At the end of every year, Electric Literature collects its most-read stories, essays, and articles. The intent is to highlight the work that especially resonated with readers, but—for me, at least—it’s also an opportunity to speculate about why. Last year, the most popular Recommended Reading stories inhabited liminal spaces; the emphasis was on perspective shifts, moments of transition, revised understandings of past events. This year, whether it’s my own inborn cynicism or the function of what has felt like a very long year, I think writers and readers are preoccupied with aftermath. The world isn’t changing—it’s changed. And not necessarily for the better.
In the most popular excerpt of the year, from Hannah Pittard’s autofictional novel If You Love It, Let It Kill You, the question isn’t “How do you tell the story of a relationship?” but rather “When a relationship ends, who gets to write its obituary—and how much of it has to be true?” In Kevin Wilson’s “All Stories,” which also features a writer-narrator, the plot begins after the cataclysmic event: “I’d driven my car into a tree on purpose,” the narrator tells us, “and returned to consciousness a week later with a huge scar on the right side of my face.” The story isn’t about the self-inflicted accident, it’s about the life that unfolds after it, about struggling to exist after you’ve discovered something frightening lives inside you.
“Gondola” by Etgar Keret is, superficially, lighter fare. In the opening scenes, a woman knowingly begins an affair with a man who is married—a circumstance he transparently assures her will never change. The aftermath here should be obvious—affairs cross lines and push boundaries and change lives. In Keret’s hands, however, the lines and boundaries and lives are off-kilter, and the consequences are wholly unexpected.
Aaron Gwyn’s “The Cattleman” and Samantha Xiao Cody’s “Blood Makes a Bad Dye” also take sidelong looks at a world remade. In each, the protagonist is set on a canonical trajectory. The cowboy confronts lawlessness in the classic western. The girl faces social pressures and cultural expectations in the coming-of-age tale. And yet, in both, it’s not the familiarity of the arc that keeps the reader reading. It’s the suspicion that the cowboy and the girl are not archetypes. It’s the impulse to understand how it ends.
Enjoy!
– Wynter K. Miller
Managing Editor
“My Ex’s Autofiction Has Me Bouncing Off the Walls” by Hannah Pittard, recommended by Maggie Smith
Recommended Reading’s most popular issue of the year is an excerpt from Hannah Pittard’s candidly intimate novel If You Love It, Let It Kill You. As recommender Maggie Smith puts it, the novel is “about having joint custody of a relationship, and of the memories made in that relationship, and therefore of the story.” The excerpt follows a writer whose ex publishes a novel, “allegedly about our toddler of a marriage and his affair with my dear friend,” and the resulting impact on her present relationship and life as an academic. Beyond the specificity of detail in the novel, there’s a core of truth that extends beyond the central drama, capturing the realities of middle age and the relationships and losses we collect as we get older.
“Whatever’s Killing the Cattle is Killing Him Too” by Aaron Gwyn, recommended by Wynter K Miller
It’s no surprise that Aaron Gwyn’s striking interpolation of the Western was popular with readers this year. The story follows an Oklahoma cattle rancher in the 1970s. He’s losing money on his ranch, his wife wants to move to the city, and relations with the surrounding community are tense. To complicate matters, he finds two of his cows mutilated with surgical precision, and no obvious culprit to pin the crime on. EL’s Managing Editor, Wynter K Miller, aptly describes the appeal of Gwyn’s narrative flourish, as “it positions the reader in a familiar story with familiar archetypes—and then lets them unravel.” Utilizing paranoia and the eeriness of its rural setting, Gwyn turns a familiar narrative on its head, with a truly astonishing result.
“Fictionalizing My Life to Make It Livable” by Kevin Wilson, recommended by the Michigan Quarterly Review
Kevin Wilson’s “All Stories” follows a struggling undergraduate student who is socially isolated, barely getting by in school, and overwhelmed with disaffection. When he begins taking a creative writing class, fiction becomes a beacon of meaning and purpose. As Michigan Quarterly Review editor Polly Rosenwaike puts it, “The crisp prose moves our dejected guy forward in an almost buoyant way. And the story soon offers him hope—in the form of fiction and friendship.” This hope deepens the emotional resonance of our narrator’s despair, and speaks not only to the story’s success but to its resounding truth.
“If You Can’t Enjoy the Sleepover, Ruin It” by Samantha Xiao Cody, recommended by Preety Sidhu
“Blood Makes a Bad Dye”—a stunning debut from Samantha Xiao Cody—is a coming-of-age story about identity and belonging, assimilation and desire. Cody’s protagonist is a Chinese American teen charting a new friendship with the popular, resolutely American Quinnie. The narrator’s efforts to assimilate into Quinnie’s gaggle of American teendom are complicated by her cultural roots and lack of experience, as well as by her mother’s vivid presence. EL Associate Editor Preety Sidhu writes of the narrator’s transformation as the discovery of “a desire even more powerful than emulation or seduction.” With vibrant prose and keen attention to the discomfort of adolescence, “Blood Makes a Bad Dye” captures something unexpected about identity, power, and the role that cultural upbringing plays in the stories we tell.
“Her Boyfriend Refuses to Discuss His Wife” by Etgar Keret, recommended by Aimee Bender
Etgar Keret’s “Gondola” is, on its surface, a story about an affair. However, as readers of Keret know, any supposedly simple trope extends like an iceberg beneath the surface of his prose. “Gondola” follows Dorit, who begins a relationship with the idiosyncratic Oshik, a married man paradoxically looking for a serious relationship. The story unfolds with precise awareness of a reader’s expectations, both subverting and confounding them. As recommender Aimee Bender so eloquently puts it: “A shiny Keret conceit is always in the service of the real, of plumbing the depths to reveal something true about how we relate.” In “Gondola,” the quirks and desires of the characters come to reflect the social and political circumstances that surround them, and the responsibilities that emerge with intimacy.
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