HALIMAH MARCUS

A blond woman in her thirties, wearing a blue blazer and a grey t-shirt, standing in front of a blue sky.

Halimah Marcus has been a fiction editor since 2012, when she co-founded Electric Literature’s weekly fiction series, Recommended Reading. Over the last decade, she has worked with hundreds of established and emerging writers. Stories she has edited have gone on to be included in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mysteries and Suspense, Best Australian Stories, the O’Henry Prize Anthology, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Halimah is also the editor of Horse Girls (Harper Perennial, 2021), an essay anthology that reclaims and recasts the horse girl stereotype, which was a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” pick. Her own short stories have appeared in Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, One Story, BOMB, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. Andrew Sean Greer selected her short story, “The Party Goers,” from the The Southampton Review as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2022. Halimah has an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in Kingston, New York.

WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR

Short stories between 2000 and 10000 words.

SAMPLE TITLES OR AUTHORS

I have edited and admire work by A.M. Homes, Weike Wang, Sheila Heti, K. David Wade, Helen DeWitt, Sarah Gerard, Laura Van Berg, Jade Jones, Ben Marcus, Kawai Wahburn, Maggie Shipstead, Nathan Harris, and Catherine Lacey.

Electric Literature publishes all genres, including fiction, critical, personal, and experimental nonfiction, flash, poetry, and graphic narrative. As fiction editor, I am looking for well-structured, inventive, lived-in short stories that take seriously the emotional and physical landscapes of their setting and characters. I have deep affection for traditional short story form, and yet I am also drawn to work that can be described as uninhibited—in style and subject matter, and by genre, trends, expectations, and rules.