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.
‘I Was Trapped Forever In This Present Tense’: Carmen Maria Machado on Surviving Abuse By Hope Reese Feature “She was always afraid of my voice. That was the defining factor of our relationship — fear of what I would say and write and do. She’s afraid of … the narrative that I possess.”
Walking Across California By Longreads Feature To understand what the Golden State is compared to what it was, one solitary hiker follows the trail of the first overland Spanish expedition into California 250 years later.
Lindy West is Preaching to the Choir By Sara Fredman Feature Sara Fredman talks to author Lindy West on women and likability, the evolution of pop culture, and navigating conversations in a complex, messy world.
Carrying Histories of Protest By Longreads Feature Jaquira Díaz witnesses her father’s rebellious fight for a better life, and her homeland’s fight for its place in the world.
Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes: On Novelist Nettie Jones and the Madness of ‘Fish Tales’ By Michael Gonzales Feature Edited by Toni Morrison, the 1983 novel ‘Fish Tales’ by Nettie Jones was supposed to set the literary world on fire. It didn’t.
Frenzied Woman By Longreads Feature Cinelle Barnes considers how the chaos and discipline of dance kept the disparate parts of her being stitched together.
The Corpse Rider By Colin Dickey Feature “I could see the ghosts,” recalled Lafcadio Hearn about his early childhood. Late in life, he became a celebrated chronicler of Japan’s folk tales: stories of strange demons and lingering visitations.
A Green New Jail By Will Meyer Feature What does environmental justice look like in a landscape overrun by prisons? Where the incarcerated suffer from unusually polluted surroundings, and prisons are a toxin in their own right?
