Page 9 – Electric Literature

My Wife Pays Me and I Pay the Nanny

Posted on February 16, 2026February 12, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

“Feeders” by Oliver Munday

The night before we met with Babette, Sarah and I had almost canceled the interview due to stress. At the time, our daughter, Sophie, was just three months old and refused to take the bottle. Sarah had had no trouble breastfeeding her, but Sophie rebuffed the synthetic nipples, despite the many sizes and flows we’d ordered. Our night nurse had been no help, and Babette sensed our distress. When we told her about the cause, she responded, very plainly, that it was a phase that would soon pass; she asked us if she could give it a try (she was older than every other nanny we’d interviewed and seemed wise for it). Sarah handed Sophie over to Babette, and she cradled Sophie in her lap. She dragged the bottle’s nipple across Sophie’s lip and lifted it away, almost teasingly. After about thirty seconds Sophie latched. Sarah and I sat in the chairs opposite our baby in disbelief. Babette left and we offered her the job the next day.

It took Babette time to get used to the sprawl of our Tribeca loft. I’d also been surprised by the space when I moved in (Sarah owned it). The high ceilings, the industrial-grade kitchen, and the twice-a-week cleaner. Sarah was adopted—one of six siblings—and her family money was old, from cardboard manufacturing. She’d been the only child to be involved with the business, pioneering a sustainability packaging program and founding the family’s philanthropic organization, where I worked as communications director. I’d never dated someone so wealthy before, and I often resented how unconcerned she was with the finances. I’d grown up solidly middle class in Baltimore—my dad waited tables at a high-end steak house, and my mom worked as a public school administrator. Even then, I’d been considered wealthy by some.

There came a point in my relationship with Sarah when I had to accept that I too was rich. After all, the money might become mine at some point, albeit partially. I’d felt like a fraud proposing to her, and then signing the prenup. The pageantry of my kneeling before her family’s standing. Accepting that this rarefied life was mine, and that, really, I didn’t have to work for anyone else ever again, was unsettling at first. I felt an acute guilt bearing my mom’s passive-aggressive comments. And oddly, this was the moment when Moses, Sarah’s gray tabby cat (to whom I was deeply allergic yet had built a painstaking immunity over the course of a year) attacked my feet. Whenever I left the bathroom after a shower, he’d hiss and pounce on my bare toes. As if he’d sniffed out an old fear of mine. As a kid, I’d had dreams about small creatures—opossums, squirrels, and beavers—assailing my toes. I was convinced Moses had penetrated my psychology, pegged me as an intruder. This was a lifestyle he too enjoyed, and he was protecting it. He ate from an automatic feeder that was double the price of my espresso machine.

When Moses took immediately to Babette, it felt like a betrayal in both directions. Since I’m also employed by Sarah’s family, Babette and I shared a strange kind of kinship. Both on the payroll. Both enjoyed benefits. Both had to be wary of occasional reprimand. Babette also had a cousin in Baltimore, so she knew where I was from. And she’d been surprised that I knew anything about where she was from—Guyana—and that I loved West Indian food. It wasn’t long before she insisted on teaching me how to make roti. Sometimes she stayed late and we cooked together. Roti had become a staple of our kitchen and Sophie’s favorite food.

The best part of my day was Sophie running to the door when I came home from work. “Daddyyyyyyyyyyyyy,” she said, clobbering my knees. Babette had put Sophie’s golden hair up in two violet butterfly clips. She looked older.

Babette came over with a small snack bowl in hand; she’d been slow to rise from the couch. She wore an Atlantic City T-shirt. “This girl is getting so smart, I tell you.”

As I hoisted Sophie up, she promptly squeezed my nose.

“How was your day, Jordan?” Babette asked.

Jordan isn’t my name. I stood bouncing Sophie for a moment and looked at Babette, waiting for her to realize. I thought maybe even Sophie would. “Good,” I said. “I was eager to get home to this little stinker.”

The moment to correct her about my name quickly passed.

“You need a ride tonight?” Babette asked.

On Tuesday nights, I played in a pickup basketball game with friends at a high school in Sunnyside, Queens, where I used to live. She lived close to the neighborhood.

A moment later, the front door opened. Sarah came in from work. She moved cautiously, and I wondered if this was because we’d just found out she was pregnant again. (We hadn’t told anyone.)

“Mommmmmy.” Sophie shimmied down and ran to the door.

“Hi, Sarah,” Babette said, yawning.

“Hello, everyone,” Sarah said. She slipped off her shoes and took Sophie into her arms. She leaned over, and I kissed her cheek, tasting the sweat from her Orangetheory class.

I watched Babette again to see if she might realize, having now said Sarah’s name, that she’d mistaken mine. But she walked into the living room to pick up stray toys from the floor. She tossed Sophie’s alligator into the large patterned basket in a tall arc.

“Maybe you should let me in your basketball game,” she said to me.

Her own laughter had a way of crowding out mine, especially in response to her own jokes. It was a laughter that seemed too harsh for her. I remembered basketball practices when I’d have to switch to guard taller players in the post, hearing them yell to the gym, I’ve got a mouse in the house.

“My mom used to come and watch me play,” I said. “I could use a fan in the stands.”

I went to the bedroom to grab my gym bag. Before we left the apartment, Babette reached down to line Sarah’s shoes up with the rest of her heels by the door. Moses walked over and brushed his body against Babette’s arm as she did.

In her car, an air freshener dangled from the rearview next to some Diwali beads.

“How’s the family?” I asked.

Babette bumped the steering wheel with the butt of her hand. “My granddaughter got another ticket. And she didn’t show up to the hearing last time. Now I have to take her in. A pain, I tell you.”

She had two teenage granddaughters, one about to graduate high school.

“Girls are sweet when they’re young,” she continued. “Then they grow up and you wish you had boys. But then you remember that boys become men and you’re glad again that you had girls.” She laughed to herself. She wore her glasses when she drove and sat up close to the wheel.

“You never wanted a son?” I asked.

“My daughter was plenty for me.” She smiled to herself. “I know Sarah is pregnant.”

I turned and eyed her. “How?”

“A mother just knows,” she said. “You want a boy? Momma’s gonna need an heir.” She cackled.

We crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, which was lovely in the evening, offering a dusk-gilded view of the city. As we got deeper into the backstreets of Queens, a calm came over me, the residential blocks reminding me of neighborhoods in Baltimore—Pigtown and Butchers Hill—the Formstone fronts and the large swaths of sky rising above the roofs. It was like being dropped off for practice again.

Babette sighed before speaking. “My husband had his hours cut at work. I’m so grateful I have you all. He is too. I don’t think I tell you enough.”

Her husband worked as a janitor at a yeshiva in Queens. Babette had said that the Jews paid him well.

“I’m so sorry, Babette,” I said. “I remember how hard it was on my mom when my dad had his hours cut when I was in high school. Will your husband look for another job? Or part-time work?”

“He’s hoping it’s just temporary, a few weeks. But he’s definitely open to other things.”

I told her I would ask around in the meantime. Before I got out of the car, she patted me twice on the forearm. “Good luck on the court!”

Later in the week, we assembled Sophie’s dinner as a family. Sophie sat on the lip of the counter, schooching her butt on the marble.

“Iwanroti,” she said.

“We can’t eat roti every day, sweetie,” Sarah said.

“Why?” Sophie frowned.

“Because we need variety in our diets.” Sarah chopped broccoli florets with a large knife. Her blond hair draped her face just below her chin. She looked beautiful, if a little severe, after a long day. “It’s more of a snack, not real food.”

“It’s real food, sweetie.” I pinched Sophie’s knee. I could feel Sarah’s blue eyes resting on me. “It’s just the more you eat something, the more likely it is that you’ll turn into it!” I pinched harder, and she leaned over giggling.

As Sophie sat with her dinner, Sarah and I drank Malbec on the couch, her glass filled with a demure new pregnancy splash. Before long, Sophie grew restless again. We told her to sit in her tiny chair until she was done, which she rarely did, even with Cocomelon on the TV. Instead, she spread out on the couch behind the table. With her butt angled high in the air, she planted her cheek on the cushion and watched.

“It’s almost bath time, stinky butt,” I said.

When she didn’t respond I crept over to her and stared at eye level. “What are you doing lying down like this?”

“Resting my ear,” she said. “Like Babette.”

Sarah set her glass down; we stared at each other for a moment.

“What, honey?” Sarah asked.

I tilted my head at her. “What do you mean?”

“Resting my ear like Babette does,” she repeated. After a minute, she grew bored by our questions and flipped over onto her back. I nuzzled my head into her stomach, and she laughed uncontrollably. We continued playing as Sarah cleared Sophie’s plate and went to start the bath.

When Sophie was down for bed, Sarah and I spoke quietly in the kitchen.

“What do you think Sophie meant earlier?” Sarah asked.

I lacked a sound explanation. But then I remembered. “Babette called me Jordan the other day.”

She looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“Like it was my name. I thought she was making a basketball joke since it was Tuesday, but I think she just forgot.”

“Stockton I can see, but Jordan, babe?” She grinned. “Did you say something?”

I shook my head. Moses sat upright in the corner and stared, which he did constantly, to unnerving effect. “I waited too long and then it felt awkward.”

“And how does it feel now?”

Sarah was quick, and her playful rebukes always made me laugh. She poured me more wine.

“I bet it was the name of the guy she used to work for,” I said. “She’s old. She’s bound to slip up.”

“Resting her ear,” Sarah spoke to herself. “It must be something Babette said. Bizarre.”

At work several days later, I received a video clip from Sarah out of the blue. I assumed, at first, that it was her trying to be sexy in the way she’d started lately; a brief striptease or view of her bare thighs below the table. Her confidence was intoxicating. These clips had a way of landing at the most inopportune times of the day, which only added to their power. But this one wasn’t sexual. Only when I started playing it did I see Moses in the frame. His triad nose darted at the camera, and I realized it was the view from his feeder. It had a camera and came with an app, too, but we’d never reviewed any footage or cued up the live feed; I’d forgotten about the capability. Then I saw Babette and Sophie in the background. Babette was seated on the couch, and Sophie was on the floor playing with her stuffed alligator. The view was partially grainy, and it glitched every few seconds. I felt like a depraved voyeur as I watched, yet I couldn’t stop. Gradually, Babette began to lean. She caught herself once and sat upright before slouching over again. My heart sank to watch Sophie on the floor, playing alone. Soon enough, behind her, Babette was completely horizontal. I rewound and watched it again. I realized then that the clip’s sound was off, but I couldn’t bear to add any more information to what I saw. Sophie dropped her alligator and rose from the floor. When she leaned over the couch, Babette startled and sat up. They appeared to talk for a minute, and then Babette hugged Sophie. And then it was done.

I felt like a depraved voyeur as I watched, yet I couldn’t stop.

That night, Sarah and I divided the evening routine. I read Sophie her favorite book about a penguin’s first day of school, imagining what it would be like once Sophie started preschool next year, when Babette would have to watch two kids.

When I came out, Sarah nodded at me, holding up a bottle of white. Her face shone with snail mucin.

I nodded, and she came over to join me on the couch. “I’m shocked,” she said.

“I can tell.”

“You’re not?”

“I am.”

“Well your energy is off,” she said.

“It’s just that . . . I felt uncomfortable watching the video.”

“No shit—We agree on that.”

I pressed my lips against the glass. “Isn’t it illegal to spy on someone?”

“Please. We’re all spied on, all the time. It’s practically nationally sanctioned,” she said. “You do understand what it is you saw? Sophie was playing alone while Babette was passed out beside her.”

“I know.”

“I thought you’d be a tad more worried by it. There’s no way we’re continuing to pay someone who literally sleeps on the job. How’s she going to watch two?”

“It’s dangerous to extrapolate,” I said. I thought about Babette’s husband looking for work. “Maybe this only happened a few times.” I worried this was tacit encouragement for further espionage.

“Once is enough.” Sarah sat back. “Once is unacceptable.”

Moses leapt onto the couch and curled up in her lap.

“We can’t be rash.” I bounced my foot. “Babette is a huge part of Sophie’s life—our life.”

“She’s an employee, babe. We pay her to do a job, an extremely important one at that. It’s clear that Sophie has seen her do this before, enough to repeat Babette’s excuse.”

Sarah brought her fingers to her lips. I rubbed her shoulder, feeling more of my own tension. “I know, it’s not right. But just think for a second—they’re safe inside the apartment. The place is still babyproofed.”

Sarah shrugged out from under my hand; Moses seemed to balk too. “What if Sophie was choking? I can’t believe I’m having to convince you.”

“Imagine it was an afternoon when Sophie was with your mom, and she happened to nod off briefly on the couch? Babette woke right up when Sophie came over.”

“My mom’s not a narcoleptic.”

“Babette is family,” I said.

Sarah looked surprised. “I know this sounds cold, but let’s be honest: the whole nanny as part of the family thing is the bullshit we tell ourselves to feel better. Sophie is family. We should’ve known this with Babette’s age.”

Sarah had picked up enough speed to bypass my hesitation.

“So, what do you think we should do?” I asked. “We can’t just cut her loose. That’s ruthless.”

“Why do you keep thinking of this from her perspective?”

“I’m thinking about this from Sophie’s perspective. It’s a lot to ask of her to get used to another nanny.”

“You need to consider us—which will be the four of us soon. We’re your family.”

After lunch the next day, I sat in a meeting that ran for over two hours, glad to focus on something that wasn’t Babette’s narcolepsy. But when I returned to my office, I found another email from Sarah. No subject line. I opened it and saw two clips, both of which were dated earlier in the day. Too big to text, it read above the first. Volume up, below the second. I felt trapped by Sarah’s insistence.

I’d have better luck asking the cat for more money.

The first clip opened with Babette, again, stretched out on the couch. My stomach tightened and I closed the clip. The other clip showed Babette and Grace, a nanny in our building who watched a boy Sophie’s age. They had playdates frequently. The four of them sat in the living room; I turned up the volume. Sophie was singing “Following the Leader,” ignoring Mikey, the little boy. When this stopped, they played with magnet tiles on the floor, and I could hear the stray clacking plastic. Then I heard the adult voices. Grace was younger than Babette, strident as she spoke. You need to ask them for a raise, she said. These people are rich, it’s nothing to them. Don’t let them take advantage of you. Grace went on to tell Babette how she had demanded more money at her last year-end review. She told Babette that, honestly, she needed to talk to me. Babette’s laughter was startling. Please, she said. You know that man is scared for his life in here. He’s a punk. I’d have better luck asking the cat for more money.

I tensed. My legs locked up. I looked over my shoulder like I was the one being watched. I played the clip once more to hear her self-satisfied laughter, to see her frail old body jiggle. Then I slammed the laptop shut.

When I got home that night, Moses’s feeder had been moved to the other side of the room, positioned with a clearer view of the couch.

“Hey, Jordan,” Babette said.

I dropped my bag to the floor; I mustered a hey.

Sarah glared at me before she spoke. “Did you just call him Jordan, Babette?”

Babette turned back and forth between us, as if she thought we were playing a joke on her. Sophie colored furiously at the table as the three of us stood in silence. Then Babette’s face opened up; she palmed her mouth and her eyes dilated. “I’m so sorry.”

I feigned a smile without speaking, then nodded.

“Gosh—I’m embarrassed.”

“What you guys talkinabout?” Sophie perked up. This was something she’d started asking lately, whenever adults spoke in nontoddler-inflected voices.

Sarah stroked Sophie’s hair and said it was nothing. Moses’s head reared up from the couch.

Babette came over to me. “Jordan was my old boss. I worked for them for so many years.”

Then she reached out for a hug, her body soft against mine.

“I hope you’re not offended. I must be getting old!”

Sarah leaned her head, pretending to doze off behind her.

“It happens,” I said.

After Babette packed up to leave, I walked her to the door. She spoke before I could. “Did you hear back?”

I was confused. “About what?”

“The job for my husband?”

I couldn’t believe her gall. “I’ve only started asking about it. I need more time.”

“I really appreciate what you’re doing for us, so thank you.”

“Listen,” I started. “Sarah and I are hoping to talk to you on Friday. Just for a few minutes after work?”

“Of course,” she said. Her face stiffened for a moment as she pulled out her glasses from her bag. “I’m really sorry I called you Jordan,” she said. I could see under the light that her lenses were slicked with grime.

The next evening, Sarah skipped Sophie’s bath and got her down early. I waited for her in the living room with a glass of seltzer, avoiding alcohol’s dulling effect. Sarah poured herself a sip of the Orvieto we’d brought back from Umbria the previous summer.

“You still in a mood?” she asked.

“Just thinking about Babette.”

“I feel like maybe I was a little rash before,” she said. “I was getting sentimental thinking about how sweet she was with Sophie as a newborn. The way she was with her bottle. We were lucky to find her when we did.”

I was surprised by her soft turn. “I know,” I said. “But I was thinking about what you said about the family before.”

“Oh?” Moses sat still beside her feet. “So you think she’s got to go?”

I stopped short of an about-face. “The prospect of hiring someone new is daunting. I’ve been torn,” I said. “But clearly now Babette’s naps are a pattern.”

“I knew the nannies talked behind our backs, but that clip was excessive.”

I nodded in agreement. “And look,” I said, pointing to a small stain on the carpet. “Babette used to clean stuff like this. She’s letting a lot slip.”

Sarah pursed her lips at me. “My mom offered to help us out if we needed it. She thinks we should let her go too.”

Tired of water, I got up to pour myself wine. “So, how do we do this? We’re supposed to tell Babette we’ve been surveilling her?”

“In the state of New York, it’s entirely legal to have a camera installed on your property for protection.”

I pictured Sarah, hunched over her laptop, devouring the stipulations of law.

“Sophie brought it to our attention, anyway,” she said. “We don’t have a nanny cam, technically. We’ve never monitored Babette before. It’s only by chance that we found this out.”

“I suppose we’re simply confirming something that Sophie told us,” I said. The wine caused a band of heat to form in the middle of my face. “I already told Babette we needed to speak to her on Friday.”

Sarah set her glass down and inched closer to me. “Wow, babe,” she said. Her energy shifted suddenly. She looked at her phone and clicked something closed before tossing it onto the couch. Then she shooed Moses away with her foot.

She mounted me. I stared at her mouth. She kissed me hard and bit my lip. Gripping my throat, she rose over me. We had fucked in the living room after finding out she was pregnant again, which before then we hadn’t done in months. As she started sucking my neck, I noticed the glossy white cat feeder in the corner of the room, with its tiny light on.

When Friday arrived, I felt nervous. I’d never fired anyone; we had scripted talking points.

Sophie buried her face in her alligator stuffie in the living room. “My love, what are you doing?” I asked her.

“She’s been silly all day, this one. I tell you.” Babette wore her burgundy Juicy hoodie with rhinestones, the one her husband had gotten her last Christmas. She sat in the chair beside me.

Sarah hovered in the kitchen, making herself tea.

“So, what did you guys get up to today?” she asked. She eyed me as she dipped her tea bag.

“Aw, we had a lot of fun, huh, Soph?” Babette pitched her head as she spoke. “We drew. We played restaurant. We went to the playground with Grace and Mikey.”

Sarah sat in one of the chairs facing us.

“Sophie climbed the big ladder all by herself. Even Mikey’s still too scared!” Babette chuckled.

Sophie looked up. “He’s scared.” She bared her tiny teeth at me.

“Thanks for making some time to talk with us,” I said. “Firstly, we want to thank you for how wonderful you’ve been with Sophie. I don’t think we tell you that enough. From the first time we met you, you never stopped teaching us how to be parents.”

Sarah widened her eyes at me. Babette mumbled some appreciation; her hands lay cupped in her lap.

“And we know just how exhausting the work can be,” Sarah interjected.

I stared back at her. “We’ve been thinking a lot about Sophie and how the next few years will play out, preparing to start pre-school, deciding what her schedule will be like.”

Babette nodded along.

“A lot is changing,” I said. “And we feel like we too need to make a change.”

I could only look at Babette for another second. Instead, I focused on a new, small stain on the Moroccan rug. A dry discoloration camouflaged by the spiral pattern near her feet.

“What you guys talkinabout?” Sophie had clued in to the room’s changing tenor. Her face was blank, innocent.

Sarah got up and grabbed Sophie to sit on her lap.

“Our childcare needs have evolved, Babette,” I continued. “And we’re really sorry, but we’re going to have to let you go.”

She looked down, hanging her head. Then she looked over at Sophie. “What?” she said finally. “I’m shocked. I didn’t think it was this—I thought I was getting a raise!”

“We’re giving you a month’s severance, and we’ll write a good review for you on the Tribeca Nannies site. You’ll find another family to work with,” I assured her.

“It’s not even been three years.” Babette’s eyes filled with tears. “You said how much finding someone for the long term was important to you all when I first interviewed. Someone to grow with Sophie. I was so sure I would be with you all for ten years at least. I love Sophie so much. I can’t bear to think about leaving her.”

Babette looked for Sophie again, but she was resting against Sarah’s shoulder. Sarah kissed the top of Sophie’s head.

“I know this is hard,” I said. “It’s been such a tough decision for us too.”

“Tell me—why are you firing me? What have I done? I’ve only ever been good to you.”

Babette’s voice grew loud. Moses darted across the carpet, startling me.

“Sophie needs more active engagement, someone who’s able to scrabble around on the floor with her.”

“But you knew that wasn’t me when you hired me. And I do play with her, entertain her, all the time. I never mislead you.”

I lowered my voice a bit. “Sophie said you were sleeping during the day.”

“What?” Babette looked indignant. “I only ever rest my head when she naps. I never sleep!” She paused momentarily and raised her fist to her mouth. “I thought you were decent people. But I’m a fool.”

I stood up and glanced at the cat feeder. Moses feasted from it now. “Babette, you don’t even clean anymore,” I said. “We come home to dirty dishes.”

“Now you’re really lying,” Babette yelled.

“Look.” I pointed at the stains on the rug. “Why are there stains?” I was angry now. “That’s unacceptable.”

Sophie started to cry, sniffling. She covered her face. Sarah rose and took Sophie down the hall to her room.

“This isn’t you,” Babette said quietly. “She’s putting you up to it.”

“It is me, Babette,” I said. “I’m firing you.”

She started to weep. I sat with her for a minute as she gathered herself, then led her to the door. Her sobs echoed in the empty hall as I shut the door behind her.

On Monday morning, when I left the bathroom after showering, Moses loped down the hallway and clawed my toes. I splayed myself against the wall, failing to deter him by flicking water from my feet. I ran away and finally closed him off from my room to get dressed for work.

“Are you starting to feel relieved?” Sarah asked when I came into the kitchen. “I’m proud when I think about how you handled it. We did the right thing, babe.” She pinched some sea salt onto my overnight oats and fed me the first bite. “I’ve already found a woman I love,” she said. “Early education degree. Young. Vibrant. Well slept.”

Sarah’s mom was heading into town soon to help for a bit. I wished my mom could do the same, and I realized then that Babette would never drive me to basketball again. In truth, I was wary of another nanny—the way a new person in the house inevitably reveals and refracts new aspects of yourself.

“She’s coming on Wednesday to meet us,” Sarah said. She came close to me. “Today’s going to be a good day,” she said. “I can feel it.”

After a strategy meeting later that day, I returned to my office to find an email from Sarah. The subject line: XoX. I turned away from the screen, incredulous. The sole relief of the last days was not having to confront another one of these videos; it was gratuitous at this point. I almost didn’t open it. But when I looked again, I saw that the clip was dark—nighttime—and the view of our living room was dim. After I pressed play, it took a minute to distinguish the large form on the couch as two people. I watched the bright points of my eyes peering back at me. Sarah and I were having sex.

I got up to close my office door. When I came back to resume the clip, Sarah moved slowly on top of me as I reached into her hair. My face flushed before my computer screen to witness it; I’d never seen myself in this way, in the motion of fucking. The clip was just over twelve minutes. I scrolled ahead, impatient, our positions staggering and changing. Toward the end, Sarah had come to sit behind me. She held a hand roughly over my mouth as she reached around. My lips now were dry while I watched her stroking me, watched her muffling my moans as she finished me off. The clip stopped abruptly. I sat back in my chair and stared at the final frame. I remembered this moment, just before I’d gone to the kitchen to get a towel. Right before I’d crouched down on my bare knees and tried to scrub clean the stain I’d left on the rug.

12 Contemporary Poetry Collections to Read Based on Your Chinese Zodiac

Posted on February 16, 2026February 12, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Time is such a slippery thing! How do we count it? By books read, conversations had, people loved, or lost? As we approach the Lunar New Year, I am struck by the many ways different cultures mark the passage of time. For my Korean family, the Lunar New Year held the anticipation and gifts of Christmas, the feasting of Thanksgiving, and was always accompanied by storytelling for the beginning of a new animal year.

In writing my debut poetry collection Brine Orchid, I kept thinking about how the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, shape our experiences of the world around us, and even our own identities. In my poems, myths intertwined with family legends, immigration records echoed Bible stories, and fairytales from both Asian and North American experience tangled into a way of understanding my own multicultural identity. One of my favorite stories was of the Great Race and the Chinese Zodiac—I loved the idea that we each have an animal counterpart whose action parallel our own character and destiny. The myth of the Great Race is one way of keeping time: Since the Han dynasty, months and years were split into 12-part cycles with accompanying animals, stories, lucky numbers, favored flowers, and more. According to legend, the Jade Emperor called the animals to a race that included crossing a vast river, and the animals were given their place in the zodiac based on the order they completed the race—an unexpected sequence impacted by their dispositions, choices, strengths, and methods for crossing the river. Many were intertwined with one another—the snake wrapped around the horse to be carried to the finish line, the rat rode on the kind oxen’s back across the river, the goat, monkey, and rooster worked together to cross the water on a raft—and some believe we carry these relationships with us into our own lives.

As the Year of the Snake wanes and the Year of the Horse waxes, celebrate this Lunar New Year by connecting with a new book of poetry, perhaps based on your or a loved one’s zodiac animal. What qualities, energies, and luck do we hope for, look toward, and carry with us into the future? Which animal are you, and how might its strengths and weaknesses map onto the music of poetry? Find out!

Rat

1924, 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008, 2020

Quick-witted, resourceful, versatile, kind

Let the Moon Wobble by Ally Ang

As the famed winner of the Chinese Zodiac Race, the Rat—and the people born in its years—are believed to overcome all odds to achieve their goals. Like this zodiac sign, Let the Moon Wobble breaks rules of form, denies borders, enjambs lines, and overcomes distances with creativity, resourcefulness, and wit. When faced with impossible or uncomfortable questions, the poet says, “I lie / like I always do.” The ungovernable beauty of this collection is messy, wild, joyful, grieving, and triumphant.

Ox

1925, 1937, 1949, 1961, 1973, 1985, 1997, 2009, 2021

Diligent, dependable, strong, determined

I Always Carry My Bones by Felicia Zamora

Known for persistence verging on stubbornness, reliability, industriousness, and unpretentious practicality, people born in the Year of the Ox are believed to be both gentle and capable. Embodying this zodiac, I Always Carry My Bones is diligent in its many “carryings”—of heritage, body, archive, evidence, anger, and hope. There is a determination throughout the collection to honor culture and survival. “You are not alone” the poems repeat, both fiercely and kindly. “Your migration: / to protect our story; an evolution to that which they cannot devour.” With an oxen’s profound strength, this collection perseveres, illuminates, and persists.

Tiger

1926, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, 2010, 2022

Brave, confident, competitive

Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves

The zodiac Tiger sign is not only an emblem of strength, courage, work ethic, and luck—it is also known to exorcize evil. Best Barbarian rages, sings, and writhes against the violences of racism and colonialism with the Tiger’s ferocity, power, and leadership. “How else shall I carry the abyss /Between us other than as fire” these poems demand. With an anger at injustice that roars and a terrifying beauty, Best Barbarian and the Tiger both shine brightly in the darkest places.

Rabbit

1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999, 2011, 2023

Quiet, elegant, kind, responsible

Maybe the Body by Asa Drake

Witty, sensitive, ingenious, and adaptive, people born in the Year of the Rabbit balance sincerity and anxiety with genuineness. Maybe the Body, too, is rich with the urgency and stress that come from earnestly loving others and knowing they can be lost. Rabbits are considered marked by longevity and prosperousness, but books like this ask—is it luck, or is it actually skill and vigilance that create our fortune? Only a poetry collection as clever as this one, deftly turning over and over many different kinds of love, can match a sign that is, at once, gentle, and elegant and shrewd and warning: “When I feed the animals / the rabbit stands up /so straight she falls over. / This is the part I want / you to know. We are / that kind of animal.”

Dragon

1928, 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000, 2012, 2024

Confident, intelligent, enthusiastic

Leaving Biddle City by Marianne Chan

Inventive, playful, and richly mythological, Leaving Biddle City embraces the Dragon zodiac’s paradoxes. With one foot in Michigan and the other in the Philippines, these poems manage to be both confident and tentative as they navigate multicultural identity: “I forget sometimes that we are ancient and holy.” Circling and repeating language and form, the dragon coils on itself, questioning reason, memory, and the impossibility of identity and new beginnings. Goal-oriented and romantic, people born in the Year of the Dragon are the rarest zodiac sign, and it is fitting to match the sign with the keenest sense of self and identity with a book that is “[a]lways moving. Always starting over.”

Snake

1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013, 2025

Enigmatic, intelligent, wise

Self-Mythology by Saba Keramati

If you were born in the Year of the Snake, you might have the serpent’s sensitivity, wisdom, passion, and suspicious nature. In the zodiac myth, the snake springs ahead of the horse in the race, defying expected order through cleverness and surprise. Self-Mythology is a miracle, both sensitive and sensual, whether depicting medical trauma, a family origin story, or an intimate encounter, these poems do so with delicate lyric and restless form. From abecedarian to erasure to ghazal, the poems are intimate, beautiful, and hungry. As Keramati writes: “Oh, there is more of me on / the inside. Oh, it is eating me alive.”

Horse

1930, 1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002, 2014, 2026

Animated, active, energetic

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket by Kinsale Drake

People born in the Year of the Horse are known for their confidence, initiative, and enthusiasm that can rush into impatience. Only a poetry collection like The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket can reach the horses’ exuberant momentum and boundless energy. With sharp humor, solemn remembrance, vivid imagery, and shining ethnomusicology, these poems illuminate: “How do I start a story I never lived? / I think I remember stories because they are violent. / Or because there is music.” These poems write and rewrite, trace and retrace our world with dancing light and vivid music.

Goat

1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003, 2015, 2027

Calm, gentle, sympathetic

The Lengest Neoi by Stephanie Choi

With insight, care, ingenuity, and love, this poetry collection does what people born in the Year of the Goat do so well with their creativity, compassion, artistic spirit, and desire for everyone to get along. The Lengest Neoi recognizes obstacles to harmony and the pains of racism, disconnection, and diaspora, while drawing us closer together. This is a book that navigates the granular details that make us up—tattoos, teeth, hair, names—with creative form, high emotional intelligence, and deep compassion. These poems invite us into the intimacies of navigating multicultural experience, whether puzzling through migrations in a crossword puzzle poem or turning over and over the translations of a name. People from this year might not feel lucky, but they make others lucky by proximity, and Choi’s book does this too, with capaciousness and generosity.

Monkey

1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004, 2016, 2028

Sharp, smart, curiosity

The Museum of Small Bones by Miho Nonaka

In my opinion, people born in the Year of the Monkey need to be celebrated more, and so does Museum of Small Bones. With clever eyes, excellent memories, and dexterous strategy, people born in this year catch things no one else does, and this poetry collection rewards careful reading. Alight with transparent objects—glass marbles, glimmering goldfish, unwinding silk—these poems are more than they seem, gleaming with mystery, beauty, sensitivity, and a curiosity and intelligence characteristic of the zodiac’s Monkey. Nonaka’s keen eye traces the relationships between objects and people, managing to sensitively navigate nuances in both Japanese and American culture. “I dreamed of a power // to make small, imperceptible things / perceptible,” the poet explains. You will be rewarded for looking more than once!

Rooster

1933, 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005, 2017, 2029

Observant, hardworking, courageous

Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf

If you were born in the Year of the Rooster, you might be the one to call out things for what they are. This is exactly what Consider the Rooster does so remarkably—with wonder, surprise, intensity, condemnation, and heart. This is among the largest poetry books on my shelf! Its poems shift and shimmer in fragmented forms across pages, at once loud, funny, dark, and dazzlingly queer. This book wields poetry to sound the alarms on injustice, celebrate the more-than-human world, and shine light into liminal spaces. As Bendorf puts it in his coy, courageous way: “I offer you my bright dumb / hopes for democracy. May your vote always / be counted.”

Dog

1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006, 2018, 2030

Loyal, honest, prudent

murmurations by Anthony Thomas Lombardi

Folks born in the Year of the Dog are devoted, straightforward, and full of passion—and so is murmurations. Like a full-chested song, this debut poetry collection shimmers with exuberance, tinged with the worshipful quality of a hymn. As an addict himself, the poet imagines a world in which Amy Winehouse had recovered her addiction and survived, weaving fragments from her stepwork journal with energetic lyric poems on faith, loss, and hope: “how do i make room / for all this grief? . . . or is it grief / that needs to / make room for me?” Perhaps the most notable of the Dog’s characteristics is loyalty, and these poems pledge loyalty to living, to sobriety, to an undying love for Amy Winehouse, with an energy and lyricism that is unforgettable.

Pig

1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019, 2031

Compassionate, generous, diligent

Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man by Jose Hernandez Diaz

Sincere, community-oriented, and determined, Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man celebrates Mexican American experience, sings with surrealism, and refuses to rush at anyone’s pace but its own. The zodiac Boar is an emblem of wealth, honesty, and practicality. Just as Diaz’s collection reflects the poet’s own principles and identity through image and grounded poetic forms, Boars are down-to-earth, diligent, substantial, and trustworthy omens of good fortune. This book of odes “abandons the hierarchies” of language, culture, and even animal races.

9 Memoirs About Dating, Desire, and Reclamation

Posted on February 13, 2026February 13, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

As someone who has been married for twenty years, I have heard Valentine’s Day dismissed as “a day for amateurs.” And yet for people actively dating or searching for love, it still carries undeniable allure. Long before it became about roses and prix fixe menus, Valentine’s Day was shaped by a legend of devotion and defiance tied to a saint who honored love against social constraint.

The lived experience of wanting, however, is far messier, more revealing, and more instructive than any single night can capture. When I was a magazine editor-in-chief in the 1990s and early aughts, publicly dispensing dating advice as the “Dating Diva” in talk shows and columns, I was also privately navigating my own search for love. I consumed advice books like The Rules and listened to psychics, tarot card readers, and therapists while internalizing cultural tenets about how love was supposed to unfold. My path was circuitous, but eventually and against all odds, I found my “one.”

The following reading list includes books I wish I had access to during that time. Their circumstances vary, but together, they offer a realistic counterpoint to Valentine’s Day myths, and a clearer understanding of what it really meant to search for love. These authors tell deeply personal stories in compelling prose and, in some cases, weave in research or cultural critique. They explore the emotional labor behind first swipes and cultural expectations, the intentional pauses in pursuit, and the hard-won reinventions that follow devastating disappointment. And most of them add in a much-needed dose of humor, because if you can’t laugh about the travails of love, then what are you doing? Most importantly, they remind us that the pursuit of connection should always lead us back to ourselves.

A psychic once told me during my search, “Your love is in you.” The line stayed with me long after I found myself, and love.

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

In Everything I Know About Love, British journalist and podcaster Dolly Alderton chronicles the chaotic early years of dating, friendship, disordered eating, partying, and growing up, using sharp humor and emotional candor to capture what it feels like to want love before knowing how to ask for it. Structured as a collage of personal essays, text messages, lists (“The Most Annoying Things People Say”), recipes (“The Seducer’s Sole Meunière”), and “Bad Date Diaries,” the memoir mirrors the messiness of real life and romantic longing. Alderton moves swiftly through breakups, nights out, getting drunk, getting dumped, and intense female friendships, tracing how romantic pursuit often runs parallel to the deeper work of self-definition. Therapy eventually helps her leave behind destructive patterns as she approaches thirty, but the book resists a tidy redemption arc. More than a dating memoir, this is a coming-of-age story that argues that friendship and self-knowledge gained from heartbreak can be just as formative and sustaining as romantic love.

Quirkyalone by Sasha Cagen

In Quirkyalone, Sasha Cagen challenges a dating culture that treats singlehood as a problem to be solved. After years of navigating a romantic landscape that made her feel single life was a waiting room for love, Cagen began questioning whether romantic partnership was the only measure of fulfillment. Rejecting rules-driven romance and the pressure to pair off, she proposes treating singlehood as a creatively generative state. A “quirkyalone,” she explains, is someone who enjoys being single without rejecting the possibility of partnership. Blending personal reflection with interviews, graphics, pop culture references like Will & Grace and Sex and the City, and profiles of quirkyalones throughout history such as Queen Elizabeth I, Nina Simone, and Gloria Steinem, the book reframes single life as a meaningful chapter rather than a holding pattern. By introducing concepts like “quirkytogether” and “quirkyslut,” Quirkyalone expands the vocabulary around intimacy, sex, and independence and invites readers to cultivate fulfillment now.

When Longing Becomes Your Lover by Amanda McCracken

Amanda McCracken’s memoir examines what happens when romantic fixation replaces intimacy and wanting takes on a life of its own. Writing from the perspective of a journalist and late-in-life virgin, McCracken explores limerence, an obsessive rumination on idealized partners, through personal narrative and research. Drawing from her widely read New York Times essays “Is It a Crush or Have You Fallen Into Limerence?” and “Does My Virginity Have a Shelf Life?” and her experiences with emotionally unavailable “anchor men,” she interrogates the idea of longing as a replacement for real emotional intimacy. The memoir blends storytelling with psychological insight, revealing how fantasy can eclipse presence and real connection. McCracken ultimately reframes longing as something that must be disentangled from inherited scripts and childhood hero fantasies about romance. Rather than offering a quick fix, she traces how this shift reshapes her behavior, expectations, and emotional availability. Learning to imagine love differently allows her to move beyond fixation and into genuine intimacy, ultimately leading to marriage and a relationship grounded in reality.

And You May Find Yourself . . . by Sari Botton

Sari Botton’s memoir-in-essays speaks directly to her experience of reevaluating love, ambition, desire, and reinvention later in life, when familiar romantic narratives no longer fit. The memoir moves between youthful missteps made to fit in with mean girls, misguided efforts to please men, fraught friendships, and professional dissatisfaction, alongside a present-day reckoning with who she has become. Botton writes with humor and clarity about bad therapists, “Mr. Wrongs,” and the exhaustion of contorting herself to meet expectations that were never really hers. As old identities fall away, she explores how desire shifts with age and self-acceptance. Grounded in feminist reflection and emotional honesty, the book offers a reassuring perspective, showing that intimacy and fulfillment can emerge from inhabiting one’s authentic self, flaws and all, with patience and self-awareness. Once Botton reaches that realization, she ultimately finds the intimacy she was seeking in a satisfying relationship and marriage.

Group by Christie Tate

In Group, Christie Tate turns to an unexpected structure to confront her struggles with intimacy: group therapy. After years of emotional avoidance and unsatisfying relationships, Tate tells her therapist, “I suck at relationships and I’ll die alone.” His response is blunt. In group, he tells her, all her secrets will come out. What follows is a memoir that unfolds through therapy sessions and increasingly uncomfortable “prescriptions,” ranging from calling a group member to ask for affirmation to more extreme real-world challenges: telling the man she desires that she is a “cocktease,” celebrating her anger after she leaves the therapist a furious voicemail, and inviting a man over solely to kiss for five minutes. Over time, the group becomes a kind of chorus, offering reflection, resistance, and accountability as Tate learns to sit with discomfort and pain rather than flee it. That work eventually carries into her romantic life, where she builds the secure relationship and marriage she once believed was impossible.

The Dry Season by Melissa Febos

In The Dry Season, Melissa Febos begins with a radical question: What happens when we stop pursuing romance altogether? After a toxic relationship with a woman she calls “The Maelstrom,” Febos commits to a year of celibacy, not as punishment or deprivation, but as a deliberate act of reclamation. Moving between lived experience and reflection, Febos examines how desire, validation, and attachment have shaped her sense of self. When a spiritual advisor tells her she is a “user” of people, Febos confronts shame directly, writing, “The trick of shame is that it only becomes visible once you set it down.” Drawing on religious communities and feminist foremothers, she situates her personal divestment within a lineage of women who pursued autonomy and purpose outside romantic frameworks. By the end, Febos emerges ready to receive love, no longer defined by longing or seduction, but by presence and intention.

Nothing Personal by Nancy Jo Sales

Nothing Personal by Nancy Jo Sales details her midlife immersion into app-based dating culture, blending memoir, reportage, and cultural critique. As she navigates the then new app Tinder, and situationships with men much younger than her at age 49, Sales situates her experiences within a broader examination of how technology reshapes intimacy, often to women’s detriment. In between personal encounters and interviews with app users, app company executives and experts, she exposes the emotional toll of endless choice driven by impersonal algorithms. Sales reveals her addiction to the apps and her endless search for mind-blowing sex, coupled with her sharp observations on dick pics, sexting, and the commodification of desire, while becoming a leading critic of the industry through her journalism at Vanity Fair and her HBO documentary “Swiped.” Rather than offering easy solutions, Nothing Personal asks what intimacy means when connection is mediated by screens, and how self-worth can possibly survive in a culture designed to keep us swiping.

Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

This memoir opens with journalist Janet Mock preparing to tell her boyfriend her most closely held secret: that she is transgender. This is a moment that frames the memoir’s exploration of intimacy, vulnerability, and self-reclamation. Mock weaves personal narrative with social and cultural analysis, examining how race, gender, class, and desire intersect in her life as a trans woman of color. As she traces her path toward womanhood, including the physical transition, first with hormones, later through surgery in Thailand, Mock speaks about dating and romance and sex within a larger reckoning with identity, safety, and belonging. She writes how personal relationships are shaped by expectations, particularly around disclosure and risk, including moments when Mock recognizes how beauty can function as a form of social advantage, and how she uses hers to fit in where other trans people are unable to. Dating is addressed not just as a personal challenge, but as a political and emotional negotiation shaped by economic and societal constraints. Redefining Realness shows how claiming the right to define oneself reshapes not only how we love (and Mock does get her happy ending), but also, how we survive.

Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins

Nichole Perkins explores desire with humor and a bit of hubris, writing from the perspective of a Southern Black woman navigating sex, longing and power on her own terms. Told as a memoir-in-essays, the book moves between personal experience and pop culture touchstones from Prince and Janet Jackson’s power anthem Control to Niles Crane and his love for Daphne on Frasier. Perkins writes openly about crushes, fantasy, sex, and pleasure without apology, including the ways dominance and submission shape her relationships. She resists packaging her experiences into lessons, allowing longing for love to remain unresolved across essays that cover sexuality, religion, family, mental health, body image, and how misogyny and cultural myths shape how Black women’s desire for love and connection is policed and fetishized. Even the dripping peach on the cover signals what the book insists on naming: sex, pleasure, and the right to claim them for herself.

A Collaborative Story Collection That Spans Three Languages

Posted on February 13, 2026February 11, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Vi Khi Nào and Lily Hoàng’s collaborative text Timber & Lụa is a trilingual collection of ten short stories, each presented in Vietnamese, English, and a sui generis hybrid of the two, Vietlish. The book is structured to make its multilingualism legible and accessible: English is presented on the verso side, Vietnamese on the recto, while Vietlish sections are paired with an index of translated terms facing each page of narrative. The book’s glossary functions not unlike the Folger editions’ expansions of Shakespeare’s anachronistic language, providing guidance without foreclosing an experimental playfulness. Readers are free to move between versions—or remain with just one—and much pleasure of the text can be found in noticing which phrases are retained and which are transformed in the Vietlish.

With Nào and Hoàng’s signature styles of experimentation blending together, the resulting text is a cross narrative exploration of linguistic points that extract worlds populated by squids who are stars, Judith Butler-quoting sex robots, esophagus-swimming minnows, and lachyrimal episodes between cross-species lovers that threaten to last for millions of years. Interwoven in these plot points, which contort linearity until it’s an unrecognizable secret, is a surreal world not wholly unlike material reality: These characters still need to eat, make love, give birth, even as they morph into posthuman entities that defy easy taxonomy. These plot points invigorate the imagination as they shift quickly from one episode to the next. One moment we’re glimpsing an argument between lovers, and the next our narrator is contemplating the implications of growing a banana penis in her womb.

Timber & Lụa is a bridge between languages that generously holds the reader even as it destabilizes concrete presuppositions of separate cultures, which mirrors the ways in which the authors’ distinctive voices coalesce into a winking singularity of narrative finesse and postmodern exploration. The resulting text expands the boundaries of what is possible both narratively and linguistically. This collection elevates translation from a this-or-that dichotomy into a space of an intermingling, cross-pollinating and continent-traversing ellipse (or ellipses . . . ) that evokes notes of Samuel Beckett’s self-translation and a rich tradition of Viet texts.

Nào and Hoàng offered some of their time and thoughts on the nature of a collaborative text, obsession, and the complexities of working together in translation.

Rory Strong: Writing is often seen as an individualistic pursuit of the self—the myth of the “solitary genius” is still a dominant (often masculinized) paradigm of the Serious Author. As collaborators, how do you feel your influences blend together to form something that is neither wholly Vi Khi Nào nor Lily Hoàng but a “secret third thing” (as the meme goes) that muddies the mythology of a singular voice and instead opts for the genesis of a narrative that expands possibility via the creation of a third, collaborative voice that contains both fractions of self and a unified whole?

Vi Khi Nào: While I am uncertain if my collaboration with Lily is the “secret third thing” in question, the concept evokes Margery Wolf’s A Thrice Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. This work employs a similar tripartite structure to ours—hers being fictional, ethnographic, and article-based renderings of a single event from her Taiwanese research—to give birth to a feminist anthropological response to postmodernist critiques. We, however, craft our feminist response by refracting a single story through a triad of linguistic prisms: Vietnamese, English, and Vietlish.

RS: While the postmodern voices in Timber & Lụa differ greatly from each other and from Wolf’s model, we have, as you noted, forged a singular “third thing”—a unique feminist dimension emerged from the fusion of self, language, typography, and a fraction of that coalesced sum became Timber & Lụa.

Lily Hoàng: In my teaching, I actively work against the myth of the suffering genius writer. Last year, I taught a collaboration workshop for the first time, and as my students collaborated on the first day of class, the room erupted with laughter. Afterwards, my students reported that they never knew writing could bring them so much joy. Did they create the highest art? Probably not, but they had fun. Similarly, I have never laughed so much while writing as I did collaborating with Vi. I, too, had not realized that writing could make me feel joy. In particular because Vi and I collaborated in real time, I had the opportunity to watch her brain work in response to mine—and let me tell you: Vi has an incredible brain!

Collaboration forces our writing into unexpected territory. It requires both collaborators to be extremely flexible and lithe. When Vi and I first began collaborating, we worked in English only. Those stories were okay, but something really transcendent occurred when we added Vietnamese into the mix. When we began generating our collaborative stories in Vietlish, a powerful new thing popped into being. It was instantly right, like a big bold epiphany, and it was only possible because we were collaborating. Whereas individually, Vi and I had used Vietnamese words in our writing (and Vi, of course, also translates), I wouldn’t have had the audacity to try to use more than a smattering of Vietnamese words across an entire book. Somehow, together, Vietlish was simply the correct language, and it wouldn’t have been possible for me to even think up, had I been writing on my own.

RS: Were there any unique challenges or unexpected discoveries that emerged in the process of exploring these linguistic traditions?

VKN: Translation is an immensely time-consuming process. Given the experimental nature of both the original text and our approach, there was a point where a single Vietnamese sentence took us an hour to translate. What I truly admired about working with Lily was her commitment to precision, no matter how long it took. Also, the process revealed a deeper layer to her identity beyond that of a writer; beneath her literary composition lies a whole ecosystem of sorrow, heartache, death, and hiếu thảo (filial piety) that informs and underpins her work and her profound love for Vietnamese language and culture.

RS: In Timber & Lụa, the pieces are initially presented with a hybrid of English and Vietnamese sharing the page and a translation guide on the recto side. Later, stories are printed fully in English (verso) and fully in Vietnamese (recto), but I was really struck by the experience of reading the Vietlish pages. What influenced your decision to make this a linguistically hybrid work?

VKN: Prior to adopting the tripartite model, I was finishing writing a Vietlish poetry manuscript titled: Reverse Abyss. This project, which employs mathematical equations and Vietnamese diction to capture the period before my second open-heart surgery, inspired me to suggest to Lily that we organically shift to the tripartite model. A few months ago, while discussing our collaboration, my sister Uyên introduced me to the work of Tree Vo, a queer Vietnamese Instagram influencer and comedian. She is a master of storytelling using the informal genre of “Vietlish.” She’s part of a growing group of creators in this experimental “lexical” space. I find this tongue-and-cheek “genre” to be uniquely accessible, relatable, and emotionally powerful.

Last year, I taught a collaboration workshop and the room erupted with laughter. My students reported that they never knew writing could bring them so much joy.

LH: When Vi and I first started collaborating, we wrote in English only. And it was OK. Whereas Vi had a lot of experience collaborating, I hadn’t. I’d published two books that look like collaborations, but that’s just the surface of things: For Unfinished, I asked fifteen or so writers for stories that they started but couldn’t finish, things in their “Unfinished” files, and I finished the stories for them; and in The Mute Kids, I asked 140+ writers for a sentence or stanza of their work, and I used those words as the basis for a piece of flash. In both these books, I did collaborate with other writers, but ultimately, the end result was something I made. I just used their words as source material. So when I started writing with Vi, my concept of collaborative writing was skewed. I was used to a kind of collaboration that wasn’t actually collaboration, by which I mean, I had a difficult time acclimating to legit collaboration.

A few years later, we tried again. Coming off a Vietnamese lesson (my amazing grad student Gin To was teaching me how to read and write in Viet), I talked to Vi about a few punny words, and we just started generating a story with both languages. And it was magical. It was like something just clicked into place and we found the correct method to collaborate and make art together.

RS: Regarding the nitty-gritty of writing in collaboration, could you share a little bit on what your process was like? For example, would one of you begin with a story idea and then share it with the other, or was it a more granular, sentence-by-sentence collaboration along the lines of perhaps an exquisite corpse-like process? Or something else entirely?

VKN: Our collaboration began with a structured, turn-by-turn approach, where we would alternate sentences—sentence-by-sentence as you say—to build a story. As the projects evolved—particularly our narrative set in the mid-27th century—our process became more fluid and organic, with each of us writing in a more integrated fashion.

We watched each other, constantly, and we wrote one sentence at a time, switching back and forth.

While we met frequently during the Covid-19 pandemic, our sessions have since become less regular due to increasing professional commitments. Our collaboration was nearly over when the true burden of the Vietnamese translation became apparent. The workload felt intensely one-sided. When we first began the project, Lily informed me that she could barely read, write, or speak the language and was only learning it incrementally on Duolingo. In contrast, I have a stronger foundation from voraciously reading Vietnamese literature. To compensate for the imbalance, Lily proposed using reserved funds from her professorship to hire professional translators from the U.S. and Vietnam. This solution, however, introduced new problems, primarily the bureaucratic red tape involved in paying them.

LH: Timber & Lụa was written on Zoom and Google docs. We watched each other, constantly, and we wrote one sentence at a time, switching back and forth. We didn’t start by talking through a story. We just wrote.

RS: Sometimes as a reader, I pick up on what I perceive as the obsessions of the author. This book seems to have obsessions, or at least fascinations, with food, transhuman identities, and relationships (to name a few). Do you feel you each have obsessions as a writer? And if so, how do the obsessions of two artists meet—what do they say to each other?

VKN: My obsession, it seems, is that I produce books too frequently, which is counterproductive and is at odds with a publishing culture that prefers a slower, more measured pace of output. When two artists meet they say: “Chữ tài liền với chữ tai một vần” (Talent and misfortune share the same rhyme).

Vi and I both think in books.

LH: Oh yeah, Vi and I both have our own obsessions as writers, and I think a close reader can catch the difference. In particular, Vi has a very specific diction and I have a very specific syntax. There are words that find themselves in many Vi Khi Nào books, and they exist in this one, too. Similarly, I am obsessed with punctuation, and you can find that in this book, too. Of course, because we both know each other’s particularities, I think there are instances where we will adopt and adapt from each other, and that’s fun to watch and catch!

RS: In the acknowledgments, you thank your “new BFFs,” Google Translate and ChatGPT. The use of AI is contentious in the writing world. Could you speak to your process of incorporating these new technologies in your work?

LH: Vi and I used Google Translate and Chat GPT as the ground floor for our translations. We typed a sentence into each and put them side-by-side, more as a way to conceptualize the grammar of the sentence in Vietnamese, and from there, we wrote our own translation.

I know ChatGPT is contentious, and I’m sure most translators would gasp at our process, but Vietnamese is a complicated language, and only one of us (Vi) has any actual instruction in it. I can say, also, that although we used ChatGPT, by the time we finished translating any single sentence, there was little to no resemblance between what Chat offered and the final translation.

RS: You also mention that some of these pieces were previously published in Denver Quarterly and Puerto del Sol. When you began this project, did you plan on writing a full length collection together?

LH: Vi and I both think in books. Even from the very beginning, we understood that our collaborative efforts would accumulate into a book. There were certainly times along the way that I know I doubted if we could pull it all together as a book, but that is perhaps one of the blessings of writing with another person, especially a person with as much drive, determination, and iron work ethic as Vi Khi Nào.

RS: What would you say to writers who are just setting out or considering working in collaboration?

LH: For years, Vi and I wrote for at least an hour a day, seven days a week. After a while, we had to make it two hours a day, seven days a week. Before collaborating with Vi, I was a pretty flakey person, but working with Vi, I learned to show up, to not make excuses, and to not be late! Before collaborating with Vi, I only wrote during the summer months, when I was free from the burden of teaching. But writing with Vi meant a whole different style of writing for me, one that was foreign and exciting and quite frankly a little scary. But, in the end, we have this amazing book, and I feel such gratitude for Vi and the art we made together.

Poetry Reminds Me of the Holes in My Memory

Posted on February 12, 2026February 11, 2026 by EL Assistant2

Caesura by Victoria Kornick

One of the most common symptoms of an oncoming grand mal seizure is the sense that it has happened before. Déjà vu, like an epileptic seizure, begins as a disturbance running through the temporal lobe of the brain. The sensation of déjà vu, in itself, can be a small seizure. It is possible to have seizures like this—absence seizures, very small seizures, seizures when sleeping—for years without realizing they took place.

The criteria for diagnosing epilepsy is simple: The patient has had two or more seizures, and these seizures have no other known cause. “Have you ever been unable to remember what you were thinking? Have you spaced out, or had a blank period of memory? Did this happen in your childhood? When? How often?” a neurologist might ask.

It is like being called upon as a witness to an event that occurred years earlier, one you can’t remember happening, and about which no one will tell you the date or any particulars. You must swear both to how you felt and how you looked from the outside, on some long-ago, unremarkable night, when you may have left your body.

The year I started writing poetry was also the year I had the worst migraines of my life. I was nineteen, in my second year of college, and enrolled in a workshop for the first time. The genre seemed true to my experience of being alive: images flashing over broken lines, rhythm and meter giving the illusion of familiarity, of a connection or meaning just outside of sense.

It was dark by the time I got back to my dorm after my last class each week. A migraine would begin throbbing on my walk home. By the time I reached my room, I had trouble seeing. I collapsed on the cold concrete floor of the suite’s bathroom and vomited on and off all night. Most of this I can’t remember well, but I had always thought that was simply the nature of the mind: to block out memories of pain so we can keep living.

I had always thought that was simply the nature of the mind: to block out memories of pain so we can keep living.

I thought of these periods as a caesura—the break within a line, a pause between ideas, a moment of breath that gives meaning to what falls around it. Caesura comes from the Latin to cut, though parenthetically, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that “(Some writers appear to have erroneously associated it with cease).” Cease, seize. Seizure, caesura. These are words I want to use, when trying to describe the blank spaces within a line, a night, a life.

The triggers for an epileptic episode, like those for migraine, include loud noises, bright lights, hormonal changes, periods of intense stress. One can be mistaken for the other. A migraine can move so variously, through the brain, the inner ear, the sinuses, the spine, the stomach, the gut. It can be dull or sharp, sudden or take days. It can begin with a spasm firing in the neck, a partial or complete loss of vision, a pulsing ache of blood and nerves in one eye.

“But was there ever a blank space within the sensation of pain?” The doctor looks at you, like you might know the answer. “Did you move your limbs without knowledge or effort? Would you describe your actions during any of these periods as involuntary?”

The primary definition of seizure is in the sense of possession: a sudden and forcible taking hold. Its etymology runs back through the romance languages to Frankish Latin. At the end of the entry, the Oxford English Dictionary hypothesizes its ultimate origin is the Germanic satjan (to place), the root of the verb set.

To set is related to, but more complex than, to sit. It isn’t simply a matter of having an object, like lay is to lie. Set can be transitive or intransitive, reflexive or figurative. Set can refer exclusively to a rabbit in one sense, to a hen in another, or, most often, to the sun. You can be set upon by plagues, set in motion, set a table, set up a scene, set down a law. Setting is definite, though not permanent. What sets can also rise.

It is like seizure in that way—what is seized can be released or reclaimed. Though not necessarily permanent, each can repeat infinitely. The sun sets and sets and sets. The body seizes and seizes and is seized.

On Friday nights in college, after my migraines, I went to parties. Everything then was some degree of a rave, all the house parties, the fraternities, the bars. The terrible pounding of dubstep making it all feel like one long version of the same song. A strobe light flashed somewhere, always, and some guy grabbed you from behind.

When it did happen, the seizure felt incredibly familiar.

Once, a tall, sweaty brick of a frat brother took my glasses off my face, and I had to leap at him, in the strobe light, clawing to locate where he held them in the air, then stretched the temples to fit over his huge, laughing face.

Wouldn’t it have happened then? A seizure I mean. It seems, looking back, so perfectly primed: the flashing lights, the strong emotion, the fatigue. Was it happening, that year, on the nights I had migraines? How can I know what went on in my body in the moments I can’t remember?

When it did happen, the seizure felt incredibly familiar. I was sitting at the dining room table of my childhood home, eating dinner with my parents, my husband next to me.

I lurched forward and thought I would be sick. My parents’ dog started barking, and I felt like I was remembering something, as if I were midway through a book I had just picked up again, or a dream I was trying to reenter. I could almost place it. Then I lost consciousness.

When I came to, I heard a loud, mechanical noise, like a revving engine. I wasn’t aware that any time had passed. I couldn’t see, though I sensed that my eyes were open. I felt hot waves of fury, like I was fighting with someone, though I couldn’t remember whom, or about what.

I saw my mother’s face, then my husband’s face, then my father’s. They were all standing over me. I was still in my chair, though I’d slid down, my head tipped over the backrest, face lifted to the ceiling.

Someone should turn off that machine, I thought, as the sound kept pounding in my ears. I tried to lift myself up, but my hands were too weak to grasp the edge of the seat. There were small points of blood on my palms, where my nails had pierced the skin.

In the emergency room, my husband described what had happened, since I couldn’t. It was strange to hear about myself like this, like a person who wasn’t there.

“She jerked backwards all of a sudden. She got so stiff, and the chair almost fell over. Her head tilted back all the way on her neck, and her hands clenched into fists, shaking really hard at her sides. It was maybe a minute, maybe longer, until she started coming to.”

I learned from the ER doctor that the anger I felt as I regained consciousness was a common neurological symptom. Patients often report strong, random surges of emotion—panic, laughter, tears, ecstasy—as part, sometimes the only part, of a seizure. The machine I heard was an auditory feature, a sound only the person having the seizure can hear.

“Did you convulse in your sleep as a baby? Did you have learning disabilities? Did you seem absent as a child?” A neurologist, a month later, interrogated me as if I had been an observer, and not the child in question.

He asked about the déjà vu I’d described to the emergency room doctor. “What image did you see?”

I said it hadn’t been an image, but a feeling, as if I were about to understand a connection or remember a dream.

“That’s not déjà vu,” he said. “My patients with déjà vu, it’s like they look at the television and think of a glass of water. Like, aha!” He snapped. “A totally random association. And then they have a seizure.”

The neurologist’s disbelief made me hopeful. “Does this mean there’s a chance I didn’t actually have one?”

“Oh no,” he said, looking back at his notes. “You almost certainly have epilepsy. You’re just not very accurate in describing things.”

Poetry accounts for pauses in a way that prose refuses to. This was one of the reasons I loved it: how I could mark the breath of a caesura on the page, how I could scan syllables for emphasis and note line breaks with slash marks, stanza breaks with double slashes.

Poetry accounts for pauses in a way that prose refuses to.

When I teach poetry now, I show my students a line and cover the one below it. What would it mean if you only had access to the first? For example, if I began:

I had a seizure, though perhaps not

It would cast doubt on the fact of the seizure, pausing your reading before you reach the rest of the sentence. Each line is, for a moment, true, even if the next complicates or negates it.

I had a seizure, though perhaps not

my first.

The line break allows for a brief deception, an omission, a doubling in meaning. Enjambment is, in some ways, a trick. But it is also powerful to hold two truths together at once—each line on its own, and what they become together.

Sometimes, prose writers in my class will ask how to use this idea in their work. I want to say that every lesson is applicable, that learning about poetry makes you a better writer of any genre. But caesura and enjambment simply don’t transfer. Maybe, I said once, you could imagine enjambment on a larger scale. Tell a story in parts, perhaps out of order. Let each piece you add change and complicate what came before it.

About a month before my seizure, my husband and I had been in Europe. We each had archives to visit for our dissertation research, but we also went sightseeing, walked for hours, ate late into the evenings, had drinks on patios, befriended strangers.

On a sweltering afternoon in Rome, I started feeling a little strange. I stared down at my pasta, unable to eat. The feeling didn’t abate that night, or the following day, when we travelled to the south of England. The temperature turned cool and crisp. The owner of our bed and breakfast was delightfully eccentric, walking barefoot with us to the grocery store and singing opera in the yard. My husband and I traipsed through gardens, and I spent hours in library special collections. Every afternoon, I was so exhausted, I slept until dinner. I drank cup after cup of tea, and my stomach lurched unsteadily.

We dropped our rental car at Gatwick Airport, before spending a final few days in London. While my husband sat with our luggage at the ground transit Costa Coffee, I restocked a few toiletries at Boots. I considered, as I picked up a box of tampons, whether my period might be late. I saw, at the very bottom of the display, a pregnancy test for only £3.99 and decided it couldn’t hurt to take it.

The one I’d chosen was so basic, its instructions so vague, that as I stood in the airport bathroom stall watching my phone timer, I was holding up the wrong side of the plastic test strip for results. Puzzled, after three minutes, that not even a control line had appeared, I turned the test in my hand. On the other side, I found two bold, fully formed blue stripes. I stared at them, then at the instructions. I stared at the dark, floor-length door of the stall, unable to believe I could be—I was—pregnant. I rushed back to Boots to buy a nicer, name-brand test.

The same teenage cashier rang me up both times. “I hope it’s the result you wanted?” she asked shyly, handing me another pregnancy test. I told her, laughing, that I thought it was.

I reached out to my gynecologist, who suggested taking an antihistamine for the nausea, which I later realized was mostly for sedative purposes. I learned, after the seizure, that antihistamines can be a trigger for epilepsy patients; the second neurologist I saw believed this was certainly to blame. But what, I wondered, of the countless times I’d taken allergy medications in the past? My GP speculated that pregnancy alone may have caused enough stress to lower my seizure threshold.

I kept asking what the seizure meant for our baby, but no one was sure. This was not the doctors’ primary concern. I needed to get more tests. I was only seven weeks pregnant, and an obstetrician hadn’t even confirmed viability.

My crisis in poetry came in graduate school, as my poems grew longer and longer. I didn’t want to omit anything. Still, I felt that what I was writing was poetry—poetry had been the shape my life had taken. My stories so seldom came to a climax.

The difference between poetry and prose can be, at times, difficult to define. One professor told me a poem is circular, the final line recalling each of the preceding lines and changing them. A simple test, he said, was when you finish reading a poem, you want to go back to the beginning and read it again. Prose, by contrast, takes you somewhere new and leaves you there.

I loved this idea, though I found it difficult to apply. After finishing a novel, for instance, I often reopened it and read again from the first page. I realized, eventually, that I wanted poetry and prose to do different things for me. I wrote poetry to replicate the way my life felt. I needed prose to help me understand it.

Seizure and caesura have no common etymology, nor do seize and cease. The constellation of words I wanted to use to describe what happened were related only by sound, that ghost of one thing in another that creates meaning in poetry, but elsewhere, creates no viable connection, much less a conclusion.

As an EEG technician glued electrodes to my head, he told me about how, when his wife was first pregnant, they’d balanced a spoon on her belly to see whether it was a boy or girl. He said this casually, as if this were a test I’d be familiar with. I acted like it was, though later I wished I’d asked more questions.

He finished putting on the last of the electrodes and turned off the lights. When the spoon fell—how it fell was what mattered, though I couldn’t tell from his description why—he felt the urge to weep, an urge he said never left him. “I knew we were having a baby girl, and it changed something in me,” he said, and I could hear from his voice that he was crying again, as he stood at a monitor behind me in the dark room, recording the electrical activity of my brain.

I wrote poetry to replicate the way my life felt. I needed prose to help me understand it.

“You should relax,” he added. “Your High-Betas look like the waves of a very anxious person. But I’m not seeing seizures so far.” He asked me what had happened, that I was having this test now. He asked what the seizure had felt like, and if I was in pain.

“It felt like nothing,” I told him, “with terrible pain on either side.”

He said that sounded right. He told me about his wife’s pregnancy, which had also been very difficult, medically. He talked about his infant daughter. I thought about caesuras, and seizing, and ceasing, and cutting. Cut scene, the seizure has ended. Caesura, we’ve reached the other side of the line. Cease, start again. I thought about electricity, and a spoon falling slowly, and I felt like I was about to understand something important.

I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep until the lights came back on. I felt panic rising at the sensation that I’d lost some amount of time during the scan. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You were just asleep. Your waves were like—” he moved his hand through the air, as if tracing a gently sloping line I could not see.

A woman who has her first seizure at thirty may not have a second. Each six-month period without one is a milestone, the passage of which lowers the probability of another happening. Nineteen months, a neurologist predicted, was when my next seizure would take place. But this was only a statistical likelihood, and it would change if I’d had seizures in the past, which I couldn’t confirm. I needed to pay attention, the doctors said, to the onset of any symptoms, particularly déjà vu.

Two nights after the first seizure, my husband and I stood in my parents’ street at dusk. We were going to start the drive back to Los Angeles in the morning. My husband said something, but I didn’t quite hear him. I was looking at the hellebores in my childhood garden, shining softly through the dark. I had the sense I recognized them, like the faces of people I’d known years before. I swayed and my husband caught my arm. It was only a slight pause in my steps, a momentary cessation of thought, a familiar longing. I couldn’t have said whether anything had happened in that small, almost unnoticeable gap between looking at the flowers, and looking at the flowers again.

The Most Anticipated Queer Books for Spring 2026

Posted on February 12, 2026February 13, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Like many of you, I wake up each morning with the feeling that they’re coming for us. But then I think, they have always come for the queers. And we have always, throughout human history, stood watch all night over the fire. We have always taken care of each other, and we will keep on doing it.

I’ve been joking lately that I’m just going to get gayer. I’m going to make up new pronouns. I’m going to keep going out, dancing with my friends—which we call Church—and I’ll go on gay marrying my loved ones as an ordained minister with the highest of internet credentials, and I’ll watch Queer Ultimatum if I have to and Heated Rivalry because I want to, and I will honor the memories of our BIPOC queer and trans ancestors. I will fight for trans youth, and I will keep writing and sharing our stories no matter how much they try to silence or censor us.

Electric Lit’s Most Anticipated Queer Books List was launched by Michelle Hart, who centered and uplifted LGBTQ+ writers and the queer stories that “deserve not only to be included but centered” in literary discourse. Michelle tells us, “Let these new books be a reminder: Even in the face of despair and erasure, we’re still here—reading, writing, and refusing to disappear.”

It’s an honor to continue the work Michelle started in 2022. She reminds me—these books remind me—that queer is the future: It has always been the future. We keep the fires lit ‘till morning.

Genderqueer Menopause by Lasara Firefox Allen (Jan 13)

This groundbreaking handbook, written by a genderqueer doula and accredited menopause coach, offers tools, insights, and solidarity for queer individuals going through menopause. Author Lasara Firefox Allen foregrounds perspectives that have been sidelined and systemically erased in mainstream medical care. They identify resources that are both genderqueer and binary-gender-oriented, integrate quotes from real people they have surveyed, and include an appendix for health practitioners. Firefox Allen centers queer experience, affirming care, and community support, moving beyond heteronormative conceptions of menopause to empower, relieve, and demystify.

Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno (Jan 20)

In this gothic novel dedicated to Faliveno’s parents, a woman fleeing her own life escapes New York for her family’s cabin in rural Wisconsin, leaving behind a boyfriend, an apartment in Brooklyn, and a job as an editor. After almost a year of sobriety, Sam, grappling with her family’s history with alcoholism—and her mother’s disappearance into the nearby woods—begins to drink again. The book is full of shadows and longing, a prolonged sense of uncertainty about where the danger lies. There are poison plants, conversations with a doe, and flirtations with a cute local named Gina. Faliveno’s crisp prose evokes an ambiguous haunting that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has been through it: “It’s like I’m turning into something else . . . like something is opening up, or making its way out.” This “butch Black Swan” captivated Austin Carter at Pocket Books Shop, the queer-feminist indie bookstore owned by three best friends (with a new second Lancaster, PA location!)

Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana & Hwang Sunwoo, translated by Gene Png (Jan 20)

Two Women Living Together is not a queer book—technically. Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo use the language “cohabitants” to define their relationship, and the best-selling Korean memoir clearly casts the two as women who value their independence. After turning forty and being confronted by the loneliness of living alone, the two move in together. Still, there is undeniable intimacy in these pages: their four beloved cats, shared playlists and guilty pleasures, the little noticings of habits. During a hospital stay, Hana stays by Sunwoo’s side. One section is titled: “If We Broke Up.” In switchback chapters, Hana and Sunwoo create a new domestic sphere that is undefined by patriarchy and social expectation. Sly, subtly subversive, a wonderful companion, Two Women Living Together is anything but straight.

Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg (Jan 20)

For seven days, across seven chapters, Dell Danvers live-streams her life for the internet, eating hotter and hotter peppers for cash donations. This self-exploitation might sound all too familiar, and at best, Dell is “a morally gray heroine” who would undoubtedly be played by Natasha Lyonne. (Even Torenberg admits she probably wouldn’t like her protagonist in real life!) Nevertheless, like her followers on Live Cast, we readers are eager to know if Dell will do it: will she eat the ghost pepper. Like Dell, we anxiously count every coin that passes through her hands—we’ve seen her paycheck ($0) and her apartment (formerly a closet, no bathroom); most of all, Dell has allowed us a glimpse into her pain, how she is grieving for her comatose sister and reaching for the impossible. Funny, chatty, weird, and at times unexpectedly poignant. You can devour Just Watch Me in one gulp, but, like a habanero, it’ll be sitting with you for hours.

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson (Jan 20)

“Stories are there to change what is into what if,” Winterson tells us. This is feminist manifesto, literary criticism, personal narrative, oral storytelling—a book that refuses to be categorized, much like its author. Fans of Winterson know she grew up as a lesbian adopted by ultra-religious Evangelical parents: That is, she was told one story about who she was, and the only way she could be saved was to go out into the world and tell another. Many others. Calling on One Thousand and One Nights’ Shahrazad, who tempts and tricks her would-be executioner, the Sultan Shahryar, Winterson tells us tales to keep us on the hook, all while confronting issues like capitalism and consumerism, climate change, and “everything-bagel liberalism.” In One Aladdin Two Lamps, Winterson reminds us that stories are a way to reshape our world, by which she means: our future.

On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield (Jan 27)

Yah Yah Scholfield’s simmering debut is arriving hot off the heels of her selection for The Best American Short Stories 2025. The book follows Jude, who flees her childhood home and abusive mother, finding solace in a house whose dark history is immediately familiar to her. Developing a solidarity with the spirits of the house, Jude becomes a healer, although the darkness of her past continues to lurk in the shadows. When a mysterious, alluring woman arrives at the house, Jude must come to terms with her desire, demons, and the legacy of violence within herself and the walls of the house.

Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack (Feb 10)

The incomparable Catherine Lacey calls Murder Bimbo “Gone Girl for the Luigi Mangioni era.” A sex worker is recruited to become an assassin at the hands of the US government—and on page one, she’s running for her life. We are seduced by this unreliable queer narrator, caught up in her ex and writing late-night emails about justice and a man named Meat Neck! Propulsive, electric, Murder Bimbo conceals and reveals and conceals again, as any disruptive queer act must. The political assassination at the heart of the book is eerily resonant, though the novel was written before Charlie Kirk was killed. Rebecca Novack, who has a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard divinity school, plays with our readerly expectations about motive, audience, authorship, and the genre of true crime.

Last Seen by Christopher Castellani (Feb 17)

Last Seen, a speculative literary thriller, follows four young men—Caleb, Steven, Matthew, and Leo—each of whom disappeared between 2007 and 2020, and whose bodies were later found in icy rivers across the United States. The book alludes to the true-crime theory proposed by retired NYPD detectives, suggesting the series of deaths might be linked murders rather than accidental drownings. Many people are convinced the boys are victims of the Smiley Face Killers, an insidious group targeting white, college-aged men who have been drinking. Castellani’s writing tenderly captures the voice of the four boys, and all they’ve lost, as they watch over their loved ones in death: “I am one of those boys they keep finding in the river . . . Caleb Aldrich who was too beautiful to live.” An exploration of grief, masculinity, and homecoming, Victor LaValle calls it “a ghost story, an elegy, a love letter to young men who go missing without a trace.”

So Old, So Young by Grant Ginder (Feb 17)

What’s more queer than following a group of friends to five parties over twenty years? In this tragicomedy full of wit, wisdom, and sizzling dialogue, Ginder shows us how tender and complicated chosen family can be. Six friends try to find each other as they drift apart. Pick the hard adult thing: unrequited love, bad taste in men, job loss, infidelity, binges, unrealized potential. “While this is a distinctly millennial set of characters, their stories of heartache and searching is a universal one,” says Claire Benedict of Bear Pond Books, Montpelier, VT. Ginder’s fourth book, follows Honestly, We Meant Well and The People We Hate at the Wedding, which was adapted into a major motion picture starring Allison Janney and Kristen Bell. Reading it, one realizes that nostalgia is a decidedly queer emotion. At heart, it’s about the little fights between friends that become great distances to travel, and the ways we find our way back to one another.

Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (Feb 17)

It’s 1970s San Francisco, and nineteen-year-old Celia Dent demands her freedom from her domineering husband. After Vivienne Bianco is murdered at the phone company where Celia works “the elephant graveyard of jobs,” she begins to seek “revolutionary changes . . . violent changes, even.” Celia buys a knife, she fires a gun, she seeks real love. “We can take forever to arrive at the most obvious truths about ourselves, because the will to conform is mighty in us, and the fear of somebody find out we’re not normal is a mighty fear.” This dark, unconventional comedy is quirky, surprising, and sharp!

Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes (Feb 17)

In her introduction to this new edition of Ladies Almanack, Sarah Schulman tells us, “No one loves the lesbians as much as a lesbian in love.” The Ladies Almanack proves that lesbians have always been sly, pissed off, underpaid, but also funny and innovative. The work is a roman à clef about the vibrant lesbian expatriate community in 1920s Paris, focusing on Natalie Clifford Barney’s salon. The mock almanac celebrates and only thinly veils the real people at the heart of the work, including Thelma Wood, Djuna Barnes’s impossible, often drunk, charismatic lover (who apparently also seduced Edna St. Vincent Millay). This is all at once high queer court, social satire, love letter, and flirty literary gossip written in a pastiche of Restoration literature that asserts, “We don’t feel about men the way they feel about themselves.” Reissued by Dalkey Archive Press nearly a hundred years after it was re-written, the work now comes complete with Elizabethan-style woodcut illustrations. Shoshana Bockol at The Head & The Hand bookstore in Philly put this one at the top of her list. She says, “This is the one I’m most excited for!”

Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg (March 3)

Night Night Fawn is undoubtedly the Marxist, trans, comedic dystopia we need in 2026. Initially conceived as nonfiction, Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel subverts form to become an inherently transgressive unauthorized fictional “memoir” that reads as hysterical manifesto. Barbara Rosenberg, a character modeled loosely on Rosenberg’s own mother, is a terminally ill Jewish “yenta.” High on opioids, looking back at her origins in post-war New York—where she grew up with aspirations to be a wealthy Jew—Barbara wonders where she went wrong with her estranged trans son and her ex best friend. As Barbara takes an “unrepentant account of all her failures,” she seeks to understand how her child ended up becoming her greatest fear—queer, unrecognizable, anti-capitalist, manly. As with Rosenberg’s first book Confessions of the Fox, the prose crackles.

Whidbey by T Kira Madden (March 10)

I’ve been eagerly awaiting this title since I heard T Kira Madden read from her manuscript at the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. The book opens with Kira’s letter to the reader, explaining that this revenge story is fiction but also revealing just how much she had to live through. Whidbey, in many ways, is unfinished business for Madden, who wrote about her assailant in “Feels of Love” in the memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. Her debut novel begins on a boat to an island: A woman running from the man who abused her as a child, a chance meeting with a stranger who promises to kill him—and then, days later, the murder. But in Madden’s hands, this is so much more than a noir story. The sentences are exquisite. The novel gives voice to survivors of sexual abuse and rape, claiming power not only from assailants, but from a broken justice system and the media. Madden, unflinching as ever, even drops us into the perspective of the mother of the convicted sex offender.

A Lady for All Seasons by TJ Alexander (March 10)

From the Lambda Literary Award finalist comes the sequel to A Gentleman’s Gentleman, named one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of 2025. It’s 1820s London, and the cunning Verbena Montrose at the heart of this queer Regency romance tricks her newly rich best friend Etienne into marrying her. This is a comedy of errors full of yearning and hijinks and genderfluid lovers. You can expect scheming, gossip, a lavender wedding, genderplay, and even a cameo by Lord Byron. Just in time to pre-order from BookWoman for Valentine’s Day, you fans of trans historical romances!

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran (March 10)

This lesbian gothic horror set in 1928 at the “pash” Briarley School for Girls is set in the long boarding-school tradition of young people being forced to rely on no one but themselves. The rules are different, the food is terrible, the mood is always brooding. Everybody is always watching, but nobody sees the two girls kissing on the grounds. Emily Locke, who is “not good at discerning the contours of what to be afraid of” is in her final year when her best friend falls mysteriously to her death. Violet, a cunning beauty envied by students and teachers alike, is the first to die, but certainly not the last. This lesbian phantasmagoria has everything: silk gloves, sour milk, clandestine visits to mystics, potentially evil yet sexy French teachers. It brings to mind Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar, Tana French’s The Secret Place, and even the salty teen-girl quips of Christine Schutt’s All Souls. This one was a favorite of Emerson at The Head & Hand bookstore.

Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall (March 12)

Described by Sarah Gailey as “Moby Dick meets Treasure Planet by way of Fleabag,” Hell’s Heart is a sapphic journey through the depths of space and human desire. Earth is abandoned and its remaining inhabitants have taken to the stars, where they survive by harvesting spermaceti, a hallucinogenic fuel produced by massive whale-like creatures. Society has deteriorated into a desolate landscape of corporate accumulation and morally bankrupt religious institutions. With no other options, the narrator—called “I”—joins a voyage hunting for spermaceti, and quickly becomes infatuated with the ship’s female captain, “A.” As the hunt progresses and the captain’s delusions mount, the narrator’s grasp on reality and her sense of self is thrown into question.

My Lover, the Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum (March 17)

In this much anticipated novel, nearly two decades after he published his first, Wayne Koestenbaum performs for us the inexhaustible gaze of the lover. “All I ever wanted,” our speaker says of the rabbi, “was to be smothered by his nakedness, to be walled off from the world by the sheer interfering magnitude of his flesh . . . between my body and the rest of existence.” This is a gay, gay book, often told in poetic, staccato chapters, with some sentences going on for pages. One conversation about “the best dermatologist” gets interrupted by “quaint” fellatio and an allusion to Odysseus, ending many lines later in a recommendation to go to Charlottesville. Fans of Garth Greenwell will delight in Koestenbaum’s demonstration of the sublime against corporeal obsession, play, need, humiliation, grief, desire, camp, refusal to engage in any heteronormative norms.

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro (April 7)

From the incomparable New Directions comes a gorgeous work of collective witness set against an urban landscape. Giada Scodellaro, whose debut Some of Them Will Carry Me was listed by The New Yorker as one of its best books in 2022, archives Black women’s experiences in this poet’s novel. Scodellaro writes, “The community is made up of predominantly black people . . . it’s a place we’ve created for ourselves, okay? Or a place we were forced into and have reimagined.” Conjuring the spirit of Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Ruins, Child weaves folklore, botany and the body—always the body. One chapter is entitled “groin,” another, “sole of the foot.” Ruins, Child is a surrealist, cinematic telling with an eye towards the future.

Honey in the Wound by Jiyoung Han (April 7)

Set in the 20^th century during the Japanese occupation of Korea, this multi-generational, historical novel follows a family of women with astonishing gifts: one who disappears and returns a tigress, one who can force a liar to speak the truth, one who can see into dreams. The work centers on Young-ja, who infuses food with her emotions, and ultimately uses that power to resist colonialism. In 1931, after Japanese soldiers crush her family’s defiance against the Empire, Young-Ja is taken by a Korean resistance fighter to Manchuria, where she joins a clandestine world of teahouse spies. Han’s writing is lush and moving, and the work is both inventive and deeply researched—sometimes reading as fable, other times as historical account or ancestral narrative. Kirkus describes this stunning debut as “a revelatory work of harrowing fiction . . . [that] validates the hidden powers of ‘powerless’ women.”

Surrender by Jennifer Acker (April 14)

Jennifer Acker’s Surrender is a tale of reinvention, baby goats, and grown up teenage love. After decades of city life, 47-year-old Lucy returns to her childhood home in rural Massachusetts to take over her father’s farm. Almost immediately, challenges arise: Lucy’s lack of experience is compounded by loss and the worsening health of her husband. Lucy finds a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Sandy, her childhood companion-turned-more-than-a-friend, but Sandy’s presence at the farm also draws the attention of her employers, a solar energy company. Exploring grief, desire, and the second adolescence of middle age, Surrender is a must-read of 2026.

Harmless by Miranda Shulman (April 14)

Two years after the fact, Bea is still reeling from the death of her twin sister, Audrey. Where Bea is brusque, driven, and deeply lonely, Audrey was bright and extroverted, and her absence has become a ruling force. Now living in Brooklyn, Bea throws herself into an old dream she shared with Audrey: to start a dog kennel. When old friendships rekindle, desires spark, and the lingering weight of Audrey’s death threatens to sink Bea’s budding dream, she must come to terms not only with the loss, but with the secrets it has brought to the surface.

Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg (April 28)

It’s easy to see why the short story is Emma Copley Eisenberg’s first love, even as Fat Swim follows the author’s wildly successful debut novel and memoir. Eisenberg treats her characters with such tenderness, whether it’s young Alice at the pool (or grown-up Alice at camp), or Jules, the trans assistant to the famous elderly gay writer, or Mama, trying hard to migrate to her queer child’s elastic definition of love. Or, for that matter, any minor character that, in Eisenberg’s loving gaze, is celebrated in all their fulness. The collection resists the erasure of fat bodies in American letters, mostly by giving us all too rare portraits of pleasure and desire. Grace Paley is in these pages, as is summer, and ice cream, and Ray’s Birthday Bar, and refusing to be defined in binary terms.

Nothing Is Wrong and That’s Terrifying

Posted on February 11, 2026February 4, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

When I Grow Up I Aspire to Be Nothing Like My Father

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Highland

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Literary Citizenship Looks Like Aaron Burch

Posted on February 11, 2026February 9, 2026 by EL Assistant2

Aaron Burch is the Rick Rubin of online literary publishing. Over the last two plus decades, he’s helped hundreds of writers jumpstart their careers, whether it was through Hobart, the online literary magazine he edited for 20 years; the micro prose journal HAD; or his latest project, Short Story, Long on Substack. Burch is also a lecturer at the University of Michigan and a successful writer in his own right, having published an essay collection, a craft book, a novel, a memoir, a short story collection, and now a new novella, Tacoma.

If there’s a shared thread in his work, it’s his playfulness, an underlying punk essence and dedication to absurdity that seems absent from some crustier tiers of the literary world. Tacoma is no exception. Though ostensibly about an ordinary couple enjoying their friend’s vacation house for the summer, Tacoma quickly dips its toes into the speculative waters of the Puget Sound when the couple discovers their neighborhood is full of portals that transcend space and time. They are forced to navigate this beautiful and strange world that threatens to pull them away from the present and each other.

What I’ve always loved and admired about Burch’s writing is its earnestness: he writes, as my professor Lee Martin always said, quoting Isak Dinesen, “without hope, without despair.” Whenever I read Burch’s work, I feel almost no separation between my enjoyment of the text and his delight in creating it. I had the pleasure of speaking with Burch over Zoom about his writerly obsessions, the evolution of the online literary scene over the past 20 years, and what it means to be a model literary citizen today.

Sophie Newman: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is the title, Tacoma. Why does it capture your literary imagination?

Aaron Burch: I grew up there. It’s that mysterious, curious magic of childhood. In high school and college, I loved hardcore music, and I got really into this band Botch. There was a pretty good hardcore scene in Seattle, but then, being an hour south of Seattle, it always felt like Tacoma was both part of Seattle and not. They would start every show by saying, “We’re Botch, and we’re from Tacoma.” As somebody who knew them, somebody who felt a part of Seattle but also not, that felt really exciting and welcoming. At some point, I’d written a handful of chapters which at that point were stories. When I had the idea of pulling them together and making one unified narrative out of them, I was like, oh, I could call it Tacoma. It just made me laugh, the idea of calling it Tacoma.

SN: While we’re talking about constructing this book, I’m curious about the decision to name the chapters. Was this concept there from the start?

AB: The titles are because I was titling short stories. Me and my girlfriend spent a summer in Tacoma, and I was writing these stories in our Airbnb. Sometimes they were literally capturing versions of our day-to-day and other times they had nothing explicitly to do with place. At the end of the summer, I collected a bunch that felt most like they could be woven and collaged together. But at some point, I was like, I don’t really want it to just feel like a bunch of short stories. I want it to feel like a narrative. So, how do I force that upon this thing that started as unconnected stories? And also, how do I play with chapter titles [in a way] that lends them to feeling like chapter titles and also does something for the book?

SN: Your narrator shares a lot of biographical details with you. At one point he tells his friend that he’s writing “exaggerated autofiction about us and writing and friendship and telling stories and life and seeing art and magic and beauty everywhere you look.” Do you consider this “autofiction”?

Sentiment and earnestness have always been there in my
writing. It doesn’t seem as cool as writing about despair, right?

AB: I do think of it as autofiction. Before this book, I wasn’t that interested in writing autofiction. I don’t read that much autofiction, which, counter-intuitively, was part of what was fun about this for me. How do I write into it, but make it my favorite book? How do I play with it? Anyone who reads [Tacoma] knows me to varying degrees. Some readers might not know anything about me. Some might be like: I’ve read a couple of things by you online, and I’m vaguely aware of your presence. My best friends probably notice things that aren’t important, but that are all over the book. Maybe part of the appeal is playing and bending and making stuff up but blending it with the stuff that isn’t [made up]. On top of calling it Tacoma, I knew I wanted to play with this summer that we spent in this place. But I didn’t want the impetus for the book to be, oh, the couple rents an Airbnb and goes and stays there. I wanted it to be a little more heightened, a little bit more magical, a little bit more fun.

SN: The inclusion of speculative elements plays with the expectations around autofiction. Some autofiction could literally be memoir. Instead, at times, you almost dip into horror, but always keep it very funny.

AB: Maybe there is a tradition of that silly, fun, magical element in autofiction, more than I’m even aware of. A lot of what I’m aware of is the, how do I most realistically capture my life on the page? Looking back, part of what all speculative writing is capturing with the magic are the feelings that feel true. I guess I was doing that.

SN: At the beginning of your first chapter, your narrator explicitly says, “this is a story about magic and beauty and wonder.” I was curious if you find these concepts harder to write about than, you know, crushing despair.

AB: I find them easier to write about, but I am something of a happy-go-lucky dork in general. Sentiment and earnestness have always been there in my writing. But, especially earlier on, I battled with it. It doesn’t seem as cool as writing about despair, right? The more I’ve embraced it, the better of a writer I’ve become. But it’s tricky. When it works, it lands so hard and lands so well and is so appreciated because it is a little less common. But then when you don’t land it, it’s so quickly and easily eye-rolly and easy to make fun of or groan at. That’s the tightrope.

SN: I think people shy away from it because there’s a vulnerability there. If you don’t stick the landing, you’re going to be exposed, versus if you’re writing about despair, you’re almost guarding yourself against those potential criticisms.

AB: It’s such an interesting contradiction, or two sides of the same coin, too. So much of the writing about despair or trauma is often celebrated for its vulnerability, and yet the flip side of that is we’ve been rewarding this kind of vulnerability while hiding or shying away from another kind of vulnerability.

SN: The novella seems to be about the tension between the past and the present. Your narrator is almost literally lost to the past. I understand Year of the Buffalo, your first novel, explores similar themes. Is this one of your writerly obsessions, or am I reading too much into it?

AB: No, it for sure is. As a human, I am generally a very nostalgic person and maybe often more nostalgic than is “cool.” I think both my reading and writing interests are books that deal with coming-of-age, growing up, nostalgia, wrestling with the past. That’s mirrored by when and where I grew up. Maybe I would have been like this no matter what, but Seattle in the 90s was so cool and so close, but also when you’re 16, an hour up the freeway is so far. I think I was at that age where, on the one hand, I was kind of perfect for being in the radius of grunge, but also, I was slightly too young to have gone to any of those shows. That idea of having grown up in a time and a place that felt so alive but often just barely out of reach definitely imprinted on me. All of my books are wrestling with the past to varying degrees and thinking about what that means.

SN: I wonder if we could transition to talking about some of your other literary projects. I know you started editing Hobart over 20 years ago. What’s your perspective on how the literary magazine landscape has changed since then, either for the worse or the better?

When I started Hobart, we were kind of in this boom of indie lit,
a lot of those people seemed like rock stars.

AB: At the time, websites with short shorts or flash fiction were not that common and were often looked down on like a little sibling or something. I’ve never made this connection before, but maybe there’s something interesting about thinking of Tacoma in relation to Seattle and websites in relation to print journals. Now, most writers I know would almost rather have something published online than in a print journal, because it’s going to get read more.

When I started Hobart, we were kind of in this boom of indie lit seeming really cool. We were all just riding the McSweeney’s/Dave Eggers coattails. I mean, maybe it was just me because I was a writer, but a lot of those people seemed like rock stars. I don’t think that’s the case now, right? I don’t think there is that cool aura around this scene outside of a pretty small group.

SN Is it just that there’s an over-saturation of journals, or do you think people have actually changed their mind about what’s cool?

AB: It’s a little bit of everything. There’s always fads. The grumpy old man on his porch perception is: People are reading less and spending more time on social media and scrolling and watching TikTok and reels. When I was in my early 20s and a new graduate, in the early years of Hobart, I was working at a bank, and in my downtime between customers, I would alt-tab over and read the new piece on McSweeney’s. I didn’t have a smartphone yet, and there wasn’t social media. Now, if I need to kill two minutes or five minutes and I’m waiting in line somewhere, I’m just doomscrolling.

In the past few years, it’s been interesting to hear from my students about their awareness of their own online-ness and their desire to be a little less so. For a while, I was like, oh, it’s just me as somebody your parents’ age being like, you’re looking at your phones too much. And then at some point they were like, we are looking at our phones too much, and I wish we weren’t. Hearing a student say, “part of what I enjoy about golfing is leaving my phone somewhere, and I’m just golfing with friends for four hours.” I hadn’t thought about that with golf, but that’s an interesting take and cool to hear from an 18-year-old.

SN: On the topic of social media, tell me about your decision to start Short Story, Long on Substack versus a more traditional platform.

AB: A few years ago, I stepped away from Hobart. Immediately when I stepped away, I was like, I’ll probably start a new thing. At this point, it’s just such a part of my life. I’ve been doing it for 20 years. Although I was still editing HAD, we built a pretty well-oiled machine that takes a lot of time once or twice a month and then otherwise not very much, if any. One of the things that I liked at Hobart, that I thought I was pretty good at, was editing and publishing longer fiction.

If you just want to start a journal, then start a journal.
An under-appreciated element is just trying.

There’re a bunch of websites that I love publishing short shorts and there aren’t many that excite me publishing a 4,000-word story. At the time, there hadn’t really been any literary journals using Substack, but it seemed to lend itself to it really well. It’s built in that you can subscribe as a paying subscriber, which meant I could pay contributors. It also meant not having to build a website myself or hire someone. Here’s this template, it’s set up, I can just plug and play, and I’ll borrow this One Story model of publishing one long story at a time and doing it once a month.

SN: I’m wondering how you split your time between teaching, writing, and editing. Do you have a schedule? Do you just organize by priority and deadline?

AB: I think some combo of priority and deadline and what feels exciting or where my own energy is. Sometimes those things align and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, I really need to get this stack of papers graded. I’m not the most organized person—teaching, my own writing, editing, family life—I think I’m usually dropping one of those balls, and sometimes two. I think the journals take away time overall from my own writing. But the flip side of that is, I’m not always the most dedicated writer. It allows me to not be writing for a while but still feel like I’m being productive and living this literary life.

SN: Do you feel like teaching also feeds into your writing and editorial work?

AB: It all feels related and connected for sure. Obviously, it feels more like a job than writing or editing because it pays me and the other two arms don’t. Sometimes, it does feel a little bit more like a responsibility or a burden. Burden is kind of both too strong of a word and also true.

SN: I think a lot of people, myself included, see you as a model literary citizen who’s doing your own work, but you’re also dedicating a lot of time to championing other writers and building platforms for them. If a young writer asked you where they could plug themselves into the literary community, what would you say?

AB: For a long time, my answer was: Be on literary Twitter and interact with other writers. If you’re on Bluesky or if you are on Substack or if you are following the right journals and other writers and starting to interact with them, I do think there can be fulfillment there. I think every writer should be a reader for a journal for probably at least three to six months. I think if you just want to start a journal, then start a journal. In the publishing aspect, and also in our own writing, an under-appreciated element is just trying. Whether you’re like: What if I just try to be more earnest, and then don’t show anybody, and it turns out cheesy, but I tried? What if I just try to start a journal, and it turns out I don’t like it, and I fold it? But maybe it turns out I love it and it takes off.

7 Sri Lankan Novels Haunted by Skeletons in the Nation’s Closet

Posted on February 10, 2026February 9, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

As a Sri Lankan-American born in rural Appalachia, I have always sought stories with characters who connect me to a culture and heritage I can’t find in my own backyard. Having not seen my own heritage reflected back to me anywhere outside my own home, stories were the only way I could get a better understanding of what it meant to be both Sri Lankan and American. My parents, foreigners in a land not accepting of them, wanted me to assimilate. They spoke to me more often in English than their native tongue, and told me to hide my clothing when my mother made curry so our clothes wouldn’t smell of cumin and turmeric. We were taught by neighbors, colleagues, and even friends, that to be accepted in America was to shed parts of ourselves, at least from public view. And even when we returned to Sri Lanka every summer to visit family, stories about relatives killed in bombings, rumors of child soldiers in the north, and cruelty imposed by the government swirled in a contextless haze. It seems even in Sri Lanka, a place I was supposed to be myself, the American ideal of assimilation followed me.

During these visits to our ancestral home, where the sticky heat caused people to move like zombies and a war I couldn’t possibly understand infected every aspect of life, books kept me company. I was desperate for the greater truth as to who I was and where I came from. I sought out Sri Lankan stories and was struck with what I found: novels full of grief and complexity, grounded in sorrow, and haunted by a longing for a Sri Lanka that no longer exists.

The novels on this list helped me understand what it meant to be Sri Lankan. Haunted by lingering ghosts of death, self-imposed exile, and the grief and terror that come from seeking the truth in a culture that sometimes wants to hide it, these narratives are anchored by the protagonists’ journeys of self-discovery. My own debut novel, The Midnight Taxi, follows a Sri Lankan–born taxi driver who feels neither fully Sri Lankan nor fully American and is searching for her identity and place in New York City. Like the protagonists in the novels on this list, my heroine, Siriwathi Perera, is running from something she cannot escape: the ghosts of her past and present. I hope my novel, like those listed below, helps readers better understand the Sri Lankan–American experience—and, beyond that, what it means to be imperfect in a world haunted by the ghosts of loss and uncertainty.

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

Quiet, introspective, and unsettling, A Passage North follows Krishan as he travels north for the funeral of his grandmother’s longtime caretaker: a woman he suspects may not have died by accident. As he journeys, Krishan reflects on her life, wonders whether her death was suicide, and confronts the enormous sorrow she carried after losing three sons to the war. At the same time, he revisits his dissolved relationship with Anjum, a political activist whose sense of urgency and moral clarity once gave his life shape. The ghosts here are intimate and internal: unresolved love, unanswered questions, and the emotional fallout of a war that keeps taking. Arudpragasam’s novel proves that silence can be as heavy as gunfire—and just as revealing.

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan

Brotherless Night unfolds amid the early years of the civil war between the Tamils and Sinhalese. Through the eyes of Sashi, a young woman who dreams of becoming a doctor, the novel traces how violence infiltrates domestic life and slowly dismantles a Tamil family weighed down by the decisions they make to uphold their way of life. Somehow, those very decisions are the things that unravel them all. We follow Sashi through her adolescence, her education, and her deepening political awareness as the war tightens its grip. The ghosts in this novel are many: missing brothers, dead classmates, and abandoned futures. As Sashi’s world shrinks under the weight of conflict, her lost possibilities haunt her as much as the dead. The final effect is devastating—a reminder of the enduring physical and mental trauma of war.

Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

In Anil’s Ghost, a Sri Lankan-born forensic anthropologist returns home after years abroad to investigate extrajudicial killings during the civil war. Anil works alongside Sarath, a quiet archaeologist whose loyalties remain unclear, to uncover the truth behind a body discovered in a sacred burial site, a man they call “Sailor.” As Anil traces her identity, she is forced to reckon not only with political terror but with personal loss—especially the shadow of her own parents and her estrangement from home. Ondaatje frames forensic science as a confrontation with memory itself: what bones reveal, what governments erase, and what history refuses to admit. While structured like a mystery, the novel’s true power lies in its meditation on grief and the cost of knowing too much.

My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa

Jayatissa’s My Sweet Girl is a sharply plotted psychological thriller. It centers on Paloma, a woman adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage into a vastly different life in the United States. But like most compelling thrillers, her adopted life is built on a buried truth and Paloma carries a secret that trails her like a shadow. Paloma’s roommate begins to uncover this past, but before Paloma can pay him for his silence, she finds him dead in their apartment. By the time police arrive, the body has disappeared. The novel’s ghosts include the past Paloma has tried so hard to outrun, the identity she tried to abandon, and the lingering spectre of people who refused to be erased. In My Sweet Girl, the truth always catches up and it never arrives quietly.

What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera

Munaweera’s novel opens with a chilling story about moon bears and their devotion to their young—before undercutting it with a declaration that “in America, there are no good mothers.” What follows is a devastating exploration of motherhood, displacement, and unhealed trauma. The narrator, Ganga, recounts her childhood in Sri Lanka, where appearances of privilege mask emotional neglect and abuse. Her father drinks; her mother vacillates between love and withdrawal. A single act of violence fractures her life, setting her on a path that leads eventually to the United States but even ghosts of traumas past can cross oceans. The ghosts in this novel are relentless: memory, shame, and childhood terror that resurfaces in adulthood and motherhood. Munaweera’s portrait of intergenerational trauma is unflinching and intimate.

The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai

The title The Hungry Ghosts refers to a Buddhist concept of restless spirits plagued by craving—and it perfectly suits this coming-of-age novel set against Sri Lanka’s sociopolitical collapse. Shivan, a sensitive Tamil boy discovering his sexuality, grows up amid a disintegrating family and a nation consuming itself amidst a civil war. Shivan is craving a life of something more even as desire, shame, and fear intertwine with political violence threatening to erase his identity. Even as Shivan leaves Sri Lanka, he learns he cannot outrun his past and his earliest, and perhaps deepest, wounds suffered in his motherland. Selvadurai’s novel captures the cost of growing up gay in a culture where silence is survival and grief that lingers long after escape.

The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka

Part mystery, part satire, part obituary, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew follows W. G. Karunasena—an alcoholic sportswriter racing his failing liver—as he hunts for the truth behind Pradeep Mathew, a cricket legend who has gone missing. Karunasena has a year or two to live at most. Even if he cuts back to only two drinks a day, the years of arrack consumption have finally and definitively done in his liver. Mathew may have been smart or alcoholic or entirely invented. As Karunasena interviews old players, officials, and drunk cricketers, the investigation sprawls into something larger than Karunasena could have imagined with the search touching on ghosts of corruption, class division, denial, and war that haunt Sri Lanka. The deeper Karunasena digs into the truth of who Mathew was and where he’s gone, the more unstable the sportswriter becomes. As the search dissolves into uncertainty, we’re left to struggle with the notion that men aren’t accidentally forgotten; they are buried by design.

Colonial Violence and an Old Prophecy Haunt a Chinese Family Across Generations and Continents

Posted on February 10, 2026February 9, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Alice Evelyn Yang’s sweeping debut novel, A Beast Slinks Toward Beijing, chronicles the experiences of a Qianze, a second-generation Chinese-American, whose estranged father reappears in her life a decade after leaving her and her mother. What follows is a whirlwind tale of Qianze’s lineage, spanning 93 years and two continents, tracing back through her father Weihong’s childhood during the Cultural Revolution in China to his mother Ming’s experience during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Shifting between these three perspectives, Yang not only chronicles the events that preceded and precipitated Weihong’s abandonment of his family, but also illustrates the magnetic power of stories and secrets as they accrue over generations, wielding the power to bring people together and repel them apart for reasons that seem inexplicable.

Through lush imagery, other-worldly creatures, and breath-taking attention to detail, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing mimics the form of the story within. Under Yang’s precise and delicate pen, a family’s decades-long web of well-intentioned avoidance and experiences of colonial violence unceremoniously unravel as a drunk and confused Weihong attempts to reveal a prophecy from his past in his daughter’s Chinatown apartment. Careening between time periods and dimensions, the novel’s central characters are tied together not only by shared history and DNA but a deep-seated sense of anger and fear that transmutates into an empathy that cuts across time and space, revealing untrodden paths forward. Much like the accumulated weight of Ming, Weihong, and Qianze’s inherited trauma, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is all-consuming and impossible to put down until every last stone is overturned.

I had the pleasure of speaking to Yang in her Brooklyn apartment a week before her debut’s release about the blurred lines between predator and prey; folklore as a force of and against imperialism; and seeing one’s parents as complex, flawed humans.

Christ: I found A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing to be about the power of stories themselves. Was that the conception of the book?

Alice Evelyn Yang: I began the book by writing the initial reunion scenes between Qianze and her father. After I had this seed of an idea, I wrote the book chronologically. I first wrote Ming’s timeline, then Weihong’s, and then the present-day sections. I always knew that there was this frame-tale that would wrap around the story. My idea for structure has always been a Russian nesting doll where each generation carries the previous generation within it. I want to use stories as a way to interrogate how people share societal values and how myths and folklore are representations of patriarchy and the fears of a certain society.

C: So much in the book is about what happens when stories aren’t told. It’s understandable when parents want to save their children the unpleasant details of their past, but what do they risk when creating a vacuum like that?

It is possible to not follow down the path of your parents and grandparents.

AEY: I grew up in a first-generation immigrant household where my parents weren’t very forthcoming with their past or Chinese history at all. The bulk of what I learned about the Cultural Revolution I had researched on my own. Like Qianze’s mother, they thought, “Oh this is a new life, we are going to leave the past all behind.” The book poses the question of how do you reckon with trauma when it’s made physically manifest? A lot of the risks in not learning your familial history are things that are encoded genetically from intergenerational trauma. For Qianze, it’s physically-manifested unspoken trauma but also the trauma of colonialism and empire. The things that are happening to her she has no understanding of. You’re left in the dark scrambling, looking for answers, and the answers might be right in front of you, but you don’t have access to them.

C: Qianze, Ming, and Weihong all share experiences that lead to a bifurcation of the self. Is this exacerbated by their patchy understandings of their own personal histories?

AEY: The situations they were placed in forced them to have this sense of themselves as a before and after. They can’t conceive of themselves as a whole being in which before and after are reconciled. The events that split them, they hold so central to their sense of identity that there’s no way to make peace with them. They can’t let these wounds heal; they have to keep picking at them and taking the scab off. So it becomes this part of themselves that is so core to their identity.

C: As Ming and Weihong live through the Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution, respectively, the amount of political violence is staggering. How do you think that is reflected or refracted in Qianze’s timeline and her experience in the US?

AEY: A lot of people around me who are also second generation immigrants are learning about the Cultural Revolution through my book, despite their parents living through it. For Qianze and for myself, we live in a relatively privileged time, especially because we live in the imperial core. We’re insulated from what is going on outside of the West, neo-colonialism, and empire. If you don’t even have the knowledge of the effects of colonialism and empire, and it’s not actively taught in schools in the West, you can’t understand what’s happening right now in the Global South. Qianze lives this very privileged life where she doesn’t know about her family’s past, but at the same time the atrocities that happened in her family’s past are still ongoing in the present. It offers a window into empathy for and understanding of what atrocities happened in the past, but also what atrocities are ongoing in the present.

C: That sense of perpetuality comes throughout the book: that these things that have happened, are happening now, and will always be happening. How does this shape the arc of these characters?

AEY: I had to piece the timelines together like a patchwork quilt. I was looking for these tissues of connectivity between them to find where each generation echoed one another. Placing them in similar situations or placing the same objects throughout these generations, there is that sense of continuity, but also that they are speaking to one another. There are parallels between them, so even though Ming and Qianze never meet, Ming still somehow communicates with her, which is done through the folklore and magical realism elements. With the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy, these characters find themselves in loops and a few of them can’t seem to break out. What I wanted to suggest in the ending is that it is possible to not follow down the path of your parents and grandparents, and you can find healing and move on from these cycles that feel inescapable.

C: There is a recurring metamorphosis of prey becoming predator, most obviously embodied by the hare becoming the jackalope. How does that figure come to represent the experiences and fears of the book’s central characters?

Anger is this nexus of transformation from prey to predator.

AEY: One of the primary emotions I am working with is anger and how transformative anger can be. Qianze is such an angry character and that anger has transformed her. Like you said, the bifurcation of her: The Qianze before Ba, who she sees as having this idyllic, happy childhood, versus the Qianze after Ba who’s forced into this position that she sees as unjust. She had to take on a very adult role from a young age. Anger is this nexus of transformation from prey to predator. At the same time, I want to challenge the notion of who is prey and who is predator. I never want to create a dynamic that is so black and white, because there is so much ambiguity. A lot of the characters that commit the most violent acts in the book, whose actions feel very predatory, you also understand the reasoning behind those actions and how, in certain circumstances, they were forced into committing those actions. Just because something or someone shifts from prey to predator doesn’t necessarily make them more powerful.

C: You do such a wonderful job of weaving passages of surrealism into what is a deeply realistic, human, and historically accurate story. Could you speak on where the magic of the story originates?

AEY: I studied magical realism in university in the context of Latin American literature: works by Gabriel García Márquez or Jorge Borges, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier. In those cases, a lot of folklore and magical realism is within a narrative of colonialism. There is this traditional folklore that sort of works as a force against colonialism. I wanted to examine that idea as what happens when a colonizing force that uses folklore is also colonizing the land? That’s where Japanese folklore creeps in and intrudes into the family. You have a foreign colonizing force’s demons and monsters, but you also have traditional folklore like the hare with horns, which in its simplest form is a metaphor for intergenerational trauma. My editor asked, “What makes this family special that they have this hare with horns?” This family isn’t special. I found the hare with horns in a book of omens and prophecies with hundreds of creatures. It could be any family or any creature. The idea of the magical part where it follows them and haunts them doesn’t mean that they’re chosen in any way. In fact, there are probably all these other families with different omens following them.

C: So many of the mythological or folktale figures during Ming and Weihong’s youth are women. Why is that?

AEY: There are a lot of allusions to female monsters and demons in both Japanese and Chinese folklore: fox demons, the Yamauba, which are old mountain hags in Japanese folklore. All of these portrayals go back to this idea of monster theory, where folklore conceives of monsters as fears of a certain society. The village in rural China was so afraid of women deviating from the norm, of being anything but a chaste wife and mother. Even when someone is forcibly driven off that track, they are vilified and demonized. It’s a deeper understanding of how these monsters were created and how maybe they weren’t monsters at all, but a reflection of the values that this village had.

A lot of what is considered monstrous is justified anger or emotion. Ming is seen as monstrous by the village because she is healing from something that they can’t understand, but they know that she no longer shares the values that they hold dear. Conversely, the Oni commander in the Japanese army is basically the most evil character, but when you think of someone who’s immortal, they have a completely different perspective of the world. There is complexity to him because he is envious of death. He isn’t meant to be a pure black-and-white figure. There is a sense he favors Ming because there is this distorted sense of connection between them.

C: Despite him being the most evil character throughout the book, it’s made clear that the worst violence in the world is committed by humans. How does that ground the story?

AEY: There are these supernatural elements of monsters and demons, but at the same time, that’s a story that we tell in order to justify the actions that humans have taken to survive. Qianze says, “If I was backed up in a corner, would I have committed the same moral failings as my father?” Looking at memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, it’s likely. We all want to think that we’re better, but when we’re pushed into situations that come between our survival and our family’s survival, people can easily do monstrous acts. The harder thing is to stand by your morals.

C: Food is very central to Chinese culture and the family unit throughout the book. How do you see food or the lack thereof operating across the book’s different timelines?

People can easily do monstrous acts. The harder thing is to stand by your morals.

AEY: I come from a privileged background, so I can never imagine what famine feels like: food as luxury, food as a driving force to make someone do these unforgivable actions. During the Red Guard ransacks, they would take the food. So food is this reward that’s won. During the Japanese occupation, the Japanese army plundered Manchuria for their goods. In the present timeline, it’s very different. Food becomes this language of care. Qianze and Weihong have a hard time expressing their complicated feelings towards each other, but you see how she makes the steamed egg custard, which is something he made for her. These unspoken gestures show how the connection between them still exists.

With all the motifs and symbols that keep on occurring in the novel, they have to change with time. It’s interesting to see how these same symbols appear in each generation, but they have completely different meanings.

C: In that same vein, the color red plays a pronounced role throughout the book.

AEY: Red is one of those symbols that accrues different meanings because it appears in all these different contexts. Part is the history of the Cultural Revolution. People were split up into this idea of red or black. You also have motifs: the red thread that is Weihong’s leading line into his past. He follows what he sees as a red thread of fate through the maze of his memory to find the memories that he feels are most important. The Cultural Revolution was so dominated by these colors of red, and I want it to have different meanings and complexity. In traditional Chinese culture, red is a very lucky color, and it’s something you wear for Chinese New Year and weddings. The color has such significance in the culture, it’s bound to have multiple meanings and the same is true in the book. It means fate and fortune, the communist regime and the violence that is committed because blood is red, and there’s a lot of blood spilling within this novel. Nothing is ever good or bad; it’s got multiple dimensions to it.

C: In the last part of the novel, each of these three characters have moments of keen understanding of one or both of their parents. How are those insights necessary for rebuilding their own self-image?

AEY: Ming was so vilified by the people around her who she considered part of her home [that] she understood more intimately the role of women in this society. That gave her access to understanding her mother and her conceptions of her mom as monstrous, which is not to say that her mother wasn’t a bad parent. She understands now how someone can become that angry and bitter because she’s gone through events that have created those emotions in her. That is a parallel experience with both Weihong for Ming and Qianze for Weihong: Understanding their parent’s past and what actions shaped them makes them more human. If you just know someone blindly without knowing their context, it’s easy to vilify them, but knowing [that] what happened to them and what they did didn’t occur in a vacuum lends itself to understanding them more as people.

C: What is so hard about getting to the place where you can see your parents as people and not just parents?

AEY: This is something my friends and I have dealt with. When you’re a child, you don’t have the maturity to see your parents as fully-fledged people beyond them being your caretakers. I’m 27 now, and I remember when my mom told me that she was 27 when she immigrated to North America. That was really jarring to me because I always felt her past was this mythological thing, but then I imagined myself in her place. When you’re a child, you tend to idolize your parents and it erases the flaws, and humanity comes from the flaws. Qianze is having trouble reckoning with this idealized vision of her father, who abruptly left, with the very human person he is now. Writing this book for me was trying to put myself into the skin of someone who lived through the times that [these characters] lived through.

[Like] a lot of second-generation children, I used to feel so frustrated with my parents that they hadn’t fully assimilated, because when you’re a child, being different feels so glaring, and I just wanted them to be like every other parent. I remember being frustrated when they would talk in Chinese in public. I have a lot of regret for how I acted then. I also don’t think I knew better, but now that I’m an adult, I just want to understand them as people, and I want to give them all the grace that they deserve.

“Feeders” by Oliver Munday

Rat

Let the Moon Wobble by Ally Ang

Ox

I Always Carry My Bones by Felicia Zamora

Tiger

Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves

Rabbit

Maybe the Body by Asa Drake

Dragon

Leaving Biddle City by Marianne Chan

Snake

Self-Mythology by Saba Keramati

Horse

The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket by Kinsale Drake

Goat

The Lengest Neoi by Stephanie Choi

Monkey

The Museum of Small Bones by Miho Nonaka

Rooster

Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Dog

murmurations by Anthony Thomas Lombardi

Pig

Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man by Jose Hernandez Diaz

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

Quirkyalone by Sasha Cagen

When Longing Becomes Your Lover by Amanda McCracken

And You May Find Yourself . . . by Sari Botton

Group by Christie Tate

The Dry Season by Melissa Febos

Nothing Personal by Nancy Jo Sales

Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins

Caesura by Victoria Kornick

Genderqueer Menopause by Lasara Firefox Allen (Jan 13)

Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno (Jan 20)

Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana & Hwang Sunwoo, translated by Gene Png (Jan 20)

Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg (Jan 20)

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson (Jan 20)

On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield (Jan 27)

Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack (Feb 10)

Last Seen by Christopher Castellani (Feb 17)

So Old, So Young by Grant Ginder (Feb 17)

Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (Feb 17)

Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes (Feb 17)

Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg (March 3)

Whidbey by T Kira Madden (March 10)

A Lady for All Seasons by TJ Alexander (March 10)

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran (March 10)

Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall (March 12)

My Lover, the Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum (March 17)

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro (April 7)

Honey in the Wound by Jiyoung Han (April 7)

Surrender by Jennifer Acker (April 14)

Harmless by Miranda Shulman (April 14)

Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg (April 28)

When I Grow Up I Aspire to Be Nothing Like My Father

Highland

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan

Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa

What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera

The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai

The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka

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