But before we reveal the winner, here is some behind-the-scenes commentary on the competition:

While we’re really impressed with how the March Sadness bracket turned out, we can’t say it matched our expectations. The EL staff filled out our own brackets, and we failed abysmally. From nearly everyone guessing that A Little Life would sweep the left side of the bracket, to being (pessimistically) certain The Fault in Our Stars would be the runaway winner, our showings were frankly embarrassing. Out of a maximum 57 points, our winning bracket (belonging to former intern, Kyla Walker—congrats, Kyla!) scored a measly 26 points. And our lowest score, by our lovely Managing Editor, Wynter Miller (sorry to call you out, Wynter), was only 12. And I, the author of this article, who by all means should be the best at guessing given that I run our social media accounts, clocked in at a (frankly embarrassing) 17 points. I thought I knew you all well, dear followers, and I’m ashamed to say I clearly do not. My hubris got the better of me. Is this what fantasy sports feels like? If so, I don’t think I like it. But… I will be playing again next year anyway. Which kind of seems to be the entire vibe of sports? Maybe we’re onto something here.

Here is the winner of March Sadness:

For those following along at home, here’s how the bracket played out:

Thanks for playing and following along! Join us again next year for another (possibly also rhyming but definitely not sports-related) March Madness bracket.

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You, dear reader, are going to help us decide which of these books has single-handedly accounted for thousands of dollars in revenue for the Kleenex brand (we assume) thanks to readers blotting their eyes and blowing their noses. Voting starts Monday, March 25 on our Instagram and Twitter (sorry, did we say Twitter? We meant “X”).

Fill out a bracket to predict the winner, then head to our social media channels to vote in the polls. And stay tuned to find out whether your top devastating read takes the win!

Update: We have a winner! It was a tough competition, but there was one book that cleared every round with ease, swept the competition, and rose to the top. (Drumroll please!)

As a recap, here’s how the bracket played out:

Round 1

A Little Life vs. Shuggie Bain

Anna Karenina vs. Madame Bovary

We the Animals vs. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The Bluest Eye vs. The House of Mirth

Earthlings vs. Beautyland

Revolutionary Road vs. Giovanni’s Room

The Bell Jar vs. Normal People

The Nickel Boys vs. Edinburgh

Bridge to Terabithia vs. Where the Red Fern Grows

The Book Thief vs. The Notebook

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close vs. Flowers for Algernon

The Fault in Our Stars vs. The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Kite Runner vs. The Road

All the Light We Cannot See vs. The Song of Achilles

Atonement vs. Never Let Me Go

Little Women vs. Of Mice and Men

Round 2

A Little Life vs. Anna Karenina

The Bluest Eye vs. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Earthlings vs. Giovanni’s Room

The Bell Jar vs. The Nickel Boys

Bridge to Terabithia vs. The Book Thief

The Fault In Our Stars vs. Flowers for Algernon

The Kite Runner vs. The Song of Achilles

Of Mice and Men vs. Never Let Me Go

Round 3

The Bluest Eye vs. Anna Karenina

The Bell Jar vs. Giovanni’s Room

Bridge to Terabithia vs. Flowers for Algernon

The Kite Runner vs. Never Let Me Go

Semi-Finals

The Bluest Eye vs. The Bell Jar

Bridge to Terabithia vs. Never Let Me Go

FINALS

The Bluest Eye vs. Never Let Me Go

The post Help Us Choose the Saddest Book of All Time appeared first on Electric Literature.

A debut collection that draws on the poet’s Iranian heritage to process life-altering loss and grief.

Darius Atefat-Peckham’s debut poetry collection follows a boy’s coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead.

Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother’s poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one’s beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory “like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue.”

Book of Kin won the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize.

Here is the cover, designed by Melissa Dias-Mandoly, artwork by Hemad Javadzade.

Author Darius Atefat-Peckham: As an Iranian-American who’s not yet been able to visit Iran (for reasons both personal and political), whose mother and brother died before I could remember them, I profoundly relate to the ever-seeking nature of Hemad Javadzade’s The Now (which he’s graciously allowed us to use as the cover of Book of Kin!). In this piece, Javadzade depicts Time, distant and unknowable as the stars, funneled like sand through the neck of an hourglass, and finally released as something akin to rain, tapping against the mirror of the Mystic Astronaut’s one, grounded eye, like a child trying to garner his attention. All of this transformation occurs within the space of an opened notebook. What an immensely true rendering of the labor of writing, or deep listening—of an art-making that reaches toward ancestral love, grief, and connection! I’m filled with awe each time I study it, my eyes funneling through, over and over, like those stars.

So the further transformation the image underwent as it was designed for the cover of Book of Kin (the two o’s of the title interlaced like an infinity symbol, like spectacles, like fingers; the pages spread open like palms, a porthole to a site of reincarnation; my name, wading, resting alongside the Mystic Astronaut) nesting within it these poems about my family, my beloveds…it’s almost too beautiful to put to words. In this time of Nowruz, I’m called to think about renewal, rebirth, community. About growth, transformation and, yes, hope for the future. As I write this, I can hear, too, the Persian imperative my grandparents, Papa and Bibi, would often use when I was little, wanting to show me pictures of the mountains and gardens and rivers of Iran, their home, or tell me some unknowable truth about my mother, or teach me the correct way to cook rice for a Persian dish, leaving the lid of my grief slightly askew to let out the steam: Bebin, Azizam, bebin! they’d laugh, pulling me to them like an hourglass, turned over and over. “Bebin,” they’d say, which means look! or, at times, and also, listen!

Artist Hemad Javadzade: Ancient thoughts considered the unreachable realms of the heavens and a promised afterlife as a dwelling for gods and deities. However, now, with knowledge expanding its infinite scope, we increasingly return to our true selves and understand our insignificant role in this existence. Time is the crucial determinant.

Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri says: “It’s not our task to unravel the secret of the red rose Our task might be To float within the enchantment of the red rose.”

In this work, I intended to bring this to light: human inevitability in the face of time passing and the vastness of the universe. Although moments, like grains of sand inside an hourglass, fall upon us, reminding us of the passage of time.

Playfully engaging with philosophical themes has always been the main subject of my paintings. And the infinite world of existence has always been my greatest and most captivating subject.

Designer Melissa Dias-Mandoly: Such great artwork makes a cover fun to work on, and Darius selected this Hemad Javadzade piece that really speaks to all of the poems inside. I originally experimented with overlaying the title and prize line in the hourglass, but it was quickly clear that the art needed to stand on its own. I also played with various typefaces that would more obviously echo the Arabic lettering in the image itself, but we ultimately settled on the eye-catching and modern Lostar font for the title, which I think complements the art without distracting from it.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Book of Kin” by Darius Atefat-Peckham appeared first on Electric Literature.

In poems that swirl together traditional American patriotic music with current horrors—from gun violence to climate change—and in which Yeats’ famous apocalyptic figure of the Rough Beast takes a painting class, wears a spacesuit, and listens to public service announcements, Ominous Music Intensifying takes on the too-muchness of contemporary, apocalypse-prone America with its own hard-hitting music, dark humor, and the occasional fiddle duel. Teague expands her subject matter here to include chronic pain, generational poverty, and questions of safety—bodily and psychological—as she writes letters to Mitch McConnell about UFOs (and everything else), reckons with sexism and dental trauma, torture devices and sad clown paintings and the pandemic, asking “What kind of safety, breaking apart to make us?”

Here is the cover, designed by Dinah Fried of Small Stuff Design, artwork by Andrea Kowch.

Author Alexandra Teague: For months after I first ran into this Andrea Kowch painting, I couldn’t get it off my mind. While the women and crows weren’t directly characters in my poems, they existed in the poems’ same emotional landscape: ominous, askew, maximalist Americana—with maybe fiddling or off-key patriotic songs drifting in the window from the desolate gold fields. The painting asks us to reconsider what is beastly, what’s domestic, what’s safe, what’s homey. It’s a fairytale-real landscape into which the Rough Beast could slouch, as he does into my poems, moving from Yeats’ famous “The Second Coming” into contemporary scenes of gun violence and pandemics and climate change. A landscape that suggests both strange humor and danger; order and incongruity; allegory and real apocalypse. I’m so grateful we’ve been able to use Kowch’s “The Visitors” to invite readers into the kitchen (please grab a thrift store chair and don’t mind the hyena) for some poems and pie.

Designer Dinah Fried: From a design perspective, our primary goal was to allow the haunting and evocative painting (“The Visitors” by Andrea Kowch) to express the tone of the cover, and not let our design decisions distract or compete with it. In that spirit, the stark white cover and unadorned black typography are meant to be a quiet counterpoint to the visual and emotional richness of the image with its bleak landscape; piercing stares; voracious animals; chaotic tabletop; flaming red hair; and glistening, ripe berries. We chose the typeface Eagle Bold—originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1933 for FDR’s National Recovery Administration (part of the New Deal)—as it felt as if it might have existed in the same time and space as these three windblown bakers.

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“These are stories about attempting to outrun time; about trying to remember transfemme pasts; about magic touching everything except the possibility of lasting love.”

From a shapeshifting garden somewhere in Michigan to a West Texas town with a supernatural past, from a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite to a secret waterfall in Texarkana: from nowhere to anywhere, Aurora Mattia chases glimpses of paradise. Her gemstone prose shatters into starbursts of heartbreak and rapture, gossip and holy babble, bringing together a cast of spiders, sibyls, angels, mermaids, girlfriends, and goddesses in vain pursuit of their unnameable selves. Their perils are as dense with symbolism as they are refined by desire—if beauty is the labyrinth, it is also the light.

Tied together by the strings of a corset, Unsex Me Here is a dazzling showcase of other worlds near and distant, and the high femme ramblers who’ve found and lost their way through them.

Here is the cover, designed by Tree Abraham.

Author Aurora Mattia: “My family is from East Texas, but the Texas-of-my-mind, the Texas that pulls my dreams across towns and timezones—the Texas where my great-grandmother Bobby was sent to live in a single mothers’ home after a lowlife boyfriend got her pregnant—is across the Pecos, among ghost town ruins, beneath the high auburn walls of mesas like immemorial clouds calcified by heat and slow time, and come to rest. So it makes sense for the cover of Unsex Me Here to reflect that supernatural place where I first saw the moon rise; and it only makes sense, since all life began within hydrothermal heat vents—enormous cracks—in the ocean floor, for an infinite ravine to split the desert in two, because that very desert, where anyone can happen upon an ammonite fossil, was once itself an ocean floor, the Permian Basin. And so it only makes sense, in that northern corner of the Chihuahuan Desert, for iridescent forms—bubbles, blobs, mutating globules—to wobble and rise from such a ravine, on the verge of shapeshifting into something known, or at least something knowable, because, as the women in Unsex Me Here believe, iridescence is:

•          the oldest force in the universe, its most fundamental expression, i.e.,
•          the antimatter nectar of nothing, i.e.,
•          the precondition of all life.

And what could be more transsexual than that?”

Designer Tree Abraham: “Mattia’s decadent surrealist language is a designer’s dream. There was so much description of an Empyreal world made of luminescent surfaces and mythological collisions. The initial cover concept was inspired by a passage in the book:

‘To let loose a swarm of butterflies from the cracked earth, but I am not made to show you butterflies, I am made to show you trampled wings and the uselessness of beauty. I want so much to give you paradise, I am trying my hardest, I promise. I have at last exhumed my phrases and though they are damp and humid and many are rotted like wet leaves I speak them anyway.’

The cover had butterflies escaping from the crack. The author wanted something other than butterflies. I pulled the orbs from another concept, feeling these vessels of watery air offered similar optimism as they floated up from the hot dry earth. Taking notes from Mattia on color and type ultimately made this cover better than I could have imagined, but not nearly as fantastical as what lies inside.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Unsex Me Here” by Aurora Mattia appeared first on Electric Literature.

In 1953, Memory Feather and her mother Virginia are welcomed back to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote, by Virginia’s childhood friend Mac McFadden, a gay man actively participating in the Civil Rights Movement. The three of them form a loving, if unconventional family. But the arrival of Tony, Mac’s “guest,” brings chaos to their quiet life, forever changing Mem and shattering the bonds of family she thought she had. An adult now, Mem recounts her story, telling of the scars—emotional and physical—that Tony imparted on her teenage years, and seeking accountability for her own part in the catastrophic turn of events from her final summer in Belle Cote. 

Praised as sweeping, dramatic, and vividly rendered, Beautiful Dreamers is an incandescent novel of innocence, betrayal, love and intolerance, and the honesty we grant to our chosen family. 

“In designing the cover for Beautiful Dreamers I wanted to contrast something visually reflective of this beautiful and moving novel with a sense of the graphic language of protest-era Mississippi,” says the designer, Luke Bird. “The painting by Irma Cook (“Young Woman Seated in a Chair with a Green Backdrop”, The Johnson Collection) is contrasted by a vivid, typographic bottom half which features typefaces designed by Vocal Type (“Martin”) and Brandon Nickerson (“Grainville Script”). Vocal Type are a foundry committed to diversifying design through typography, and the use of “Martin” felt like a perfect fit for this book.”

Meg Reid, publisher of Hub City Press, agrees. “Minrose is a terrific writer and I truly believe this novel, which tackles LGBT issues in midcentury Mississippi, is her finest work to date. She creates a portrait of a Gulf town that is both in flux and ancient, populated by a memorable cast of characters. I knew we wanted a painting to give it a classic, timeless feeling, but I also wanted to frame it with more modern fonts and composition. While I was leaning toward landscapes, Luke found the Irma Cook portrait that so perfectly captured the themes of innocence and betrayal, of sexuality and guilt, that the novel is balancing so well. I love working with Luke because he gives the books a close read and crafts covers that are as complex as the stories they hold.”

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Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We’re Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience. From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides in both tragedies and triumphs. Danticat is an irresistible presence on the page: full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibilities of community. And so “we’re alone” is both a fearsome admission and an intimate invitation—we’re alone now, we can talk. We’re Alone is a book that asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.

Here is the cover, designed by Jeenee Lee, photograph by Widline Cadet.

Author Edwidge Danticat: “In 2021, I wrote a short essay about a series of photographs by the Haitian photographer Widline Cadet. Usually, when I write about photographs, I paste them to the wall across from my desk so that I’m always looking at them, even as I am working on other things. After the essay was published, Widline’s pictures remained on my office wall for a long time, especially the cover photograph ‘Seremoni Disparisyon #1 (Ritual [Dis]Appearance #1)’ (2019).

As I was working on this book, reworking some older essays and writing some new ones, I kept looking at this picture, hoping it might be the book’s cover one day. There is a lot of water in the book, from the Middle Passage to Miami hurricane flooding to a sea barge that carried toxic waste from Philadelphia all over the world and then dumped part of its dangerous cargo on a beach in Gonaïves, Haiti, in 1988. I couldn’t think of a better image for the cover of this book. The title of the collection is captured so well by this cover. The plurality of we, of course, negates aloneness. We might be alone, but at least we’re alone together. The photographs within the photograph are also a great reminder that even in our aloneness, there might be a few items, including some treasured amulets and, if we’re incredibly fortunate, other memory-evoking items, such as books and photographs, to keep us company.”

Designer Jeenee Lee: “The author chose an image by Widline Cadet that perfectly aligned with her book: a woman standing in still water, looking at pictures of youth, on a gray day. There is mystery, contemplation, and stories to be told. Alone, yet not alone. The visual artist Cadet is originally from Haiti, currently living in Los Angeles. My goal was to make the cover design reflective and minimal. The title is large and fills the sky, instead of being small and isolated. Even when you are by yourself, you carry your ancestors and your history with you, always.”

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The newest masterwork from the Nobel Prize winner takes place in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probing the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in  what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior? Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.

Here is the cover, designed by Lauren Peters-Collaer.

Author Olga Tokarczuk: “My story is clad in the conventions of horror while taking the culture of misogyny to task. But I hope my readers will enjoy its humor, and will have fun getting to the bottom a certain mystery. And that at least once they’ll feel shivers down their spines.”

Designer Lauren Peters-Collaer: “The Empusium is full of incredibly rich imagery, so a great deal of the design process in this case involved pulling images from the text and then combining, juxtaposing, and being inspired by them in a way that might speak to the book and its genre-bending nature. This cover hopes to be both macabre and humorous, and hints at ‘the horrors that lie beneath.’”

Translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones: “Translating this book was a delight—an exotic setting, an intriguing płot, some bizarrely compelling characters, magic mushrooms, mystery, danger and death, all described in exquisite style.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “The Empusium” by Nobel Prize Winner Olga Tokarczuk appeared first on Electric Literature.

In this stunning debut short story collection, Mary Jones uses her distinctive voice to examine the painful and occasionally surreal ways we say goodbye. The stories—which range from poignant, to darkly funny, to unsettling—will push you out of your comfort zone and ignite intense emotions surrounding love and loss. A woman camps out on the porch of an ex-lover who has barricaded himself inside the house; a preteen girl caught shoplifting finds herself in grave danger; a man hires a professional mourner to ensure his wife’s funeral is a success. Time and again, Jones’s characters find themselves facing the ends of things: relationships, health, innocence, life as they know it. The stories gathered in this collection are arresting, original, and beautifully rendered. The Goodbye Process packs a punch, just the way grief does—knocking us off our feet.

Here is the cover, designed by Anna Morrison.

Author Mary Jones: “I was hoping the cover would be minimalistic and beautiful, with a hint of quirkiness. I think this cover perfectly embodies those things, and more. I love the clean design, and the color palette which feels both sophisticated and playful. I like that the cover image is not explicit, but is open for interpretation, and everyone I’ve shown it to has had something different to say about it. To me it suggests that a conversation is happening, and maybe one person—the person with the colder cup—has been talking for a while, opening up. In all of the stories in the collection characters are at various stages of letting go of things—relationships, health, life as they know it. I feel like with this colder cup, and with the upward spiraling steam, Anna captures the feeling here that something is being released, let go of.”

Designer Anna Morrison: “Working on a collection of short stories can sometimes be a challenge, especially when trying to encapsulate a feeling that encompasses a range of different narratives. However, Mary Jones’s collection, The Goodbye Process, has a strong, overarching theme of loss and grief, with some humor intertwined in the writing. I also wanted to convey a sense of intimacy on the cover but with an unspoken loneliness, too. There are a lot of different perspectives in this collection, but I felt like the steaming cups of coffee could be the background to many difficult (or happy) conversations.”

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