Longreads

Illustration by Adam Stennett.

Once, many moons ago, I spent a month in Iceland with too little money and nothing to slow a march of days that seemed already to be getting much too short. It was September, and each morning and…

The following text is adapted from a speech given to the 2012 Whiting Award winners. In his 1988 book of essays, “Prepared for the Worst,” Christopher Hitchens recalled a bit of advice…

To mark the today’s publication of Anthony Shadid’s memoir House of Stone – which is full of the tastes and smells of traditional Lebanese cooking – Annia Ciezadlo takes…

When Mrs. Wharton's stories first appeared, in that early period which, as we have now learned, was merely a period of apprenticeship, everybody said, "How clever!" "How wonderfully clever!" and the…

Photo by isafmedia. Not until the helicopter flew away did I realize that I had left on the seat my copy of The Magic Mountain. Whatever demon had led me to think that I might read it on the flight…

Roving thoughts and provocations from the writers of December 13, 2011 This issue sponsored by Focus Features A small selection of notable posts from the

Seven days after September 11, 2001, I left New York to do two weeks of book promotion, under other circumstances a predictable kind of trip. You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive-time radio, you do an “event,” a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service, and leave a 5 AM call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city. During the week between September 11 and the Wednesday morning when I went to Kennedy to get on the plane, none of these commonplace aspects of publishing a book seemed promising or even appropriate things to be doing. But—like most of us who were in New York that week—I was in a kind of protective coma, sleepwalking through a schedule made when planning had still seemed possible. #Sept11

First came the dream: a society that could be both communist and freewhere men could speak and write without fear of punishment, where rewards would be based on merit rather than loyalty,…