For whatever reason, it has always seemed apparent that my friendships—if handled with devotion and care—will outlast my romantic relationships. Through adolescence and early adulthood I put as much work into these bonds, often prioritizing them over my actual romantic relationships, and finding myself equally brutalized when they occasionally ended.

Now that I am married, these same friendships provide additional outlets for the intimacy and joy that I’m also building at home with my partner, and I’ve spent countless coffee-fueled hours asking myself: why do we place so much pressure on spouses to fulfill all of our needs? Why not turn to a friend? This was the idea that inspired my novel Significant Others, which follows friends and roommates of twenty years as they grapple with change when one becomes pregnant following a one night stand. The women co-own a home, co-raise a dog, and so they ask themselves: why not co-mother this child? But before I was writing about unusually deep friendships, I was reading about them.

Below are seven of my favorite stories that remap the location of friendship in our lives, pulling it from the margins and placing it front and center.

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman

Is it possible to write a book about the death of your most beloved person that manages to be as hilarious as it is devastating?  Catherine Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things screams hard and clear: yes. Quite literally a celebration of life and friendship, the novel follows 45-year-old Ash as her closest friend Edi decides to move away from her husband and young son so that she can be near Ash in a hospice facility during the final days of her battle with cancer. Their lifelong friendship is the point from which their worlds pivot, and now Edi is choosing to come home to her best friend so that she can die. If that sounds depressing, please know it isn’t. The story is fresh, invigorating, and completely reconceptualized my understanding of what platonic devotion can look like; it remains one of my most recommended books from the last two years.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Autofiction, I am new here, and I opened this book unsure about the format and expecting an exploration of a young woman finding herself through her art. I was surprised to close it reeling, instead, from the story of a woman finding herself through friendship. Freshly divorced Sheila and her new friend Margaux share a bond that is as romantic as they come; they write each other letters and slip them beneath apartment doors, they traipse around the city talking for hours, they buy the same dress and then argue about it, they document their relationship and the impact it has on each other’s art and life, they search for and sometimes overstep each other’s boundaries, defining and redefining their love for one another again and again. Please know, the plot in this book is minimal, but the feelings its richly imagined characters inspire are maximal. More, please.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Two young girls in West London bond over their shared love of dance; one is gifted, the other is not, yet each will inevitably make a life around the art, and each other. While much of the narrative actually takes place during a period of time the women aren’t speaking, even through silence (and some relatable internet stalking) the friendship continues to provide the frame for both the book’s narrative structure and the interiority for its nameless protagonist, impacting how they see themselves in each other, and therefor in the world.  

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Before Eileen there was Veronica. While this is not the moody psychosexual romp that Moshfegh gifted us, there is certainly something unnerving at the way Gaitskill’s narrative skips through a taught timeline as it follows the seemingly unlikely bond between young up-and-coming fashion model Alison and her friend Veronica, a disgruntled middle-aged proofreader dying of AIDS. Starting when Alison is in her forties and looking back on her friendship and its longstanding impact on her life, the narrative sweeps back and forth between past and present, uncovering a devotion as surprising to its narrator as it is to the reader. Gaitskill has long been a favorite of mine, and this incisive look at connection, time, memory and loyalty sunk deep into my bones and stayed there.

The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen

A startling new addition to the friendship and found-family cannon, this nonfiction book explores the uncommon stories of people who have build their lives around a platonic partnership. The author, journalist Rhaina Cohen, has spent more than a decade deeply embedded in the social science of unusually devoted friendships, and the included vignettes offer a refreshing (and comforting) alternative to the marriage model we’ve all been raised. The friends interviewed are just as deeply committed to each other as a romantic pair might be. They buy homes, co-raise kids, and participate in long term care. In an era marked by alarming levels of self-reported loneliness, might this be an answer?

Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett

This gorgeous friendship memoir from the national treasure that is Ann Patchett spans twenty years in the shared lives of Patchett and her long-time friend, the writer Lucy Grealy, who passed away in 2002. It’s a gutting celebration of platonic chemistry and deep commitment in a uniquely—sometimes disastrously—close friendship. A quote: “Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.”

 Warning: this book will most likely make you cry.

The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker

As a filmmaker I of course have a bias for a story about two filmmakers, but still, I haven’t seen anything that explores the intersection of friendship and creativity the way this story does. In many ways, Mel and Sharon’s deep relationship has the makings of a marriage — union, commitment, (creative) progeny — and therefore it has the complications of one too: communication, trust, honesty, devotion, doubt, jealousy.

The post 7 Books About Women Who Put Friendship at the Center of Their Lives appeared first on Electric Literature.

The Best Way to Bury Your Husband was born of the sheer deluge and urgency of the work that followed. All authors draw from life, but this was the first time my “day job” shaped one of my novels so completely. It awakened an interest in how other writers explore the benefits and challenges of leaning heavily on experience, not just imagination.

Our work life is such a rich and inescapable source of material and inspiration, but sometimes that depth of knowledge can be just as daunting and complicated as having to invent everything from scratch. What should you put in to make the work authentic versus what should you leave out to avoid getting bogged down? How much can you borrow before you’re no longer writing fiction at all? Here are seven authors, with novels inspired by their day jobs, who are answering those questions.

Forensic Anthropologist: The Temperance Brennan series by Kathy Reichs

From Patricia Cornwell (who worked at a medical examiner’s office) to Kathy Reichs (a forensic anthropologist whose crime novels inspired long-running TV-series Bones), crime writers with a background in policing or the analysis of evidence have become increasingly common as an ever more sophisticated readership looks for greater authenticity. It’s not just the ‘telling details’ that matter—and which are easily enough seized upon—but the types of story that emerge organically from specific types of work, happening in specific contexts, within a specific professional culture. 

Counterterrorism Communications: The Chase by Ava Glass

Christi Daugherty moved on from crime reporting in the U.S. to counterterrorism communications in London, and it was this that informed her new Alias Emma series, written under the pen-name Ava Glass. The Chase sees spy Emma Makepeace (not her real name) engaged in a fraught escape across London—the most heavily CCTV-surveilled city in the world—while The Traitor follows her across Europe on an oligarch’s superyacht as she hunts a possible government mole. A female-centric spin on Le Carré, The Traitor was shortlisted for the prestigious Crime Writers Association Steel Dagger Award for its grounded depiction of intelligence work. Hailed as a “‘female James Bond,” Glass, with her keen eye for both detail and fun, brings the action—and also a depth of insight into the damage this type of work wreaks on a person’s life and psyche.

Mental Health Worker: Girl Friends by Holly Bourne

It’s perhaps not a surprise that counselling and mental health work is another common author ‘day job’ given the novel’s unrivaled canvas for exploring character interiority. Holly Bourne worked as a teen mental health advisor. Her years of experience shine through in all her novels, from her alternatively hilarious and heartbreaking Am I Normal Yet? YA series to her nuanced examination of trauma in her adult novels, most recently Girl Friends. Bourne has an extraordinary ability to switch from laugh-out-loud comedy to peeling back the layers of what’s happening to reveal the tragedy beneath, from the lies we tell ourselves to the horrors so normalised in society we barely recognise it doesn’t have to be like this.

Teacher: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller 

A former classics teacher, Madeline Miller brought her love of Latin and Greek into her sublime The Song of Achilles, which effortlessly and accessibly renders the stories from The Odyssey into a living, breathing tale of love and devotion. It sings to the modern reader just as the original would have to listeners from thousands of years ago. Miller captures the magic of ancient rhythms and the beauty of language that has withstood the test of millennia. The swift, smooth flow, mimicking the tale’s origins in the oral tradition, saw me unable to stop turning the pages.

Journalist: The Many Lies of Veronica Hawkins by Kristina Pérez

 Like her protagonist, Pérez moved from New York City to Hong Kong, where she worked as a journalist. A tightly-structured “book within a book”, it’s clear from the start that everyone in this twisty tale is lying—but what they’re lying about, and how this relates to the death of the eponymous Hong Kong socialite, is a tangled web indeed. The sense of a dynamic place at a profound moment of change is as much a character as any of the named players, adding depth and a disconcerting vividness that makes the levels of storytelling even more engrossing.

Playwright: The Appeal by Janice Hallett 

Janice Hallett is another author with a background in journalism, but it’s her “day job” as a playwright (and her passion for amateur dramatics) that shines most brightly in The Appeal. Told through emails, texts and other documents, this is a modern spin on the epistolary novel. Hallett’s skill with capturing different voices—much like an actor—keeps the pages turning as you puzzle over the deeper meaning of a friendly sign-off versus a terse one, and whether concern over ethical and legal technicalities will prove a red herring or the key to unraveling the central mystery.

Lawyer: The Unseeing by Anna Mazzola

Lawyers  are well-represented among authors, from Charles Perrault to John Buchan, and from John Grisham to Anna Mazzola. To date, Mazzola has focused on the intersection of her legal expertise with her passion for history. The Unseeing is a dual-narrative following a young lawyer sent to re-investigate a (real) 1830s case in which both a murderer and his common-law wife have been sentenced to death: the second narrator is the condemned “accomplice.” With a sharp eye to how gaps in evidence can be as revealing as the evidence itself, Mazzola turns her lens on the way power structures don’t just shape the law as written, but also how it affects the legal system in practice. Look out for her first contemporary legal mystery in 2025 under pen-name Anna Sharpe.

Babysitter: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age was inspired partly by her own experiences as a babysitter. When a Black babysitter takes the young white girl she cares for to the supermarket, she finds herself accused of kidnapping. Her horrified employer wants to make things right, but from the micro- to the macro-level that is anything but simple. The book took the publishing world by storm, ending up on the longlist for The Booker Prize among other accolades for its nuanced exploration of race, class and power.

The post 8 Novels Inspired by the Author’s Day Job appeared first on Electric Literature.

But I’m fascinated by the places where those categories break down. Are the mice who intrude on my cupboards wild? Is my cat wild when he hunts a songbird? Are the songbirds becoming domesticated if I feed them suet? What about the microorganisms that make up much of our body mass?

Writing my book, The Age of Deer, was a deep dive into those kinds of questions, prompted by the long and tangled history humans share with deer. We’ve influenced each other so profoundly—ecologically, biologically, culturally—that the more I researched our relationship, the more the conventional lines of division between us began to seem blurry at best. Here are eight other books that examine the interconnections among humans and some of the species—or “nations,” as they’re sometimes called—with whom we share the Earth.

Winter: Effulgences & Devotions by Sarah Vap

Centered on the Olympic Peninsula, Vap’s recursive, questing book-length poem charts a radical porousness between people and whales, salmon, microorganisms: all the species that are part of our world, that influence us and are influenced (and devastated) by us. But the dissolving boundaries in this book also include those between Vap and her children and husband—the “family animal,” in her phrase, a collective organism that sleeps, eats, nurses, plays, shares thought and speech, seeps in and out of the language of the writing. The project took years to write and contains many layers of personal history and political response, but it constantly circles back to the image of a mother who is as vulnerable to the beloved interruptions of her young sons as she is to the horrors of climate change, extinction and war. The body here becomes a hinge between human and animal existence, a reminder of our inescapable (and why would we want to?) creaturehood.

Milk Tongue by Irène Mathieu

Animal life is not the overt focus of this book, but in and amongst Mathieu’s explorations of history, family, and her work as a pediatrician, wildlife is a quiet and frequent presence, inviting itself into the human world. Thrush, an infection of the mouth, is also a bird that “lands on the windowsill” and becomes woven into a complex imagistic fabric. Deer tracks are the epicenter of “a kind of country… we drew.” Mathieu’s poetry finds slippages between body and landscape, brain and culture, and locates moments when the domesticated world collides with the feral (a moth, having strayed into a kitchen, cut down by a snapped dishtowel) and those when the human is drawn forward and outward by the more-than-human: “confused animal I am,” she writes, comparing herself to “the small miracle of organization” represented by a flock of geese. 

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams

Birds in this book are messengers carrying mystical resonances, like the ruby-throated hummingbird who hovers in front of Williams as she kneels on the ground, grieving a friend. Or the owl who appears, seeming to warn her, as she follows a dangerous man into the wilderness, against her own better judgment. Her world is vibrant and full of signs, and she possesses deep recall of many moments from across her life, like a sunrise she watched with her grandmother in the Uinta Mountains of Utah, when they witnessed a golden eagle silence the dawn chorus of songbirds and grab a mouse. “Voice” here means authentic speech, speaking up or out, and birds are Williams’ guides through a life in art, activism, and family.

Yaqui Deer Songs / Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry by Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina

Technically, this is an academic work of anthropology. From the first, though, it reads like a poem— fitting, since it brings forth the elegant, living body of literature created by Yaqui people in Arizona and Sonora. Yaqui deer dancers perform in order to invoke another world, the sea ania or flower world, from which deer emerge: mythic figures and key providers for humans. But it’s not as simple as calling forth the deer. The dances and music enter and honor the deer’s own perspective: the dancers wear antlers and imitate the movements of deer, while the lyrics are often cast in the deer’s voice. “With a cluster of flowers in my antlers, I walk.”  A native Yaqui speaker and a white academic co-authored the book in 1987; they fill it with images, translations and anecdotes, like a personal tour of the Yaqui world.

The Radiant Lives of Animals by Linda Hogan

From her small house in rural Colorado, the Chickasaw poet Hogan charts a way of listening and co-habiting with wild animals that is often revelatory in its simple lack of dominance. Instead of spraying wasps who nest in her bedroom, she opens the window for them every morning so they can go in and out. “Not being a person… with insect hatred,” she demonstrates that animosity and fear of the wild are choices, just as easy not to harbor. In a lilting, dreamy voice, through the Yaqui deer dances and Hogan’s ties to horses and burros, this book of mostly essays explores the enchantment that brings humans into receptivity toward many species’ intelligence—ants, elk, wolves—“all citizens here.” 

The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham

Through linked essays, Lanham becomes our guide to the landscape of his South Carolina childhood, where his forebears were farmers and pillars of Black community life. Birds and other wildlife captured Lanham’s attention early; he longed to fly, tempted vultures by playing dead, and gradually realized that his religious feelings were more centered on the outdoors than on church. As an adult, he became a birder and a professor of wildlife ecology—a rarity in both largely white realms. He expands our notion of who belongs in the outdoors and who loves wild places: “I also think about how other Black and Brown folks think about land,” he writes. He’s at his most convincing when he describes becoming a deer hunter, fully and consciously involved in the life and death dance of the land he loves.

The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication by Stephen Budiansky

Budiansky, a science writer and former Nature editor, makes a case here that domestication of animal species is not a process of enslavement but simply part of evolution. Both parties benefitted, he argues, when humans began to offer food, shelter and protection for species that in turn provided meat, milk, hides and labor. He traces the long, gradual process by which “loose associations” become codified, often hinging on the trait called neoteny — a tendency to retain some juvenile characteristics even in adulthood. Both domesticated animals and humans display neoteny, and collectively it has served our numbers very well: the total biomass of land species on Earth is becoming more and more weighted toward people and the animals we control. “Wild,” then, is a contested and precarious category.

Woman the Hunter by Mary Zeiss Stange

An academic and hunter, Stange investigates a string of questions animated by the presence of the female hunter—who, she points out, is not only a modern phenomenon: in hunter-gatherer societies, women have routinely killed small animals as part of what gets labeled “gathering.” Why does anyone hunt in the modern world? What can hunting tell us about the human presence on earth, and whether “wildness,” as we’ve imagined it, really exists? When the hunter is a woman, Stange argues, she awakens fertile contradictions lying deep beneath our culture: Artemis, for example, is both a death-dealer and a protector, a patron of animals who also embodies the fact that, in Stange’s words, “life feeds on life.”

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Works of fiction mostly, very short story collections. 

I was quite literally attracted to their shortness—the slim spines a definite selling point. 

At first I worried that my attention span was shrinking.  

That soon—perhaps very soon—I wouldn’t read anything at all. 

But no: I gave these books my full attention, savored every word.  

I came to view them as heroic—especially in a world filled with baggy prose.    

They got in, they got out, they were precise and concise. 

They were diamonds, or daggers, or single burning rays of sunlight—whatever metaphor you like. 

Soon I found myself not only reaching for such books, but writing them as well. My most recent is called My Worst Ideas. 

Don’t let the title fool you: it’s a real hoot.  

Now my little obsession has reached an apotheosis: I teach very short fiction workshops as well. 

I also write lyrics for little songs.  

I’ve gone all-in on short, for better or worse.

It’s come to define me completely, this brevity.

Oh well. 

Here are seven slim collections that do good work!

Kitchen Curse by Eka Kurniawan, translated by Annie Tucker, Benedict Anderson, Maggie Tiojakin and Tiffany Tsao

A ripe and rank collection, full of unspeakable excretions. Ruder and cruder than Beauty Is a Wound, these stories dare you to turn away in disgust, but always go to unexpected, revelatory places.

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky

Sharp and dissonant stories that give voice to women from Ukraine’s Donbas region, whose daily lives and jobs have been upended by war. Belorusets elevates, in her own words, the “insignificant and the small, the accidental, the superfluous, the repressed” in her writing—things that avoid capture by the dominant historical narrative. 

The Book of Sleep by Haytham El Wardany, translated by Robin Moger 

A collection of tales, philosophical inquiries, and nighttime ruminations from the Cairo-born, Berlin-based writer that reflect on the meaning of sleep—a potentially subversive activity, El-Wardany suggests, under the twin scourges of authoritarian government and 24/7 capitalism. 

Thick City by Katie Jean Shinkle

Thick City’s visceral, interconnected vignettes introduce us to a host of characters caught up in various entanglements and estrangements, absurd and weird and tender and sometimes gruesome, amounting to a queer city-symphony in miniature.   

At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid

These voice-driven pieces, which depict an Antiguan childhood full of enveloping mystery, pain, and beauty, burrow deep into the subconscious. Kincaid’s singular style commingles the plainspoken with the rhetorical, the dream and spirit with the corporeal. 

The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Kenneth Northcott

A compendium of both banal and horrific anecdotes concerning social life in post-war Austria, rendered in a deadpan, just-the-facts journalistic burlesque. For a brilliant contemporary riff on this book, check out Gabriel Blackwell’s Correction, which lays bare the American predicament with ruthless precision.  

Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris, translated by Richard Sieburth 

An awesome anthology (spanning 1923–1961) of the author’s dreams, offered without analysis or explanation, written with frightening intimacy and a wonderfully detached style.

The post 7 Very Short Books That You Can Read in One Sitting appeared first on Electric Literature.

Retellings can breathe a new life into what was once flat and staid. Characters from the Bible and fairytales can feel one-dimensional. With retellings, the writer has the opportunity to transform a pre-renaissance painting into a high-definition, digital photograph for the modern era. These writers want readers to feel a gnawing familiarity, something deep inside saying, “I know where this is heading,” before they’re surprised with a new interpretation. Retellings also allow room for writing detailed settings as well as including better causality concerning plot. Retellings insert key “what ifs,” changing the protagonist’s gender, age, race, or nationality, all the while making the point that the human condition is timeless and transcends circumstance. 

I describe my novel, Daughter of a Promise, as a retelling. It draws from an ancient text, the Book of Samuel, and feels perfect for this moment, as we’re riding a cultural wave of recontextualized myths and legends that bring once muted voices to the fore. Think Hadestown, Circe, The Book of V. 

More than a retelling, I’ve decided my book is “talking back.”  Contrast that with genteel novels “in conversation” with a historical text, Daughter of a Promise’s point of view shift demands recognition. The legend of David and Bathsheba beckoned me in its brevity, its male perspective, its neglect of Bathsheba’s thoughts and feelings. It was practically waiting for a future writer to come along and fill in the gaps. To retell a foundational text may sound like heady stuff, but it gives the writing process an added dimension of fun. The rigor of adhering to critical plot points, while putting the spotlight on Bathsheba made the writing meaningful. 

Despite the contemporary setting and revised point of view, these 7 novels based on the Bible that prove love, passion, and jealousy will always be universal.   

The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton

The Book of Ruth won the 1989 Pen/Hemingway Award for best first novel. Set in the small town of Honey Creek, Illinois, Ruth is a young woman who has never left her rural environment. She experiences difficult family situations including a tense relationship with her mother May and an abusive marriage with her husband Ruby.

The novel borrows its title directly from a book in the Bible, however, is not a retelling in the strictest sense of the word. In the Bible, Ruth marries into a different tribe and instead of returning to her own people after the death of her husband, she stays with her mother-in-law. The novel expands on important themes in the original text including loyalty and family dynamics, struggles and overcoming adversity, as well as journey and redemption.

The Book of V. by Anna Solomon

Weaving three story lines together, the novel follows 3 women across 300 years: Lily is living in 2016 Brooklyn and struggling with reconciling her role as wife and mother with her sexual desires and intellectual ambitions. Vivian is a senator’s wife in ‘70s D.C. who would do anything to advance her husband’s career, until a shocking request becomes the tipping point. In ancient Persia, Esther is a young woman living outside the palace. During Purim, she saves her people by marrying the King after he banishes his first wife Vashti. The Book of V takes the Book of Esther and makes it contemporary, exploring women’s agency and power throughout history. 

East of Eden by John Steinbeck 

East of Eden is a classic reimagining of Genesis, the fall from grace that led to the calamitous rivalry between Cain and Abel.  Set in the agricultural region of the Salinas Valley in California, this magnum opus portrays the multigenerational dispute between two families, trapped together in a cursed cycle of vengeance and pain. 

Paradise by Toni Morrison

In the Bible, Exodus is the story of an enslaved people searching for a home for their community: a paradise. Weaving together multiple timelines, Toni Morrison’s Paradise follows former African American slaves who founded the town of Haven, and then Ruby, in Oklahoma as a refuge from racism. The allusion to the Garden of Eden is also obvious in the novel’s title, Paradise, which foreshadows the inevitability of tensions arising between members of the community. Convent, an all-female inhabited house, crops up on the outskirts of town in response to Ruby’s patriarchal governance.  Convent becomes both a scapegoat and a threat to the male leaders of Ruby. The novel explores generational trauma, the women of Convent are haunted by their pasts as well as the collective history of the community.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this canon of American literature details a journey of redemption, forgiveness and love through the correspondence of two sisters, Celie and Nettie. The sisters address letters to God, the first clue that Walker intended the novel to be theological commentary. As with many novels depicting slavery, it evokes the story of Exodus, but it is also about a search for God, transcending what is universally “religious” to discovering personal spirituality. 

The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr

The prophets in the book are references to Samuel and Isaiah, two major prophets in the Bible. A finalist for the National Book Award, this unflinching and painfully wrought tale describes the lives of two enslaved gay men, tending animals on a plantation in Mississippi. It is filled with lyrical interludes told from the perspective of what are presumed to be ancestors, grounding the plot in a broader history and lending it a biblical nature. A tender love story that blossoms, against all odds, in the harshest environment.  

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

This Pulitzer Prize winner is told in the form of a letter from Reverend John Ames to his young son. Gilead is the name of the small town in Iowa in which the family settled many years before and John is a third-generation minister. A retelling of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, so much of this book is about the relationship between fathers and sons, but it is also filled with the theological rumination of an elderly minister who foresees impending death.

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Full-bodied, because… emotion. Emotions as experienced physically in the body. In a woman’s body. My body. As in Dar Williams’ song, “When I was a Boy” I was a kid that you would like/Just a small boy on her bike, until a week after I turned 13, when I got off my bike and discovered a rust-colored stain on the seat announcing that I’d “become a woman.” Fuck! I thought. I was not pleased or proud or relieved or excited to get my first period. To the contrary. What I had outrun until that afternoon had finally caught up to me. 

How did I come to terms with growing a woman’s body? I did what I do when faced with something I don’t understand: I read into it, and then I wrote into it; and through this, I found my material. Women’s bodies are all over my collection, Half-Lives—performing, misbehaving, seducing, challenging. All the stories feature women as protagonists. In one, a woman lists her vagina on Airbnb. She uploads her listing, fields inquiries, accepts her first guests… all the while musing on what it means to have a vagina—everything from the makeup marketed to it to the staff it requires. A deeply problematic renter appears, and what she does about it causes the welcome end of the hot dry summer. Another story is a contemporary retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” where Beauty is a yoga instructor in a coma (you’ll just have to read the story). In the title story, a middle school teacher chaperones a trip to a nuclear power plant secretly carrying inside her the unformed body of her identical twin.

To be a woman in the world today is to have a body that is appraised, despised, endangered, and idealized. Medicalized and misdiagnosed, restricted and performed, colonized and commodified. Gendered, dominated, threatened, shamed and all the while, lived.

Here then, are some recommendations of short story collections that complicate the conversation about women’s bodies. 

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado 

No list of story collections about women’s bodies would be complete without Machado’s dazzling, multi-prizewinning Her Body and Other Parties. Flowing between horror, fantasy and satire, these eight stories examine women’s bodies and psyches in contemporary society. In “The Husband Stitch” a wife’s head is held in place by the green ribbon around her neck; in “Mothers” a protagonist contends with her abusive lover Bad and their alleged daughter. There are ghosts of murdered women, doppelgangers and rapes. Women who slowly lose their bodies are sewn into the dresses sold at a fashionable boutique, and a fat old body lives as a specter in the house of the woman who surgically reduced it. Machado puts women’s bodies front and center tackling deeply rooted issues of sex, trauma, autonomy, and power. 

The Long Swim by Terese Svoboda

In Svoboda’s latest collection of stories, women’s bodies, especially mothers, upend everything. From the female fetus directing the mother in “Mexican Honeymoon,” to the daughter rubbing lipstick over Mom’s lips at the morgue in “Decorum Stinks.” In between, there are all the missing bodies of women who have disappeared in “The Haight” during its hippy heyday, the bodies of orphans gyrating inside a vending machine trying to attract adopters in “The Orphan Shop,” the nipple fiercely repossessed in “The Last Night,” the abused body of the nude woman seeking sanctuary in “London Boy,” what’s leftover of the woman’s body in “Loose Lion,” the naked woman appearing to convince Mom that it’s her lover visiting in “Rex Rhymes with It,” and the title story of the mothers who applaud the turtles who don’t show up to lay their eggs. 

Some Of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro

The Black women in Scodellaro’s collection of 35 brilliantly condensed stories experience dislocation in sensual detail. In “A Triangle” as water rises to her thighs in a surreal rainstorm, a woman watches another through a fourth-floor window after following her home because of her hair: “It was the curl of it on her neck and on her forehead, the way it looked like a question mark, circuitous and pleading.” In “The Ethics of Piracy” a woman walks naked through the Holland Tunnel. The stories, some as short as only a paragraph, are cinematic, absurdist and enigmatic, and one emerges from them grateful for the opportunity to enter this author’s hypnogogic world. 

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima

In Lima’s debut story collection, a woman sleeps with the Devil at a party in her 20s and is visited by him over the years as she ages and lives her life as a writer. The experience is formative but unrepeatable as her body is completely overcome, and she is lost to lust if their skin ever touches. In the stories Lima writes, women’s bodies are central: an immigrant, reflecting on how her body remakes itself through cell renewal, realizes her whole body has become American; a woman ingests her own body (a miniature version dispensed from a sinister vending machine); another imagines her adult body comforting the memory of herself as a child, running her fingers through her hair. Even the writer within the book is not immune to the embodiment of her own creations as when she attempts to inhabit a ghost she’s writing and experiences her own body losing its shape.

Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Ted Goosen

Kawakami is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary fiction writers, and in her latest collection, translated by Ted Goosen, she explores transfigurations and cohabitations in eight otherworldly stories. Bodies in Dragon Palace are regularly freed of the conventions of their forms, and people, animals and spirits come and go with the ease of folk tales. In “Fox’s Den,” a romance between a female caregiver and an elderly man who is sometimes a very small fox, she remarks that her naked body is nothing like those of the women in his pornographic magazines and his response is, “Both are necessary.” Older women parade around naked, a goddess controls her followers with sex, a woman is handed from husband to husband until she can return at last to the sea, and in the titular story a great-grandmother returns in the body of a shrunken teenager that the narrator tosses across the room like a doll.

Double-Check for Sleeping Children by Kirstin Allio 

The twenty formally inventive, poetically charged stories in Double-Check for Sleeping Children record the consciousness and embodiment of women. In “Ambush,” a former dancer finds herself in unfamiliar territory, middle-aged maiden-prey. In “Naiad,” a mother stares up at a lurid, suggestive stain in the cracks in the ceiling above the bed as her young daughter confesses with seething hostility that she’s lost her virginity. In “Stand of the Tide” a woman crouches outside her own bathroom window to watch her sister-in-law bathe. At the end, the narrator says, “I reversed course, backed carefully away from the window of my own house, letting my sister-in-law’s body be.” 

Every Drop Is A Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto 

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s debut collection uses magical realism to center the lives of contemporary Hawaiian women of color in a landscape rich with cultural wisdom and haunted by colonization. In Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, sexuality intertwines with mythology, and generational memory speaks to identity. A woman’s fears around her pregnant body are set into motion from a long-ago encounter with a wild pig; a widow sees her deceased lover in a giant flower, a 12-year-old grapples with her first period while learning about precolonial Hawaiian history, a mother of six finds a Menehune (mythical forest-creature) in her clothes dryer, a woman visits a salon where pubic hair is waxed and then paid for by a “trait exchange.” Kakimoto’s collection is rich, wrenching, and visceral.

Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall

Marshall, a playwright, makes her prose debut in Women! In! Peril! a collection of twelve stories that slide slyly between realism and surrealism. In one story a woman must contend with her wife’s mysteriously pregnant body, another is told from the perspective of Annie, a determined sex bot, and yet another illustrates the racialization of an Asian American girl. These stories are darkly funny explorations of queerness, parenting, sex, race, gender, divorce and the state of humanity.

Good Women by Halle Hill 

Hill’s debut collection explores the private lives of 16 Black women living in Appalachia and the Deep South. The women in these stories are shown in their multitudes—hungering, escaping, observing, and making sense of their lives. In darkly funny stories women wrestle with weight and pregnancy, as well as parents, police, and evangelism. Hill pairs sex scenes with the frustrations and disappointments and violences that make them all too true. These are stories of Black women’s bodies and interiors seen and witnessed.

The post 9 Short Story Collections About Women’s Bodies appeared first on Electric Literature.

My debut novel, A Sign of Her Own, explores one woman’s personal discovery of deafness. Set in late 19^th-century Boston and London, Ellen Lark, who is deafened by scarlet fever, becomes a pupil of Alexander Graham Bell and studies his technique called Visible Speech. When Bell’s attention turns towards the telephone, Ellen finds herself drawn to a deaf man, Frank McKinney. As their friendship deepens, and Bell’s views on sign language become clear, Ellen is left with a decision that calls into question everything she has been taught. 

Many books helped me understand deaf people’s experiences at this turning point in history. Some were historical texts and studies which provided insights into the attitudes of the time, as well as deaf people’s own experiences and opinions. But I also turned to contemporary fiction, poetry and memoir. Written by (mostly) Deaf and Hard of Hearing authors, these works explore themes that are universal, through the lens of deafness: Language, how it fails and unites us, and loneliness, the ways in which we find community and connection, and silence, that manifests in many forms. From a graphic memoir to these nine books showed me just how varied the Deaf experience can be. 

El Deafo by Cece Bell 

This classic graphic memoir should be read by everyone of all ages. Cece Bell  depicts what it feels like to grow up deaf in the mainstream education system as she grapples with the emotional consequences of being different from one’s peers. The book offers insights into the common assumptions that people make about deafness, and provides young deaf readers a rare chance to see themselves represented in fiction.

True Biz by Sara Novic

On the rare occasions that a deaf character features in fiction, they are often isolated figures, stranded in hearing society. In True Biz, Novic gives us the diversity of Deaf experience through a variety of characters who come together at a school for deaf students which is being threatened with closure. Novic paints an engaging, tender and passionate picture of contemporary Deaf culture, illuminating a range of issues that affect deaf people today, while paying homage to the school’s central role in Deaf history.

Chattering by Louise Stern

As a native sign language user, Stern is interested in the way language inhabits our bodies, and the physicality of communication, silence and sound. The characters in these short stories seek new experiences, traveling between Deaf and Hearing worlds and navigating their passage with a mixture of signing, lipreading, and pen and paper. The stories are deftly written moments of insight and revelation in which Stern skillfully flips the perspective on hearing people’s attitudes to deafness. 

Hearing Maud by Jessica White

A work of creative nonfiction by Australian writer Jessica White, this book combines the author’s personal experience of deafness with the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of Rosa Praed, a Australian novelist living in London in the 19th century. White writes with heartbreaking precision about Maud’s life as the only deaf child in the family and her eventual commitment to an asylum. Equally fascinating is how White charts her own journey through the landscape of deafness, giving readers a global story of deaf history that crosses continents. 

The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus

This poetry collection opened my eyes to the creative possibilities of writing about Deaf experience. Antrobus writes about growing up deaf, Deaf history, his Jamaican British inheritance and his relationship with his father. What connects the poems is their exploration of the linguistic and acoustic edges of deafness, as Antrobus recounts being made to speak and hear, stumbling through English grammar, making translations in sign language, and the relationship a deaf person has with sound and noise. Antrobus also takes on Deaf history and representation in the last two centuries, addressing works by Charles Dickens and Ted Hughes, and showing how the “space of deafness” has been shaped and controlled by hearing narratives.

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

At the end of Ilya Kaminksy’s poetry collection, he writes: “The deaf don’t believe in silence,” he writes, “silence is the invention of the hearing.” Set in an unnamed occupied territory, Kaminsky’s vignette-like poems unfold the lives of the town’s residents after they choose to become deaf in response to the killing of a deaf boy. Using silence  as protest and resistance, the townspeople create their own sign language to communicate. The result is an imaginative act which asks us to consider how we construct our ideas of silence and deafness, and for what purposes.

Sounds Like Home by Mary Herring Wright

First published in 1999, this memoir by Black Deaf author Mary Herring Wright has been reissued in a new edition. It gives a vivid account of Wright’s experiences in a school for deaf and blind Black students in North Carolina in the 1930s. Providing a fascinating insight into residential school life for deaf people at the time of segregation, Wright movingly portrays her girlhood and coming-of-age, and her bonds with her Hearing family and deaf friends as she alternates between family and school life.  

A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing edited by Christopher Krentz

In this anthology of deaf American writing from the mid-19th century, Krentz brings together texts that reflect the opinions and experiences of deaf people at the time. Although largely focused on well-known figures in American Deaf history, these accounts are interesting in mapping out the emergence of Deaf culture that preceded the era of oralism. They also provide an insight into how deaf people used writing to demonstrate their capabilities, and to connect with the wider Deaf community. 

Deafening by Frances Itani

This novel by Canadian author Itani, published over twenty years ago, was inspired by her deaf grandmother. Deafening was the first time I’d encountered a deaf main character in fiction. Quiet and compelling, this is the story of Grania O’Neill, a young deaf girl from a family of Irish immigrants. The novel portrays her encounters with language and love as the story moves from a boarding school for deaf children to the frontiers of World War I. Through Grania’s growing relationships with her grandmother and friends, and finally with a hearing man, Itani illuminates the myriad ways in which language fails us and connects us.

The post 9 Books that Center Deaf and Hard of Hearing Characters  appeared first on Electric Literature.

It’s not unfair to ask why such a thing exists. Why take a concept like murder—this horrific act of ending someone’s life for reasons that are usually riddled with selfishness—and put a light-hearted spin on it? I can only offer my take on it all, but my love of the genre is founded on the fact that in our imperfect world of unfairness and injustice, these stories present us a reality in which clues are trackable, ticking clocks not unbeatable, and comeuppances always dealt. You may need to shift your understanding of what’s plausible in order to roll with the plot lines of a lot of fun murder mysteries, but once you realize you’re in the hands of authors who probably grew up watching Murder She Wrote, you can sit back and accept that there are in fact times when the serious concept of murder is not taken too seriously. As one of the characters in my upcoming book, How to Solve Your Own Murder, says, “If TV has taught us anything, it’s that the murder rate in small towns is disproportionately high.”

And if you think that every permutation of whodunnit has been done to death (I make no apologies for puns), you are painfully mistaken. Here are nine books that range from humorous hijinks to slightly darker but creatively clever approaches to murder mysteries. 

Over My Dead Body by Maz Evans

When Dr. Miriam Price wakes up from a supposed drinking binge to find her own dead body on the floor of her flat, she finds herself stuck in “limbo” unless she can prove hers wasn’t a death by misadventure. Miriam is sure she’s been murdered, but her memories on the incident are murky, so she’s got to piece together the last few weeks of her rather messy life to try to find the culprit, or face being stuck in limbo for eternity. The trouble is, with her rather prickly personality and long list of enemies, she’s got a lot of avenues to investigate and not a lot of time to do it in. Adding insult to injury is the fact that while she can move amongst her friends and family, only one person can see her—it’s a clever bit of afterlife world-building on Evans’ part, that only the dying can see the dead. So Miriam is stuck trying to solve her murder with the one person she’s been feuding with for months—her elderly neighbor Winnie. The wit is electric in this one, and the unlikely crime solving duo of Winnie and Miriam is equal parts hilarious and heartwarming. A great one for a highly original take on the classic whodunnit, this book is cozy crime meets The Good Place, in the best way. 

Voyage of the Damned by Frances White

A murder mystery on a sea voyage, with a rich fantasy setting and an unforgettably snarky narrator. Ganymedes Piscero has a secret — he’s the heir to one of the twelve provinces of Concordia, a role that should have come with an inherited magical ability called a Blessing. Each of the heirs to the twelve provinces have one, but Ganymedes has come up short and shows no signs of inheriting his. When he’s forced to pretend he’s got a Blessing while on board a 12-day voyage with the other heirs, Ganymedes hatches a plan to be the biggest problem he can so that he can get kicked out of his role and go live his life in bliss, far from the politics of the realm. But when one of the heirs turns up murdered, Ganymedes finds himself at the centre of a plot that might just take down the whole empire. Suspects abound, including a host of people who all have reason to hate one another — and who all have magic that they like to keep secret. Adding an extra pinch to the heart is Ganymedes’ former lover Ravi, a man who seems to have changed overnight into someone Ganymedes doesn’t recognize. Wonderfully paced, with a fantastic pairing of a snarky disaster of a man and a small girl with a malicious streak, this is murder mystery like you’ve never seen before. 

Malice by Keigo Higashino 

This one sits in the “fun” category not because of coziness or humor, but because it’s one of the cleverest murder mysteries I’ve ever read. It takes the whodunnit and turns it on its head, and sinks the reader deep into the whydunnit, with twists upon twists all built on a set of events that you think can’t be flipped any further. It starts with the murder of bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka, who is discovered in a classic locked-room scenario. Detective Kaga investigates, and discovers that Hidaka’s best friend Nonoguchi, who is also a writer, is someone from Kaga’s own past. The case becomes a tangled story of past and present, while Kaga and Nonoguichi wrestle artfully with who has control of the narrative. Keigo Higashino is the author of the bestselling thriller The Devotion of Suspect X, and Malice will provide surprises for even the most seasoned sleuth. 

The Three Dahlias by Katy Watson

Dahlia Lively was a famous fictional detective in the 1930s, and has become such a national treasure that she’s been portrayed in television and film over the decades three separate times. When the three actresses who have played Dahlia are invited to a murder mystery convention at the home of Dahlia’s late author, everything is not what it seems. There’s Rosalind, the original Dahlia; Caro, the seasoned TV Dahlia; and Posy, the newcomer—each with their own motivations for being there, and their own secrets. When a murder occurs mid-banquet, the three Dahlias must team up to solve the crime, in an effort to save their careers—and possibly their lives. Set in a stately home with its own poison garden, miniatures of murder scenes, and a host of suspicious family members and fans mixing together, this is a wonderfully fresh take on the traditional cozy crime set-up. 

Miss Austen Investigates by Jessica Bull

Twenty-year-old Jane Austen is attending a ball, and underneath the glittering conversation and society manners is a layer of secret liaisons, cunning lies, and most importantly, murder. When the body of a milliner of Jane’s acquaintance is found on the premises, Jane’s clever mind is activated. But when her brother Georgy is accused, she’s convinced of his innocence and is determined to clear him. Georgy has learning difficulties—a historically accurate fact that Bull has clearly taken great care with—and thus becomes the unfortunate scapegoat to a killer willing to do whatever it takes to remain undiscovered. Rich with historical details, Georgian atmosphere, and a winning cast of Austens, this was like a trip back in time and a conversation with Jane Austen all in one. 

Belladonna by Adalyn Grace

Nineteen-year-old Signa has a peculiar talent—she can consume Belladonna berries, and not only survive, but she’ll be visited by Death himself. He’s a mysterious and compelling force in her life, but since Singa seems to inhabit the murky space between life and death, it’s unsurprising that her guardians all tend to meet untimely ends. When Signa goes to stay with her only remaining relatives, the wealthy and strange Hawthorns, she finds herself investigating the death of its matriarch, along with the mysterious illness of the daughter of the house. She forms strange alliances and makes startling discoveries, but it’s her alliance with Death himself that makes her the perfect person to uncover what’s really happening at Thorn Grove. A slightly gothic fantasy, this book preserves the golden age crime novel feel on top of some very creative world building, with a heady romance in the mix. 

Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

Finlay Donovan is a struggling writer and single mom, who meets up with her agent at a Panera and to discuss her newest crime novel. The problem? She’s mistaken for a contract killer when the woman at the next table overhears the plot of her book—and she’s slipped a note with a mouth-watering amount of money promised if she kills a nasty husband. Finlay might not be a killer, but she’s a curious writer, and when she decides to do a little spying on her target, she ends up over her head when he actually turns up dead. She’s desperate to root out the killer before it all comes back on her, all while trying to make a deadline, deal with a horrible ex of her own, and juggle her young kids. It’s a fresh and funny take on the genre, with some truly clever twists. 

The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder by C. L. Miller 

Twenty years ago, Freya Lockwood was an antiques expert, world traveler, and all around adventurous woman. But something happened in Cairo that changed the course of her life, and caused her to turn her back on the antiques world, and fall out with her mentor Arthur. When Freya learns that Arthur died suddenly under mysterious circumstances, she reluctantly returns to the small village she grew up in to help her beloved Aunt Carole through the loss. But Carole and Freya quickly realize that Arthur was involved with something dangerous, and has left clues that only Freya has the knowledge to decode. Soon Freya’s past comes to back to haunt her, and she and Carole are drawn into an antiques enthusiast’s weekend that could hold all the clues to Arthur’s murder, or could be a terrible trap. Carole and Freya make such an entertaining duo, and the book is rich with description and details of real antiques.

The High Rise Mystery by Sharna Jackson

I am unapologetically putting an upper middle grade mystery in the mix, because not only do I think that adults have so much to gain in reading children’s books for fun (looking at problems through a child’s lens can give such great perspective), but this book in particular hits all the beats of the fun murder mystery, in perfect balance. 

Nik and Norva are sisters who live in The Tri—a triangle of high-rise buildings in central London. When they find their neighbor Hugo dead in the apartment’s dumpster, the two girls bravely put together an investigation of their own in order to clear the police’s main suspect—their father. It’s a brilliant mix of hijinks, genuine puzzles, social commentary, and family love. And if you think that just because it’s a kid’s book you’ll easily guess the ending, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong. 

The post 9 Fun Murder Mysteries You Should be Reading appeared first on Electric Literature.

The fictional characters who have the greatest emotional impact on me are the ones who will stay with me forever, and they’re often not the nicest people in the book. Far from it. In fact, sometimes they’re the worst breed of villain—serial killers. A murderer who kills once is bad enough but the people who strike again and again, should surely terrify and repulse me—shouldn’t they? Well, sometimes they do, but not always. Sometimes, for reasons I don’t fully understand, I find myself rooting for the serial killer, desperately hoping they won’t be caught. 

In my debut novel, You’d Look Better as A Ghost, I introduce Claire—a serial killer who sees her victims as ghosts before they die. Despite being a brutal, unforgiving psychopath, Claire is often described by readers as being extremely likeable and strangely relatable, prompting me to wonder why. What is it about her that resonates? Her difficult childhood, perhaps? Her authenticity? Or is her likeability directly related to her dark humor? Are we more forgiving of the people who make us laugh? 

With this in mind, I’d like to consider seven books that have introduced us to unforgettable characters and pose the question—why do we find these serial killers so likeable? (And what does that say about us?) 

Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

As readers, we warm to serial killer Dexter Morgan in Jeff Lindsay’s series of books, because we know we’d be safe around him, wouldn’t we? After all, Dexter only goes after the bad guys who do terrible things, and this is part of his appeal. We agree with his assessment of other people and appreciate his wit and the peculiar logic to his code of ethics. Plus, he’s intelligent and good at his job as a forensic blood splatter analyst, and he treats both the women in his life—his adoptive sister and his girlfriend, with respect. I think we like him because when he’s not killing bad people, Dexter is extremely charming. 

Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings

Whilst not as overtly comical as her character in Killing Eve—the TV adaptation of Luke Jennings’ novel, Villanelle is an undeniably fascinating creation. One of the world’s most skilled assassins, she is glamourous and unflappable with an ever-present, understated wit. But she is also a cold, brutal killer, so why do we, as readers, care about her? Perhaps the answer lies in her troubled childhood. After her mother’s death, her questionable father was often absent, leaving the young Villanelle in the care of orphanages, and us to ponder—would a different childhood have created a different girl? 

Hannibal by Thomas Harris

Someone else who is extremely interesting to ponder but definitely from a safe distance, is Hannibal Lecter. In fact, if one was brave/unfortunate enough to meet him in real life, the list of questions for the serial killer first introduced in the novel, ‘Red Dragon’ by Thomas Harris would be endless. How can a genius doctor and cannibalistic monster co-exist in the same human form? And maybe therein lies the answer. Maybe the behaviour of Hannibal Lecter is so extreme, so far removed from conventional norms that we no longer consider him human. Perhaps it is his complete lack of morality that allows us to skim over the killing and be entertained instead by his intelligence, charisma and sharp wit. Any character who ‘preferred to eat the rude’ is indisputably grotesque, but certainly not boring. 

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Whilst Korede isn’t the serial killer in Oyinkan Braithwaite’s novel, she acts as accomplice for her murderous sister, so why are we on her side? Maybe it’s because the siblings are so different. Whereas Ayoola is beautiful, reckless and messy with her kills, Korede is average-looking, organised and meticulous in cleaning up each crime scene. And when Korede is read and understood in the context of her family—abusive father, passive mother, sociopathic sister—her determination to protect her sibling at all costs, can be more easily understood. Perhaps our sympathy for Korede’s position within her family and life, clouds our judgment and makes us more forgiving. 

Sweetpea by C.J. Skuse

Rhiannon Lewis, the anti-hero in C J Skuse’s series of books, survived a traumatic crime when she was young that left her with a serious brain injury. Years later, armed with an abundance of dark humour, brutal one liners and a kill list of those who annoy her, the reader is never sure whether Rhiannon would always have developed into a merciless, albeit hilarious psychopath, or whether her brain injury is solely to blame. Regardless of this, I think the reason we find ourselves rooting for Rhiannon is because if we’re honest, we all have murderous thoughts about the people who irritate us, and spending time with a character who not only shares those thoughts but acts on them, is highly entertaining and strangely reassuring. For all our faults, we’re not that bad. 

How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie

We know we shouldn’t like a woman who calmly killed numerous members of her family whilst experiencing not a moment of upset or regret, but there is something very intriguing about Grace Bernard, the protagonist in Bella Mackie’s novel. Maybe she’d be less relatable if this story was solely about revenge, but her rage at the class system and patriarchy certainly resonates. Grace refuses to conform; she doesn’t exhibit behaviours we have been conditioned to expect from women, and this is so refreshing to read. Yes, she’s often angry, cruel and self-important and yet there are times when we find ourselves agreeing with her. Maybe it’s the conflict Grace creates within the reader that makes her such a fascinating character.

Jaws by Peter Benchley 

Whilst not a conventional serial killer, the star of Peter Benchley’s novel certainly racks up a decent number of victims and I think deserves a place on this list. Without the shark, Jaws is just a story about Police Chief Brody working in Amity during the busy summer season. But with the shark, this is one of the most exciting stories of all time! And from the safety of the shoreline, I have to admit that I’m a big fan of the shark, who after all, is just doing what sharks do. And, returning to my initial question, maybe that’s the best answer of all. Maybe the reason I find the fictional serial killers on this list so likeable is quite simple. I love characters who are unashamedly themselves.

The post 7 Novels About Unconventional Serial Killers appeared first on Electric Literature.

For all the physical strength and dominance they display, athletes on the collegiate, Olympic, and professional levels are still susceptible to the vulnerabilities that plague us all. They fret over their identities and legacies, the health of their platonic and romantic relationships. Some days they wake up feeling invincible; on many other days they know all too well they aren’t.

In recent years, I’ve had conversations with dozens of athletes about their mental health, specifically. My new book, Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes, is a deeply reported look into the athlete psyche and what non-athletes can learn from it. As someone who hasn’t played competitive sports since high school, I needed as many direct glimpses as possible into what high-level play is like—and the mental tolls that come with it. For that, in addition to original interviews, I turned to athlete memoirs.

Whether you’re looking to be inspired to push past an obstacle in your way or you’re struggling and just want to feel seen by someone successful who’s been in your shoes, look no further than athletes’ own powerful words. After all, no one has a better handle on their mental health struggles than they do. Here are nine captivating sports memoirs that grapple with mental health.

My Greatest Save by Briana Scurry with Wayne Coffey

Scurry, the goalkeeper of the U.S. women’s national soccer team during the famous 1999 World Cup victory, chronicles the saves that she made look effortless on the field and the trouble that she had saving herself off it. After a career-ending traumatic head injury in 2010, she fell into depression and self-medicated with Vicodin and alcohol. The icon digs deep to describe how she found herself and fought for her chance at recovery.

Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised by Carmelo Anthony with D. Watkins

The 10-time NBA All-Star had a particularly tough time adjusting to fame after growing up in poor Brooklyn and Baltimore neighborhoods, where he described being surrounded by drugs and violence. For Anthony, learning how to be vulnerable as a Black man and process his feelings in a healthy way became a lifelong journey.

Open by Andre Agassi with J. R. Moehringer 

A former men’s world No. 1 tennis player, Agassi details a childhood rife with emotional abuse. Nevertheless, he was high-achieving from his teenage days at a tennis boarding school. Agassi, who is honest and reflective throughout about the pressures of playing professionally, even addresses getting past his 1997 positive test for methamphetamine.

Over It by Lolo Jones

The summer and winter Olympian—a hurdler and bobsledder—is perhaps known best for her shortcomings in both sports, especially tripping over the penultimate hurdle in the 2008 Beijing Games and missing out on gold. What fans may be less familiar with are the negative mental health effects she experienced after the traumatic event, when strangers wouldn’t stop mocking her. Jones’s faith, as she tells it, got her through, just as it got her through a tough upbringing.

Till the End by CC Sabathia with Chris Smith

An MLB Cy Young Award–winning pitcher who starred in Cleveland and New York, Sabathia was hiding his drinking as much as possible during the early stages of his career. Inevitably, people started to notice his erratic, confrontational behavior. In 2015 he took a step not many athletes do: publicly announcing that he was checking into a rehabilitation program — right before the playoffs, no less. He revitalized his career afterward and became an advocate for recovery from mental health and substance use.

Rise by Lindsey Vonn

Vonn put together one of the best skiing careers of all time; when she retired in 2019, she was the most decorated American in her sport. But that success and her speed on the slopes came at a cost: She struggled with depression for decades, learning to cope by leveraging attributes like grit and perseverance. Here, she gives clarity for athletes and non-athletes alike to those oft-murky concepts. 

The Save of My Life by Corey Hirsch with Sean Patrick Conboy

By his early 20s, the Canadian goaltender had accomplished his dream of making it to the NHL. He also earned a silver medal in the 1994 Olympics. But Hirsch was also wrestling with dark thoughts and relentless anxiety he wouldn’t share publicly until decades later, in a groundbreaking 2017 Players’ Tribune essay about OCD. This book is an insightful expansion of that article, detailing his path to recovery. 

In the Water They Can’t See You Cry by Amanda Beard with Rebecca Paley

In 1996, Beard made the Atlanta Games at age 14, and, with her teddy bear famously in tow, she walked away with three Olympic medals (including one gold). But the fame and pressure that accompanied global success at such a young age took a toll on her mind and body, as she silently struggled with depression and bulimia in the following years. Slowly, she learned to trust those around her and seek the help she desperately needed.

Getting a Grip by Monica Seles

The tennis star peaked at the women’s world No. 1 ranking in the early 1990s. From there, things got considerably harder. In 1993, a fan of opponent Steffi Graf stabbed Seles in the back, forcing her to take more than two years away from the sport to recover. During that time, she developed a binge-eating disorder and depression, while coping with her father’s cancer diagnosis and death. She eventually persevered through it all, making it back to the court and even picking up a ninth grand slam.

The post 9 Memoirs That Reveal the Mental Health Challenges of Athletes appeared first on Electric Literature.