It’s easy to lose yourself in this vibrant collection of literary posts. A blog-based website devoted to the power of storytelling, ElectricLit is organized into a handful of sections including Scuttlebutt, covering current events of a literary nature, and Features, offering, well, you guessed it, features on literary topics. There’s an archive’s worth of reviews, new and not, in Books, and author ruminations in Conversations.
Gathered in the Recommended Reading section of the site are book recommendations from famous authors, indie presses and literary magazine editors. Also included are special monthly picks by the ElectricLit editors themselves, featuring the work of new, previously unpublished, voices in fiction. (Subscribe to “Recommended Reading” and get a free story in your inbox every week.) For short, darkly-comic, ironic experimental fiction, essays, poetry and graphic narratives check out the Okey-Panky tab, which posts something new each Monday morning.
And for those who love a little art with their text, check out the posts tagged “Infographics” (in the Features section), quirky, fact-filled, graphic entries like “Unusual Jobs of Famous Writers,” “A Global Tour of Literature“ and “15 Books with More Characters Than You Can Keep Track Of!” These entertaining posts inform and enrich the literary mind, with crisp, contemporary graphics to please the eye.
Speaking of pleasing the eye, hit the Shop section and check out Literary Aces, a fabulous deck of playing cards sporting original portraits of Proust, Woolf, Kafka, the Brontes, Nabokov, Joyce, O’Connor, Fitzgerald and others, on the face cards of the deck. At $10, who could resist? I bought two; one for me, one for my Book Club bestie!
One drawback to this site is its heavy dose of advertising, which can be both annoying and detracting. A non-profit enterprise, it might be worth hitting the Donate page with hopes the advertising can be minimized in the future. The site’s motto reads: “We believe the transformative experience of reading literature fosters empathy and explores the human condition like no other art form.” A worthy cause, indeed.