Category: First Chapters

In an excerpt from ‘The Library Book’ — inspired by a historic California library fire — Susan Orlean challenges her respect for the printed word with a match and a copy of ‘Fahrenheit 451.’

In an excerpt from her new memoir, ‘All You Can Ever Know,’ transracial adoptee Nicole Chung recounts how her parents came to adopt her.

In an excerpt from her new essay collection, Heather Havrilesky calls for tuning out the online cacophony telling us we aren’t enough, and tuning in to the soul-affirming, quiet truth of the present moment.

An excerpt of ‘Now My Heart is Full,’ Laura June’s memoir, about the challenges new parenthood placed on her and her husband — and their marriage.

In an excerpt from her memoir, Porochista Khakpour recalls fashioning herself after her artist aunt’s example.

When Leslie Jamison got sober she wanted to know how a life lived without alcohol would affect her writing.

How “know-nothings” Elizebeth Smith Friedman and William F. Friedman became the greatest codebreakers of their era.

An excerpt of Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost its Soul, by Jeremiah Moss.

An excerpt from “Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home,” by Jessica Berger Gross.

Unhappiness Cloak: An excerpt from “Weird in a World That’s Not,” by Jennifer Romolini.

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 1992 murder of a young boy unravels a journalist’s dark family secrets.

Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper describes how she fell in love with words and offers a peek into the complex process of making dictionaries.

How we became a prison family.

Motivated by seller’s regret and nostalgia, a journalist goes in search of the vinyl of his youth. And not just copies of albums he loved—he wants the exact records he owned and sold.

The first chapter from Alexander Chee’s much-anticipated second novel.

“Sometimes a book that is wonderful and well-told and riveting is overlooked. I believe this is the case with Rachel Pastan’s Alena.”

“I wanted him to understand my life—that I’d been caught in the local pattern and found the safest way forward, but if I’d lived somewhere else I’d be someone else and still could.”

The true story behind the HBO miniseries “Show Me a Hero.”

“We know each other, Kev. From way back. And I didn’t want to bring you here like this.”

Emily Gould | Friendship | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | July 2014 | 8 minutes (1,893 words)   Below is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book […]

Stephen Rodrick | The Magical Stranger | 2014 | 11 minutes (2,779 words) Below is the first chapter from The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick’s memoir about his father, squadron commander and Navy pilot Peter Rodrick. Our thanks to Rodrick for sharing it with the Longreads community.

Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)   For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured […]

“They don’t know the first thing about us; they just hate us because we’re black.”

In 1970, Lynn Povich and 45 other women sued Newsweek for discrimination. Here is what the workplace was like for them.

“There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.”

Paul Monette | Open Road Media | 1992 | 4 minutes (797 words) Below is a brief excerpt from Open Road Media’s reissue of Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, the National Book Award-winning autobiography by Paul Monette. Purchase the book here. *** Everybody else had a childhood, for one thing—where they were coaxed […]

The following is a free excerpt from Open Road Media’s The Children, the acclaimed book by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Halberstam on the early days of the civil rights movement. The below excerpt focuses on Diane Nash and the Nashville sit-ins, which started on this day, February 13, in 1960. Buy the book now.

“What had driven us apart? What was so important that it had turned us into strangers, even today?”

Edwin Lefèvre | Reminiscences of a Stock Operator | 1923   Our latest Longreads First Chapter comes recommended by Michelle Legro: Long before the “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort made his first million or snorted his first line of cocaine, turn-of-the-century trader Jesse Livermore, the “Great Bear of Wall Street,” accumulated over $100 million short-selling stocks before […]