Pravesh Bhardwaj read and and shared 304 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2020. Here are his favorites.
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Things Fall Apart Turns 60
A brief history of Chinua Achebe’s debut novel “Things Fall Apart,” which was published 60 years ago.
Posted inArts & Culture, Culture, Current Events, Essays & Criticism, Feature, Media, Nonfiction, Story
When American Media Was (Briefly) Diverse
An economic downturn in 2008 shuttered numerous publications and further marginalized people of color in an already minimally integrated industry. But in the 90’s and early-aughts, multicultural publications flourished, providing an alternative model for journalism that bears remembering.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Commentary, Culture, Current Events
Reading with Kiese Laymon’s “Heavy”
“Heavy” confronts generations of Black art.
Posted inNonfiction
School for Girls
Years after recovering from anorexia, Jasmin Sandelson writes a letter to the high school friend she idolized, and explores how hunger, love, and envy shaped — and ended — their relationship.
Posted inBooks, Reading List
The Tender, Wild Realm of Children’s Literature: A Reading List
The plot of the book came to me as I was falling asleep: two girls share a bedroom, and squabble until they have no choice but to divide their room in half. Only one girl has access to the bedroom door. The other has the closet, which turns out to be an elevator. Suddenly, I was […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Is W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ the Most Pillaged Piece of Literature in the English Language?
[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Things Fell Apart
An excerpt from Chinua Achebe’s memoir, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, about growing up in Nigeria during a time when his country was breaking free from British colonialism, and writing Things Fall Apart: “When I wrote Things Fall Apart I began to understand and value my traditional Igbo history even more. […]
