Exclusive Cover Reveal of SHAMEWRECK by Peggy Shinner

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Shamewreck by Peggy Shinner, which will be published on February 9, 2027 by Mad Creek Books. You can pre-order your copy here.

For readers of Eula Biss and Cathy Park Hong, essays that knit cultural criticism, social history, and personal experience to excavate the entanglements of shame, power, language, and identity.

In Shamewreck, Peggy Shinner interrogates the entanglement of shame and language, casting shame as a moral force, a conscience-beast, an umpire, the fellow who awaits when you come home. These essays grapple with the nuclear bombing of Bikini Atoll and the emergence, four days later, of the bikini in Paris; the link between property and personhood and what it means to die without possessions; the mutability of language and how shamefaced once meant “modest and bashful,” before morphing into the opposite, “aba...