out of class. The random, barely usable, tiny zipper pockets inside and outside my bag. My jacket pocket. The bottom of the chasm of my purse. Tucked in my copy of Wuthering Heights. I also feel the bulge of one digging into my thigh through the fabric of my jeans front pocket, but I opt to leave that one in there. There’s obviously a pile more sitting in a drawer in my office on campus. I’m sure if I just give myself a wiggle, markers will rain out of several orifices of my body.
I teach literature. My skills are rarely useful to others, save for proofreading the odd email. Even now, the only reason I’m the one most often at my mother’s bedside is because I work within two miles of the hospital, and only have to literally be at work for six hours a week. I am my mother’s advocate purely by accident of circumstance. Being the only member of my family who actually knows how to use a semicolon does not seem to be a qualification for patient advocacy, nor does the ability to quote by heart semi-pornographic pamphlets from the 1920s.
But I am leaking school supplies.
My mother had a stroke.
Their mother will probably never breathe on her own again.
But I have school supplies.
I will always have school supplies.
We make small talk about my classes for a few more minutes before my phone rings. The screen says “Dad,” and, seeing this, Yolanda says, “You take that, we’re going to go wait for the elevator,” and we all laugh because we know that in this hospital you need to give that elevator at least twelve minutes before it will come, stop, and have room for you to get in.
They get up and I answer. Before I pick up, I already know the extent of the conversation.
“Anything new to report?”
He knows the answer to this question before I open my mouth. He knows there’s nothing new because I would have called already if there was. When you talk five times a day, there generally isn’t anything new to report by its end.
Dad’s call is the first of the night as “The Men” descend on the hospital in the after-work hours. Last night, after I “cleaned myself up” for the sake of Dr. Ramirez, my uncle found me crying in the hallway and then told my husband, who’d joined five minutes later and saw my re-puffed eyes, “We just had a situation with your wife.”
I’m a situation now.
What do they say about my mother when I’m not there to hear it?
Despite the slow elevator, we’re all back upstairs before rounds are over. Rounds should only take an hour, but usually go later. It’s a giant room with no privacy so it’s a HIPAA violation to have family present. But I also wonder if they’re worried family members would hear what their loved ones’ doctors actually think about their progress and prognosis.
What do they say about my mother when I’m not there to hear it?
I peek my head through the window to see if the doctors are still moving in one cohesive group from bed to bed like a school of tuna passing off information on new patients and updates on old ones, or if they’ve started flitting between patient beds and the nurses’ station. More often than not, I see them congregated by the bed next to the door, the last stop in the literal round they’re going to make that evening. I generally catch the eye of one of the nurses who signals to me with her fingers how many more minutes they need before letting people in. Tonight she holds up eight fingers.
I go to the lounge, which is packed with families eating dinner from the string of Chinese takeouts that line this part of Main Street. I sit on the floor next to the snack machines, wondering how many bags of McVitie’s salt and vinegar chips I can eat before I develop canker sores. By the end of my mother’s time in the ICU, I’ll find that the smell of hospital still permeates my nostrils every time I open a bag.
I can forgive my mother for a lot of things, but I can’t forgive her for ruining salt and vinegar potato chips.
I decide to forgo the chips for now, realizing that they won’t pair well with the coffee I’ve nursed past the point of tolerable coolness but now refuse to throw away. I look at the collection of chairs linked into a bench against the window across from me. There’s a family settled in them that I remember I saw crying next to a bed when I peeked through the windows of the CCU.
It’s been a week, but it feels both as though I first entered this room an hour ago and also as though my life has always been this way. Time is an amorphous thing on the seventh floor of Queens Pres, which is fitting considering how many people who use this hospital are stuck in a neighborhood past when it was still called Booth Memorial.
I’ll start to depend on the familiar faces in the ICU, especially after meeting Yolanda and Jorge. It’s not like we’re ICU buddies now. We won’t call across the aisle separating our mothers’ beds. We won’t sit together during shift changes after tonight. But we won’t just nod in recognition when we see each other, either. We will actually make eye contact and smile, and the more intentional, performative gestures make a difference.
The community of ICU patients will constantly rotate, and when I come in the morning and realize a face I’m used to seeing is no longer there, I’ll be too scared to ask where they went. But I will also feel jealous rage when I watch a patient transferred to a different floor, even though I know that nothing about recovery is linear. Leaving the ICU does not mean that you’re “healed,” just stable.
Months later, my mother will ask me to tell her the story of what happened to her, of how she came to be in a rehabilitation facility in downtown Flushing.
“You had a stroke. It was a hemorrhagic stroke on the left side of your brain. You had a minimally invasive craniotomy. You were in the ICU in Booth Memorial, and then you went to rehab in Glen Cove hospital. But then you had to go back to the ICU. And now you’re here.”
The last decade has seen exponential growth in the popularity and prominence of nonfiction writing, and 2024 has been no exception. Where the writer often previously turned their gaze inward, and applied an understanding of the self to the world, the last year has seen a seismic shift. Writers are facing the world head-on, and tuning inward only once they’ve gleaned what they need. Our most celebrated authors have written plainly, pleadingly, their work startlingly clear-eyed and honest, yet there’s an air of having gone deeper, of having peeled back a layer and exposed the raw nerve of a nation in turmoil. Our books are making the truthful connections that we often turn away from, reminding us that we are what we do, and therefore, that this is who we are. The books on this list are a revelation, and we hope you love them as we have loved them.
The books included on this list were chosen by a vote from the EL community. Here are Electric Lit’s Top 5 nonfiction books of 2024, followed by the best nonfiction books of the year.
In his national bestseller The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates journeys to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine as he grapples with each places’ history as a site of conflict. Across three intertwining essays, Coates dissects the ways our destructive mythmaking reshapes our realities with sobering clarity.
What happens when you take ten years of diaries and sort the sentences alphabetically? In her experimental new memoir Sheila Heti has done just that. The result is an electric anaphora that juxtaposes Heti’s thoughts — whether they originally occurred days or years apart — against one another.
In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the globally renowned thinker Judith Butler examines how a fear of gender has fueled reactionary politics, and brought rise to an anti-gender movement. While interrogating the rise of authoritarian regimes and trans-exclusionary feminists, Butler’s intervention imagines new possibilities toward liberation that are as essential as they are timeless.
In her nonfiction debut, the novelist Tracy O’Neill recounts her search for her birth mother, who she suspects is dying in South Korea during the height of the COVID pandemic. This genre-bending memoir pulls from noir and mystery novel conventions to chart O’Neill’s quest toward her mother and herself. In our interview with the author, she discusses the memoir and her relationship with herself as a “character” in a book.
Taken at face value, Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is a book about basketball. But it’s also a story of grief, mortality, and what it means for a person, especially a Black man, to make it in this world. The National Book Awards Long-lister tracks LeBron James via Ohio, where he was born a year apart from Abdurraqib and he considers his own literary ascent alongside James’ success.
Electric Lit’s Additional Favorite Nonfiction Books
In A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, Lauren Markham blends reporting, memoir, and essay to interrogate how migration became a crime, and how nostalgia fuels the exclusion of migrants. Markham’s writing brings clarity to how long held myths about migration say as much about the past as they do the future.
A first generation college student who grew up on a farm in Kansas, journalist Sarah Smarsh felt disillusioned and disconnected from many in her industry. Bone of the Bone, which collects her essays, reportage, and lyrical reflections, examines the key class divisions, the rural-urban divide, environmental crises and so much more. It’s a book that tackles the crux of America’s current political and cultural movement.
Jill Ciment’s deftly written memoir accounts the love affair between herself and her painting teacher, which began when she was a teenager and while he already had a family of his own. The author revisits the power dynamics of her relationship, now reflecting with the further clarity provided to her in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement.
Though her writing has long been celebrated, Joan Didion has largely been an enigmatic figure. In Didion and Babitz, Lili Anolik seeks to break Didion from this mystery. Using the fellow literary titan Eve Babitz’s letters as a gateway into Didion’s life, Anolik explores the two California writers’ complicated relationship.
In First Love: Essays on Friendship considers the bonds between her friendships with other women as their own kind of great love. The essays in this collection are grounded in the personal — Dancyger’s own friendships and in particular her relationship with her murdered cousin take center stage — but the book also interrogates cultural assumptions about friendship.
Oliver Radclyffe’s memoir of mid-life transition is a coming of age story. Radclyffe examines the emotional stakes of transitioning and coming to terms with his gender identity as an adult, with children. His story of finding acceptance and self-love offers a fresh perspective on the terrain of gender identity and exploration.
Lucy Sante’s memoir documents her journey breaking out of her self-imposed “prison of denial,” in order to live out her life as a woman. As an immigrant from Belgium, born to conservative, working class parents, Sante only started to feel at home when she found the bohemians of New York City. I Heard Her Call My Name speaks to the trans journey with empathy, humor, and tenderness.
Emily Raboteau considers how we can parent responsibly in the face of climate crisis, pandemics, White Supremacist violence, and the other perilous challenges today’s parents have to navigate across 20 essays. These intersecting crises could make for a dispiriting read, but Emily Raboteau’s mix of personal narrative, reportage and photography captures the radical act of hope it takes to bring up children in today’s world.
Combining his daily musings and paintings, Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains offers a record of the artist’s practices. The result is an intimate look at the artist’s process, with reflections on what inspired his novels and his relationship to Turkey, where he grew up.
After sustaining a concussion as a result of a bike accident and then another one less than a year later, Annie Liontas grappled with migraines, disorientation, memory loss and other symptoms of their brain injury for years. In Sex with a Brain Injury they combine personal experience with research and reportage to understand how brain injuries affect our daily lives and closest relationships.
In a straightforward memoir, Leslie Jamison documents her divorce and her first years as a single mother. Much of the book centers on her love for her young daughter, who was 13 months old, at the time of the separation. The book is a testament to how people reassemble their lives and loves in the wake of loss.
Through Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers fans of Lorde a deeper engagement with her life, essays, and often-overlooked poetry. As the first research to explore the full depth of Lorde’s manuscript archives, Gumbs reveals what we can learn from the ethics of the Black feminist lesbian warrior poet.
In thirty-eight autobiographical pieces, Brontez Purnell combines levity with brutal honesty as he addresses topics such as loneliness, capitalism, Blackness, and the ethics of art. With aspects of poetry and performance art, this memoir in verse pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in literature.
“How do we keep doing this—making art?” Stacey D’Erasmo had already written for twenty years when she asked herself this question. In response, she interviewed older artists such as Valda Setterfield, Merce Cunningham, and Samuel R. Delany about their respective art-making journeys. As she makes connections between the great artists of our time, D’Erasmo finds what drives and shapes her most as a writer.
In her debut The Story Game, Shze-Hui Tjoa documents the power of conversation. The memoir follows Hui, who tells stories of her life to her younger sister, Nin. This book-length conversation leads to her uncovering the lasting effects of complex-PTSD, and reveals how she eventually reconstructed her sense of self in its wake.
Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife steps onto the stage in a year when divorce memoirs are having a moment in 2024. There’s splashy, celebrity titles like “Men Have Called Her Crazy” by Anna Marie Tendler, ex-wife of comedian John Mulaney, and those by talented writers examining how their careers caused friction with their spouses (Leslie Jamison’s Splinters and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, albeit published in 2023, fit into this category. Lenz’s unapologetic memoir-as-manifesto uses reportage, sociological research and popular culture to make the case that divorce can be powerful and empowering for women.
What does it mean to be both alone and together? In We’re Alone Edwidge Danticat attempts to answer this question. Her essays consider her childhood, her relationship to Haiti, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the works of her writerly influences — Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin. The resulting collection excavates territories — both physical and emotional — marred by colonialism and environmental catastrophe in an effort to understand what it means to persist.
A National Book Awards shortlist pick, Whiskey Tender considers Deborah Jackson Taffa’s efforts to understand her own identity — a mixed tribe native girl, who was born in California and raised in New Mexico — alongside her family’s experiences with government institutions designed to strip Indigenous people of their culture. Her grandparents were sent to government-backed boarding schools. Her parents believed if she gave up her culture, land and values she could achieve the American Dream. This deft, weighty memoir considers the emotional consequences of colonialism through the lens of one family’s struggle.
Following the loss of her mother, Erica N. Cardwell turns to the art world — reading books, writing poetry, and viewing art from Black artists such as Blondell Cummings, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker — in order to come back to herself. Through poetic essays and lyrical stream-of-consciousness, Wrong Is Not My Name explores legacy, grief, and art’s ability to reclaim one’s life and livelihood.
In her first essay collection, poet Morgan Parker turns her gaze toward herself. In a series of vulnerable essays she explores her own struggles with depression and loneliness within the context of what it would mean to create a society and culture that is truly safe for Black women.
It may come as no surprise that we absolutely love a good short story. When you sit down with an all-consuming piece of writing, whirl through it from beginning to end in one sitting, and come out the other side transformed in only a few pages—that experience is something like magic.
Another experience that’s something like magic? Discovering a new writer you can’t wait to follow throughout their career. Combine both of those feelings, and you get this year’s best short story collections: every—yes, every—short story collection on our top five list this year was a debut, as were several of our honorable mentions. How lucky for all of us, because it means talented, exciting writers are entering the scene, and we can look forward to following them throughout the years. These books are master classes in the art of the short story, full of unputdownable writing that you won’t easily forget. We hope you love them as much as we did.
The books included on this list were chosen by a vote from the EL community. Here are Electric Lit’s Top 5 short story collections of 2024, followed by the best short story collections of the year.
This masterfully inventive collection weaves literary fiction, Korean folklore, and science fiction elements into deeply revelatory narratives that reframe how readers contemplate the human condition. Through explorations of Korean American womanhood, transformation, fate, and legacy, Gina Chung proves in this debut her mastery over thoughtful precision. Equal parts entertaining and emotionally riveting, these stories will stay with you long after you’ve read them. Find “Presence,” one of the brilliant stories from the collection, published in Recommended Reading.
In the first story of Ghostroots, a woman wonders if she’s destined to perpetuate the same evils as her deceased grandmother, with whom she shares an uncanny resemblance. Setting the rest of the collection in motion, Aguda’s stories ask: are we fated to the violence passed down from our ancestors? Or is freedom from our generational ties possible? Through elegant prose that threads together the strange, the supernatural, and the ordinary, each story finds new ways to haunt you long after you’ve read them.
Through explorations of the supernatural and the mundane, Lena Valencia’s debut collection wrestles with the unsettling horrors of womanhood. As haunting as they are enlightening, these stories interrogate deception, self-deception, and existential dread against the backdrop of the Southwestern desert. Valencia’s tales exhibit subversion at its finest. Find our interview with the One Story managing editor about her collection here, as well as a story from the collection published in Recommended Reading.
This electrifying collection of interconnected stories opens on a young Brazilian writer who meets and sleeps with the Devil at a Halloween party. After their encounter, the writer keeps in touch with the Devil and writes him a series of haunted stories—the very same stories that make up the remaining pages of Craft. When unfolded, the layers of this frame narrative form an innovative, eclectic patchwork. Lima’s prose is at once claustrophobic and yet startlingly intimate, marking her impressive fiction debut.
Traversing through stories both speculative and realistic, Marshall’s debut collection interrogates queerness, Asian and Asian American identity, and womanhood through the lives of twelve women. Packed with wry humor and sharp social commentary, Marshall’s stories prove ferocious. Check out our interview with the author, where she discusses defying societal norms through Women! In! Peril!
Electric Lit’s Additional Favorite Short Story Collections
This daring debut book ventures to lift the folds of reality and probe the depths of the surreal, the menacing, and the absurd. The understated precision of Zach Williams’ prose allows these stories to exist in a captivating liminal realm, hovering between a dream and a nightmare.
This collection of six longer stories examines themes of taboo, neurodiversity, and sexuality with a vibrant pen. Frumkin’s ability to stare directly at the strange and the subversive creates a whirlwind, mesmerizing reading journey into these surreal new worlds.
This genre-defying kaleidoscope of a book follows best friends Val and Tal—and the women that orbit around them—following a rattling incident at a Halloween party. Haroutunian’s witty, pulsating prose draws the reader into this beautifully rendered world.
Joy Williams probes the depths of the surreal and the fleeting in this collection of ninety-nine bite-sized stories. Her fiction moves in associative, ungovernable leaps between topics as disparate as religion, psychoanalysis, art, and literature. Williams draws from her background as the daughter of a minister to craft the overarching narrative that corrals these fragments: the tale of Azrael, an angel who is ambivalent about his job collecting souls. Her prose is sparse, clear-eyed, and sharply observant, inviting the reader to immerse themselves in her fantastical micro-worlds.
Ranjan Adiga constructs unique narratives centered around the Nepali diaspora and characters who struggle toward upward mobility. Adiga blurs the line of the traditional immigrant narrative, questioning assumptions around race, class, and gender. His tightly focused style and expert plotting make each short story a treat to receive, even when immersed in uncomfortable themes.
The stories in Annell López’s debut collection offer a rare sensitivity. While confronting the hard truths of Dominican immigrant life in Ironbound, Newark, López’s prose is simultaneously delicate and methodical. Through seventeen stories, López’s honesty inspires resilience in an unforgiving world.
Okonkwo’s debut book showcases some of the best qualities of short fiction: immersive world-building, taut suspense, and endings that leave you questioning. Her stories pay close attention to the concerns of relationships of women and girls in modern-day Nigeria. The sparse but unflinching prose bears witness to Okonkwo’s masterful blending of African and western literary sensibilities. Her stories are tense from beginning to end, full of turmoil, and always deeply human.
Republished in 2024 by Deep Vellum, Kurdistan +100: Stories from a Future State imagines a freer future for Kurds, one that sees independence as a possibility by 2046 — a century after Kurds last had independence through the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad. Exploring subjects such as eco-activism, drone warfare, and retroactive social justice, this anthology of stories writes against the boundaries of what’s possible.
In her debut collection, Puloma Ghosh blurs the line between the real and the absurd to explore our most fanged and aching desires. Through contemplations on sexuality, the body, isolation, and longing, Ghosh’s stories blend genre and literary fiction in eleven eerie, yet elegant stories.
Diane Oliver, the author of Neighbors and Other Stories, died in 1966 at the age of 22. With the posthumous release of her collection, these stories explore race and racism in the mid twentieth century. Intimate, precise, and chilling, her stories prove timeless.
Sally Wen Mao’s fierce collection reimagines the nine-tailed fox spirit of Asian folklore. With vibrant, lyrical prose, Ninetails inspires hope as its characters search for truth and belonging in a world so determined to be difficult.
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Todd Portnowitz
Since Lahiri’s 2015 commitment to only writing in Italian, her short fiction has taken on a fresh, clear-eyed mode when translated into English. This collection is no different, circling its lens around Italian characters—often interlopers or migrants—who observe the world from a cool distance. These vignettes drip with delicacy and tension, an impressive display of Lahiri’s signature style.
In her debut collection, Amy Stuber writes toward hope in a world intent on taking it away. Confronting American consumerism, narrow versions of acceptability, and the worsening climate crisis, Stuber’s writing exhibits sensitivity, urgency, and care. With stories full of clarity and hilarity, the stories in Sad Grownups showcase the true strength of the short story form.
Edited by Michelle Tea, Sluts: Anthology is a multi-authored collection celebrating queer pleasure and connection. The anthology explores what it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture, with cathartic entries from writers Gabrielle Korn, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Brontez Purnell, and many more.
These striking, spunky, unforgettable short stories center around women and girls on the cusp of change, often just an arm’s reach away from some kind of freedom. Megan Howell has an unrelenting voice and constructs taut narratives that wind both reader and characters into a spiral of worry. Her debut collection is sure to both dazzle and haunt.
The reissue of this little-known classic by J. California Cooper has been eagerly anticipated by her devotees since her passing in 2014. Cooper’s prose stylings are most often compared to other authors from the Black literary folk tradition like Zora Neale Hurston, but the tender closeness of her narration is uniquely Cooper. These five “long-short stories,” as Cooper calls them, pay intimate attention to the concerns of Black women in rural areas, especially their familial, romantic, and community ties.
The queen of short horror returns with her third story collection to be translated into English, giving us a return to her usual ghostly themes but with plenty of new tricks up her sleeve. Here, Enríquez shows off her knack for rendering body horror, her affinity for neo-noir aesthetics, and her empathy for the tragedies of the mundane.
This slick, stylish debut traces a thread from El Salvador to the United States, interrogating the familial and migratory challenges of Salvadoran diaspora members. Reyes’s observant eye is piercing and unrelenting as he unfolds these poignant, sobering stories.
The protagonists of these stories are frequently spiraling out of control or breaking their own hearts, and always rendered in vibrant technicolor. John Salter has mastered the art of giving the reader just enough information and then upending his own carefully constructed world with a devastating revelation. The resulting collection has a fitful, roiling momentum that does not let up until the final page. Salter has a knack for realistic dialogue and a sharp eye for the tragedies of the everyday.
Your Utopia by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
These fascinating, technology-soaked stories take readers to outer space, unrecognizable futures, and brand-new realms. Chung excavates the loneliness and grief at the heart of each imagined utopia with her singular narrative voice and astounding imagination.
Heartbreak is a teacher, a moment that offers possibility for attunement—to pay attention with kindness and care—a chance to feel not just what we want, but what is here. As Stanley Kunitz writes in The Testing Tree,
“the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.”
Attuning to heartbreak, staying with it in this way—not turning from it—has helped evolve my writing practice into a space to witness and tell about the astonishing texture of aliveness.
My poetry collection, Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story was born out of my divorce, when I wound up on a grief retreat deep in the heart of New Mexico. In the high desert, I learned the power of telling my story in order to begin to clear it from my somatic realm, to heal, to learn, and to move forward. What started all those years ago as angry villainizing from the vantage of a self-ascribed victim has evolved into a more hopeful, honest, reflection, more compassionate both to my ex and myself. The book, full of heartache, at its center, is a love story, with all the complexities innate to such a tale.
Building relationship with grief is a gift—that an aching heart is a portal into deeper intimacy with the wonder of being. As Francis Weller quotes Terry Tempest Williams in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, “Grief dares us to love once more.”
It’s my honor to share with you collections of poetry that feel like companions, written by poets who do the good work of meeting what arises—each touches the simple truths of life, death, and love—and all—through our sharing, as Ram Dass offers, “are just walking each other home” poem by poem.
In Stag’s Leap, the speaker’s husband has left their long marriage, and she explores the situation through her keen perspective In Known to Be Left, Olds offers:
“…I am so ashamed
before my friends—to be known to be left
by the one who supposedly knew me best”
This collection is relatable in the way thatmuch of the learning and realizations happen for the speaker in the real time of her story unfolding. Old’s book is study in the craft of writing, but also the craft of living.
Heartbreak is so much more than a broken heart, it’s also a breaking open to wonder. Oliver’s steady witnessing welcomes us into the depths of the world’s open-hearted wisdom, as in The Deer, where she writes,
“This is the earnest work. Each of us is given
only so many mornings to do it –
to look around and love
the oily fur of our lives.”
She distills concepts like awe and astonishment into salient moments for us to consider and also to remember the vast beauty of life beyond the hurt and pain that so often find their way to us.
In this book, Ross Gay brings to life a heart that breaks in awe of the present moment. The opening poem, to the fig tree on 9th and christian, sets a tone of joyful optimism—a bunch of strangers inadvertently converge to eat figs under an old woman’s tree. Here, even though everyone is busy with the business and grief of their own lives, they stand together in community “gleefully eating out of each other’s hands…strangers maybe / never again.” Heartbreak needs to remember the possibilities of delight and joy, and Gay reminds us of such possibility in his remarkable work.
I don’t know how to pick just one set of lines that conveys the overarching sense of vibrancy and appreciation for life in this vital collection wherein Doty writes through the heartbreak of losing his partner, Wally, to AIDS. Doty writes,
“…love, I know, it ends,
you don’t have to remind me,
though it seems a field
of endless jade.”
As he contemplates grief through his poems, heartbreak holds space for feeling into itself—not to wallow—but to feel it as true, as what is happening now, and to brighten into an amplified sense of appreciating the complexity and joy of this existence. I feel this sense of convergence hold so true in Two Ruined Boats. Doty writes,
“…myself, my lover,
twin points we thought fixed
coming all undone, though in a flaring spring sun
the world’s a single dazzled silver.”
The whole scope of Doty’s work—from this book to his newest memoir What is the Grass? Walt Whitman in My Life—is an ongoing meditation on what it means to be in this human incarnation.
On my bookcase, Doty’s Atlantis stands in kinship with Marie Howe’s What the Living Do, on the top shelf. Marie Howe is remarkable in her deft ability to develop emotional texture through simplicity. She brings us into the moment and offers it as it is. In A Certain Light, the speaker and her brother’s partner sit with her brother in hospice as he lapses in and out of wakefulness, and she narrates a scene of exquisite heartache:
“…a kind of paradise, he finally opened his eyes wide
and the room filled with a certain light we thought we’d never see again.
Look at you two, he said. And we did.
And Joe said, Look at you.
And John said, How do I look?
And Joe said, Handsome.”
Love pours from this moment, and the intimacy here between love and grief is real. We cannot meet love without knowing the pain that comes when we lose someone we love, and Howe takes us through this journey over and over again in her work.
Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother offers another look at the experience of loss. Vuong meets grief as a son processing the death of his mother. His perception is sharpened by what has come to pass, and he shares what he witnesses with tenderness and candor. In Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker, he chronicles the list of items ordered over the last year of his mother’s life. On this list, we move from the workings of life, with items like “Seafoam handheld mirror,” to “Chemo-Glam cotton headscarf, sunrise pink,” then onto “Eternity Aluminum Urn, Dove and Rose engraved, small.” The items mount with emotional weight quickly, expectedly—yet unexpectedly. Like the air fryer that showed up two days after my own mom died of breast cancer—Vuong allows the pain each object holds to speak for itself.
To Woo and to Wed edited by Michael Blumenthal
Beware, this anthology has some unhappy reviews online by folks expecting saccharine in a compilation of poems about partnership and marriage. Though, anyone in any long term relationship will appreciate that lack of sentimentality in exchange for the complex texture of truth:
“You must know that I do not love and that I love you,
because everything alive has its two sides;
a word is one wing of the silence,
fire has its cold half.
Heartache and love—complementary sides of the same center.”
It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Poetry of Breakup edited by Jerry Williams
Another more contemporary anthology, this group of poems encapsulates some common threads of the very specific type of heartbreak that comes when a relationship ends. Jerry Williams gathers a range of voices to offer solace and perspective for readers who need the company of other broken hearts in the midst of their own. In poems like, Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts, by Mark Halliday, we meet the divorced dad, on his night with his young son, sitting in the pizza shop, surrounded by a very metaphorical pile of crusts, while his kid plays with a friend. As we sit with and witness the speaker, we come to meet all his layers of heartbreak. It’s Not You; It’s Me is full of relatable, human moments to offer companionship for us all.
In whatever way you’re coming to know your broken heart, I hope you’re encouraged to dive into this selection, and in doing so, find solace and company with fellow open and aching hearts along the way.
This has not just been an excellent year for poetry, it’s also been a tremendously important one. As governments, AI, and social media algorithms seek to suppress our voices, we need poets now more than ever—whether they’re writing rallying cries that empower us to resist or quietly reminding us of our shared humanity. This year, Palestinian and Palestinian diaspora writers have been at the forefront of this effort, publishing essential work in the midst of an ongoing genocide and reminding us of the power that poetry can wield in the face of oppression. We cannot afford to take their immensely important work for granted. The poets on this list have given us a gift, something deeply human and connective in an increasingly automated and separated world. We are infinitely lucky to have them writing in the world today.
The books included on this list were chosen by a vote from the EL community. Here are Electric Lit’s Top 5 poetry collections of 2024, followed by the best poetry collections of the year.
Danez Smith’s galvanizing new collection reckons with police brutality, racism, and Covid-19 in a divided country. A series of anti poetica and ars america poems reveal Smith’s disillusionment with the neoliberal literary scene and its acceptance of apolitical stasis. Their urgent, fierce voice cements Danez Smith as a poet of vital importance for the present moment.
Carson characterizes her latest volume of poetry as “wrong” because the pieces are unlinked. Ranging in subjects from Roget’s Thesaurus to meditations on a woman swimming in a lake, these twenty-five prose poems feel as though they intentionally capture the way the human mind moves from thought to thought, skipping from one to another with little connective tissue at times. Featured alongside the poems are drawings by Carson herself. The effect is a collection fully immersed in the lyric tradition, earning it a place on the the National Book Award shortlist.
Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s much anticipated sophomore collection, examines how families respond to tragedy. How they pick up the fractured pieces, if you will. Khoi Nguyen turns a loving, yet critical eye toward her mother’s life in the aftermath of the Fall of Saigon, her father’s experiences as an immigrant in America, and the aftermath of her brother’s suicide. These poems examine how trauma takes root over generations, providing a fresh perspective on diaspora, identity, and loss.
This harrowing collection highlights the importance of bearing poetic witness in times of violence and oppression. In fall 2023, Mosab Abu Toha was living in Gaza with his family, constructing Palestine’s first English-language library, when the current iteration of the Israeli occupation began, destroying his library and putting their lives in danger. In the aftermath, amid detention by Israeli forces and evacuation to refugee camps, Toha scribbled poems wherever he could, the poems that would eventually make up Forest of Noise. He uses stark diction, a compassionate tone, and an unshrinking documentary eye to construct this haunting book.
Hala Alyan’s fifth collection of poetry is a blistering, prescient, and formally innovative ode to the landscapes she has loved, from Palestine to Lebanon to the United States. Her stunning “interactive fiction” poems each offer three parallel narratives ballooning from a single beginning and ending line, inviting the reader to generatively reconstruct the poem alongside the writer. Thus, Alyan foregrounds collaboration, recreation, and survival even in the face of unspeakable violence. Her poems are at once technically precise and politically resonant, bringing to mind the unbreaking strength of Palestinian resistance.
Electric Lit’s Additional Favorite Poetry Collections
In his third poetry collection, Geoffrey Brock posits a unique take on the “after” poem, those lyrics written in response to works by other poets and artists. Some of those poems are after poems in the traditional sense, while others are written in the aftermath of the death of his father, the poet Van K. Brock. As a result, the collection ponders what one writer, whether they be actual father-and-son or more of a poetic mentor, inherits from another.
This unassuming little book hides poems of deep imagination and off-kilter innovation. Hernandez constructs surrealist prose poems in the vein of authors like Baudelaire and Simic, yet makes them his own with a whimsical flair. He flexes his literary muscles in confessional linear verse, too, particularly in the standout narrative poem addressed to his father. The collection shows off the wide variety of modes in which this talented, imaginative, and wholly unique poet can sing.
Oliver Baez Bendorf troubles the boundaries: of countries, of genders, of time periods. His poems contemplate both the threat of ecological collapse and the often-erotic beauty of nature. Often, gender concerns interrupt and interact with environmentalist commentary as Bendorf positions his transgender identity as “a way of arranging the / world through change.” Even the shape of the physical book—landscape orientation with wide margins—acts both to safeguard the formal integrity of Bendorf’s poems and to emphasize the importance of Earth’s landscapes. The wide range of forms in this collection, including prose poems, sestinas, and speculative ekphrasis, cement Bendorf’s status as one of the most interesting poets working today.
Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski
Winner of the Noemi Press 2022 Book Award in Poetry, Girl Work dissects the demands of capitalism, the fallibility of memory, and the “hunger of being a dead girl in a sea of / dead girls.” Zefyr Lisowski draws on myriad life experiences—a brief stint in sex work, childhood as a queer person in the South, the death of her father, her love of horror movies—to create a deeply confessional meditation on beauty and labor. The specter of past sexual violence haunts every page, especially the visual poems, wherein overlapping prose blocks depict a mind crowded by intrusive memories. Lisowski achieves feats of form, prosody, and hybridity in this ambitious, tightly constructed collection.
I could die today and live again by Summer Farah
Summer Farah’s debut is a pleasant surprise, a veritable Russian nesting doll of a collection. Though set in the video-game realm of Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda, the book contains a second setting: Palestine, haunted by the Israeli occupation. Her dense blocks of prose portal and warp, drifting musically between Farah’s preoccupations. Cycles of life and death, like a video game character regenerating, guide the book along its breakneck pace.
This Lambda Literary Award-winning poet returns audaciously with a collection that tests the limits of meter, line, and language itself. Slipping in and out of lovers’ beds and mothers’ homes, Dawn Lundy Martin reclaims her body and her selfhood from a society always poised to strip her of power. The perfectly wrought micro-poems, careful prosody, and resolute diction of this collection cement Martin’s reputation as a poet with a remarkable eye and ear.
Winner of the 2023 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, Interrogation Records turns an docupoetic eye to the Indonesian mass killings of 1965. Jeddie Sophronius takes an archivist’s posture as they sift through historical documents, many of which are collaged and interpolated in their poems. At the same time, Sophronius’s Chinese-Indonesian heritage—similar to many of the 1965 victims’ backgrounds—gives the poems an extra layer of empathy. Their unflinching, immediate poetic voice offers an alternative to the silence that has previously clouded this tragic event. Now more than ever, voices like Sophronius’s are vital tools against censorship and persecution.
Li-Young Lee’s fifth poetry collection, and the first published in more than a decade, oscillates between the divine and the mundane. The collection has similar themes — family, exile the immigrant experience — to Lee’s other books, but the imagery is fresh and poignant. These poems are an act of love, written by someone enchanted by the world.
In the follow-up to her Pulitzer prize winning frank: sonnets, Diane Seuss takes on the subject of poetry itself. Namely, her journey from erstwhile student to virtuoustic poet, capable of jumping from ballad to fugue to other more archaic forms. Her characteristic, at times self-deprecating, humor breathes life into a collection that tries to tackle the question of what poetry means — not only to Seuss, but to society as a whole — today. It’s no wonder the book made the shortlist for the National Book Award in poetry.
In Song of My Softening Omotara James spotlights bodies other writers shy away from — those that are fat, female, Black, and queer. The collection is split into two sections “The Sacrifice,” and “The Feast,” but each one contains a kind of celebration of the self and all its forms. She instructs readers to love their bodies, while also acknowledging the limits others may put on us as a result of our physical appearance.
Idra Novey’s Soon and Wholly juxtaposes two Americas: the rural world of Novey’s Appalachian childhood and the city streets where she’s raising her own family. In doing so, she weaves together the shared concerns of rural and urban Americans, two groups often cast in opposition to one another. Novey’s gaze isn’t limited to the mountains, plains, and coast of America, however. They traverse continents, dipping into both the wilderness of her own childhood and lingering on a woman housesitting in central Chile during wildfire season. These poems grasp the urgency and complexity of our time.
In this striking debut, Sarah Ghazal Ali uses the Qur’an and the Bible to explore the intersections of faith, family and womanhood. One central question of the collection is naming. Ghazal Ali writes on the origins of her name in one sequence and draws on the Ghazal, a poetic form with which she shares a name. The result is a collection deeply concerned with faith, identity, matrilineage, and how one identity can cause friction with or even splinter another.
Winner of the Yale Younger Poet Series, Cindy Juyoung Ok considers how the language of institutions — prisons, psychiatric hospitals, hospice wards — constrains the identities of those inside. Her poems bring to the fore narratives of mental illness, abuse, and death with an arid kind of humor, inviting readers to consider how the absurdity of our present moment manifests in everything from the climate crisis to the institutionalization of teenagers. These poems demand tenderness in troubling times.
This ekphrastic collection turns its eye toward the works and writings of painter Agnes Martin. In her research-laden poems, Victoria Chang considers Martin’s abstractions alongside topics like feminism, depression, spectacle and grief. The poems appear alongside collages of images and early drafts, giving the book a palimpsest quality and offering insight into the poet and painter’s process.
This unforgettable collection provokes from its very title: the ellipsis represents an unfinished thought, a loss for words, a life extinguished, erased. Joudah sustains the tension of the collection by reminding us always of the impossibly high stakes, the lives lost every day in his native Palestine. He employs a measured tone and lyric precision that cut to the heart of the tragedy, allowing the poems to speak on both the personal and the academic level. The collection leaves the reader with re-fortified belief in the cause of Palestinian resistance and with gratitude to be living at the same time as such a monumental talent.
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