Category: Fiction

Not only will I never get my faith back, but I’m going to keep missing it. I’ll always have that longing — but there’s no going back into the garden.

‘We had had many arguments, but he was my brother; he had always been my brother.’

Two new books offer fresh perspective on “Otherhood,” that condition in which characters do constant, exhausting battle — for the most part — inside their own heads.

From Elisa Albert’s acclaimed 2006 collection, the infamous short story that turned Philip Roth’s playbook inside out.

High-stakes time travel adventure from sci-fi writer Jo Lindsay Walton.

A forester’s daughter spends a night in a cabin in Soviet Russia, but it takes decades to discover how much danger she put her family in.

We use Facebook to access certain apps and stay in touch with distant friends and relatives. Deleting Facebook won’t stop other companies from misusing our data.

A conversation about writing novels that have roots in reality.

Must-read stories from Han Kang, Porochista Khakpour, and Min Jin Lee.

The author on his writing process and what it was like to watch a film based on one of his books.

Jeff Sharlet on how recovering from a life-threatening event takes place moment by moment.

In this short story, the children of Chinese miners in the frontier West struggle to survive after their parents’ death.

When Meaghan O’Connell finished reading a celebrated young author’s debut novel, she felt a mix of admiration, jealousy, and recognition of the powerlessness that comes with young adulthood.

In Don Waters’ short story “Full of Days,” a grieving Las Vegas man uses an anti-abortion billboard to justify his own pained existence.

A teacher helping fidgety students pass a rainy recess with a familiar game — don’t touch the floor, it’s lava! — finds that the ability to pretend takes on an unexpected gravity.

Growing up in the fundamentalist Christian “Quiverfull” movement, Hännah Ettinger saw her own story in Atwood’s vision.

“Her anger suddenly dissipated and was replaced again by longing.”

Data journalist Ben Blatt takes his a mathematical approach to the writers of fiction.

With a new “lost” short story published by The New Yorker, the bottle is just about dry.

Susan Read’s short fiction centers on a Kafka-esque interrogation in the back room of a coffee shop — you know, the one where they wear the green aprons — that’s a stinging indictment of the byzantine policies, procedures, and psychology of being a low wage employee.

A little over three years ago I asked George Saunders whether I could sit in on one of his MFA classes at Syracuse, and, flabbergastingly, he said okay.

Slate is running short stories by contemporary writers based in an imagined “Trump’s America.”

In Vulture, book critic Christian Lorentzen suggests we dispense with terms like “postmodern” and “postwar” when discussing novels, and instead analyze them relative to the presidential administrations under which they were released. What will we mean when someday we refer to Obama Lit? I think we’ll be discussing novels about authenticity, or about “problems of […]

Stories from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Chabon, Jhumpa Lahiri, and more.

“The car had upset me. Judy had found a parking space right in front of the restaurant and I could see the red car from our table. Taunting me.”

Read The City Born Great, new fiction N.K. Jemisin, winner of a Hugo award for her novel, The Fifth Season.

Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates. *** A few months ago, my friend Maud was in town from New York, and one afternoon I met her and her stepdaughter at a […]

Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates. * * * I was skipping around Google the other day and was reminded of a piece by Colson Whitehead called “How To Write.” You may […]

In between bites of hot dog and sunscreen applications, you can read about police brutality, what the rest of the world thinks about the United States, one woman’s American wardrobe and so much more.

How we became a prison family.