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Articles by Kyla Walker
3 Debut Authors Discuss How To Live in the Hypothetical
For the spring edition of our debut craft series, three debut authors—Alexa Yasemin Brahme, Sonia Feldman, and Vincent Yu—discuss in detail their journeys through writing about imaginary lives. One may argue that all fiction is rooted in imaginary lives, but these novels especially feel centered around the stakes of these imaginary lives as the protagonists confront, examine, wonder, and muse upon each of their choice’s ramifications on the rest of their years.
Going on Book Tour in Fiction and Then in Real Life
interviews Larissa Pham on titles, the implications of the quotation mark, and the ways art imitates life in her debut novel, “Discipline” Photo by Jim Luo on Unsplash When I was twenty-two, I came across Larissa Pham’s Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy in a bookstore in Oregon and could not put it down.
3 Debut Novelists Discuss Interweaving Narrative Voices
Supporting writers and readers costs money—$500,000 a year, to be precise—and we need your financial help to sustain our work. Today, we’re asking you to give Electric Literature the gift of another year. We need to raise $35,000 to get us through 2025 and balance the budget for 2026. In these challenging times, we need our community to step up. The world is a better place with Electric Lit in it—let’s fight to keep it that way. DONATE NOW.
3 Debut Writers Discuss Frame Narratives and Namelessness in Their First Novels - Electric Literature
For the summer edition of our debut craft series, I spoke with the authors of three novels anchored by unnamed narrators who gather conversations like wild berries in a field. They forage for witticisms, one-liners, nuggets of ancient folklore, political creeds, and casual conversation. All that language is then wrapped into layered characters, drawing out the intimate stories embedded within each of them.
3 Debut Writers Discuss Craft and Obsession in their First Novels
Skip to content Interviews Mariam Rahmani, Jeremy Gordon, and Holly Brickley on the origins of their books and the circuitous paths to writing them Obsession is the pulse and connective tissue that joins the three very different novels in this edition of our debut craft series.
Aria Aber on Finding Transcendence in Berlin’s Underground Scene
Skip to content interviews The author of "Good Girl" discusses writing a pulsing, provocative novel about an Afghan German woman growing up and falling down Good Girl—the debut novel by award-winning poet Aria Aber—follows nineteen-year-old Nila as she becomes charmed in a Berlin club and falls manically in love with Marlowe, an older brooding American writer.
Navid Sinaki’s Debut Is the Love Story He Might Have Lived if He Never Left Iran
Interviews "Medusa of the Roses" follows Anjir's search for his missing lover in a country where homosexuality is criminalized Have you ever come across a close friend’s love letters? In today’s world, this is more akin to accidentally reading private texts or emails open on a roommate’s laptop, but there are still the fortunate few out there who have the time and discipline and romanticism to write by hand and spell out the name of their addressee in pen.
3 Debut Novelists Reveal How Their First Books Came Together
interviews Santiago Jose Sanchez, Uchenna Awoke, and Yasmin Zaher on the highs and lows of the writing and publishing process While reading a debut novel, oftentimes, there exists a momentary thrill of forgetting about craft. Instead, it can feel as if these writers grew up alongside their stories—in parallel lines and lives, naturally accumulating sentences with every inch they grew. There is a tender, literary innocence and a certain freedom from expectation that comes with debut novels.
Ayşegül Savaş Casts a Lens on Life's Small Joys in "The Anthropologists"
Skip to content interviews In her new novel, a couple searches for a new home and forges a place for themselves in their next stage of life Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel, The Anthropologists, is a breathtaking excavation of the wonders and intricacies involved in making a modern life in a new city, of feeling both young and adult, and of growing up while settling down.
Clare Sestanovich Writes from the Unanswered, the Uncertain, and the Unknown
Skip to content interviews The author discusses her new novel "Ask Me Again," the ecstasies of silence, the texture of long-term friendships, and Quaker meetings Throughout her body of work, Clare Sestanovich’s prose asks the kind of questions that make you lean back—pondering daily paradoxes you’d never quite considered before—while her characters make you lean forward onto the edge of your seat.
Every Age Is a Tender Age for an Artist
Skip to content conversations Mona Simpson discusses love, art, and inevitable insecurities in her most recent novel, "Commitment" Mona Simpson’s latest novel, Commitment, is a tour de force that takes place in the early 1970s and follows three siblings—Walter, Lina, and Donnie—as they grow up in Los Angeles, into adulthood, and discover themselves while deciding whether to live an artist’s life, or a stable one.
Jonathan Lethem Returns to Dean Street After Twenty Years With New Characters and More Crimes
Skip to content conversations How a chorus of criticism turned into "Brooklyn Crime Novel" When you hear the title Brooklyn Crime Novel, you might automatically think of genres involving mystery — whodunnit, noir, hardboiled, detective fiction, etc. — and plots driven by investigation. You might think of specific titles such as The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Black Dahlia, The Feral Detective, Gun, With Occasional Music, and perhaps even Motherless Brooklyn.
8 Campus Novels Set in Grad School
The fictional characters in most campus novels are almost always undergraduates between the tender ages of eighteen and twenty-two.
Turning Small Rebellions Into a Large Literary Revolution
Skip to content conversations Kenan Orhan discusses how writing affects and reflects identity, political risks of publishing today, and the fine line of fictionalizing tragedy. Kenan Orhan’s debut, I Am My Country, feels like much more than just a book of imaginative short stories set in and around the author’s ancestral homeland of Turkey.
8 Novels Spotlighting Middle Eastern American Women
Reading Lists From Palestine to Turkey, these young women chase love, belonging, and the freedom to believe in their own desires My mother was born and raised in Istanbul, then moved to the U.S. alone when she was twenty-four years old. Turkish, like many Middle Eastern ethnicities, is not white, nor is it part of a large minority group in the United States. It is a hazy, ambiguous ethnicity that feels stuck between two continents and two eras, mostly because it is.
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