This Month in Books: The Decameron Is Online By Dana Snitzky Reading List We can all quarantine alone, together, in one big villa in the cloud.
8 Longreads by Will Storr on the Science of Storytelling By Catherine Cusick Reading List Eight must-read stories that investigate science, belief, and the human impulse to tell stories.
Novelist Charles Portis Was a True Original By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Every Portis fan has a different favorite passage from his novels, but they agree on one thing: no one wrote like Portis.
Postcard from the (Literal) Edge By Longreads Feature In an excerpt from her recovery memoir, Erin Khar recalls the depths of her self-destruction as a heroin addict.
Regarding the Pain of Oprah By Soraya Roberts Feature She gets a mansion and she gets a boat and she gets a jet! And you get to suffer and then maybe pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you’re lucky enough and bare enough of your private pain.
The Ancient Waterways of Phoenix, Arizona By Longreads Feature To understand this sprawling desert city, you have to understand its canals, whose routes Indigenous people dug as far back as A.D. 200.
American Dirt: A Bridge to Nowhere By Sarah Menkedick Feature “Jeanine Cummins can write about Mexico — but she will be judged on whether her writing actually captures the experiential and emotional and ethical complexity of that place, and she will be judged with extra care because she is an outsider.”
‘I Want Every Sentence To Be Doing Work’: An Interview with Miranda Popkey By Zan Romanoff Feature “Something I did learn writing this book is that being impressed by something doesn’t mean you should try and do it.”
In Pocahontas County, Deep Divisions and a Gruesome Discovery By Longreads Feature In an excerpt from ‘The Third Rainbow Girl,’ Emma Copley Eisenberg interrogates various social conditions that might have contributed to a mysterious double murder in West Virginia in 1980.
N.K. Jemisin: ‘I am still going to write what I am going to write.’ By Krista Stevens Highlight Hells to the yes, says I.
10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2020 By Longreads Feature Stories by Edwidge Danticat, Etgar Keret, Valeria Luiselli, and more.
William Gibson on How Science Fiction Portrays Reality By Krista Stevens Highlight “Every fiction about the future is like an ice-cream cone,” Gibson says, “melting as it moves into the future.”
Violence Girl By Longreads Feature How a young bilingual Latina became one of punk’s enduring icons and helped create a new musical universe.
What the World’s Most Controversial Herbicide Is Doing to Rural Argentina By Longreads Feature After enormous lobbying efforts, Monsanto’s GMO soybeans, treated with Roundup, became the country’s largest export, as cancer rates and other health issues skyrocketed.
This Month In Books: What Did We Miss? By Dana Snitzky Commentary The end of the year is a time for regrets. What are the books we didn’t feature?
In Jo’s Image By Jeanna Kadlec Feature Jeanna Kadlec considers the impact of Little Women’s matriarchy — and its heroine — on the formation of her own queer identity.
The Queering of the Baby Bells By Longreads Feature Highly public pressure campaigns against telephone companies were the crux of early LGBTQ activism.
Normal Sucks: Author Jonathan Mooney on How Schools Fail Kids with Learning Differences By Mark Armstrong Commentary “We are in a sort of remediation industrial complex.”
‘They Were Growing Seedlings…Which Would Sprout To Become Supreme Court Justices’ By Hope Reese Feature Ruth Marcus discusses the Federalist Society’s 30-year Justice-grooming project, the botched investigations, and everything else that brought us “too big to fail” Brett Kavanaugh.
The Longreads 2019 Holiday Gift Book Guide By Dana Snitzky Commentary Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2019 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list.
Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis By Kelli María Korducki Feature If masculinity really is in crisis — and that’s a big if — we should at least be able to agree that it’s not women’s responsibility to fix it.
In Praise of Del Amitri’s Album Waking Hours By Longreads Feature Some albums make it hard to separate the music from the experience of listening to it.
Bully for You By Soraya Roberts Feature Women with power have the capacity to silence women with less — and they wield it. Why can’t they see that?
A Beautiful, Rugged Place: Erosion of the Body By Longreads Feature The life-long writer, teacher, and activist believed she could save a piece of land or a species, but after her brother took his life, she questioned her optimism and how to grieve for him and the planet.
It Was Putin, on British Soil, Using his Poison Factory By Krista Stevens Highlight Trying to keep a mouthy Russian oligarch safe from Vladimir Putin is harder than it looks. Especially when the oligarch has a penchant for publicly poking the bear.
‘By Choice, and Not By Choice…Time Is Going To Change You.’ By Zan Romanoff Feature Nina MacLaughlin discusses her retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “[In] my very vague high school memories…there was no discussion of the fact that this book is just rape after rape after rape.”
This Month In Books: The Book Is an Escape Tool By Dana Snitzky Commentary Sometimes telling a story is the only way to escape it.
Why Lhasa de Sela Matters By Longreads Feature Raised in a school bus by itinerant hippie parents, with one foot in Mexico and one in the US, the singer blossomed into her true multicultural self in bilingual Montreal.
‘I’m a Big Fan of Writing To Find Out What You Don’t Know.’ By Adam Morgan Feature Mark Haber discusses “Reinhardt’s Garden” and its protagonist’s quest for a true understanding of melancholy: “not a feeling but a mood, not a color but a shade, not depression but not happiness either…”
Kissed a Girl By Longreads Feature Vickie Vértiz maneuvers her way around teenage love, friend envy, and being outed by her Mexican mother.
