Showing results by author "Halimah Marcus" in All Categories

"If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that logic is the sworn enemy of grief," writes Halimah Marcus, co-editor of Electric Literature, in her introduction to “Firewood," a hilarious and devastating story by J. Robert Lennon. "When the narrator’s wife (expectedly) leaves him, too devastated to admit the obvious, he concocts an impossible explanation for her disappearance. All I’ll say is that it involves the woodpile. The invented story is more horrible than the truth, but somehow easier to manage."

As a child, horses consumed Halimah Marcus' imagination. When she wasn't around horses she was pretending to be one, cantering on two legs, hands poised to hold invisible reigns. To her classmates, girls like Halimah were known as "horse girls," weird and overzealous. Decades later, when memes about "horse girl energy" began appearing across social media, Halimah reluctantly recognized herself. The stereotypical horse girl is also white, thin, rich, and straight, a daughter of privilege. Yet so many riders don't fit this narrow, damaging ideal.

In LA Times First Fiction Award winner Maggie Shipstead's "Angel Lust", Simon Orff, a thrice-married movie producer, departs for his deceased father’s house, daughters selfishly in tow. “If he had to referee their squabbles and navigate their quicksilver emotions while sifting through his father’s possessions, he hoped the house would not seem so empty, or he hoped at least the emptiness would be neutral.” "If only," writes Halimah Marcus, co-editor of Electric Literature, in her introduction.

Matt Dojny's "You Are the Stepson" is one story told three different ways. Dojny uses "variations on a theme, like movements in a symphony, or parallel universes, existing side by side but never intersecting," writes Halimah Marcus, co-editor of Electric Literature, in her introduction this issue. "The opening to 'You Are the Stepson' tips the [listener] off to the elements that will appear in all three tales contained herein: a cancer-ridden stepfather and his stepson, a bicycle and a gun, and the desperate need for an apology, 'due to the situation with the ant.'”