Electric Literature is just that, electric - five great stories that grab you. Our Summer 2009 debut anthology features the first published excerpt from Michael Cunningham's forthcoming novel. This issue also features new fiction by some of America's most innovative and important contemporary writers, including Jim Shepard, T Cooper, Lydia Millet, and Diana Wagman. These stories are charged with wit, incident, and emotional gravity right from the first sentence.

In our Autumn 2009 anthology, Colson Whitehead charts the rise to fame of a truth-telling comedian. Stephen O'Connor transports us to a cabin in the woods, where a young woman attempting to finish her dissertation in solitude becomes increasingly convinced she's not alone. Pasha Malla follows a young writer as he explores how tragedy influences art-and how life falls short of it. Marisa Silver tells the tale of three sisters who perceive the truth about their parents through the eyes of some unexpected visitors, and Lydia Davis' solitary narrator acutely details the behavior of three cows who live in a pasture just across the road.

In our third anthology, Aimee Bender introduces us to a young woman unable to summon the desire to sleep with her husband without payment in cash, Matt Sumell's protagonist feels capable of anything but can save no one, Rick Moody charts the rise an fall of a romance via Twitter, Patrick deWitt presents a bleak, funny tale of two movers who are going nowhere, and Jenny Offill chronicles the awkward vigil of a man caring for his terminally ill ex-wife.

Our fourth anthology celebrates the transportive joy of entering a vividly imagined world. Celebrated Spanish author Javier Marías spins a tale of a mild-mannered teacher turned ghost-hunter. Mexican writer Roberto Ransom (translated here into English for the first time) introduces us to a master fresco painter and the conservationist who tries to recapture his magic hundreds of years later, with mystifying results. Pulitzer Prize-nominee Joy Williams pens a fable about Baba Iaga and her pelican child, kept safe in a hut on chicken legs, until a mysterious historical figure asks to paint her portrait. Ben Stroud tells the harrowing story of a destitute cripple sent by his emperor to destroy a holy man and preserve the kingdom, and Patrick deWitt chronicles the deviant adventures of a man known only as “the Bastard."

Our fifth anthology takes you on a journey from the suburbs to the underworld. In Kevin Brockmeier's tale, "A Fable for the Living," notes are passed between the living and the dead through a fissure in the earth. J. Robert Lennon's "Hibachi" unleashes the unexpected cathartic power of a hibachi grill on a paralyzed marriage. In Carson Mell's "The West," a father and son join the insatiable Mackenzie Horselover on a quest for the perfect hamburger. Ben Greenman rekindles old rivalries in "Come Out," a story of friendships, love triangles, and repurposed bathtubs. And in Lynne Tillman's "The Original Impulse," a woman cycles through memory, encountering an old lover with every pass.

Electric Literature's sixth anthology travels highways, the waters of New York's harbors, and the grooves of a burned out LP. In Matt Sumell's "OK," a son visits his stubbornly suicidal father at his flea infested home.In "Where We Missed Was Everywhere," by Mary Otis, a brother and sister seek refuge from a funeral in a Beach Boys classic. The siblings in Marc Basch's "Three" react to one brother's dealings with a kid bully they encounter on a back country road. The subjects of a starvation experiment in Steve Edward's "Daily Bread" find their worlds reduced to the size of their stomachs. And the anthology's final story, "The Reader" by Nathan Englander, chronicles a discouraged author haunted by his one remaining reader.