Feature Sharp Women Writers: An Interview With Michelle Dean Feature On Didion, Arendt, Malcolm, Ephron and other women writers who made an art of having an opinion.
Feature The Writers’ Roundtable: Fiction vs. Nonfiction Feature A conversation between writers Eva Holland, Benjamin Percy, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Mary H.K. Choi, and Adam Sternbergh about writing on both sides of the fiction-nonfiction divide.
Feature The Death Row Book Club Feature When Anthony Ray Hinton was sentenced to death for two murders he didn’t commit, he used his time to create a book club for death row inmates.
Feature This Is How They Saved Me Feature One month after her father was arrested, Neda Semnani and her family were taken on a dangerous journey to be smuggled out of Iran.
Leslie Jamison: Does Recovery Kill Great Writing? Highlight When Leslie Jamison got sober she wanted to know how a life lived without alcohol would affect her writing.
Feature A Storyteller, Unbecoming Feature On showing, telling, and finding one’s way as a literary writer of color.
Feature The Stuff That Came Between Mom and Me: A Story About Hoarding Feature Mom would make excuses about not having cleaned the house. I knew they were lies. I knew her house was full.
Feature The Truth About Writing Fiction From Your Life Feature A conversation about writing novels that have roots in reality.
Barbara Ehrenreich on Writing to Think Highlight Barbara Ehrenreich on thinking as an antidote to “the unknown and potentially menacing.”
Feature Vanishing As a Way to Reclaim Your Life Feature On the eve of her marriage, an adventurous young woman tests how free she really wants to be.
The Money His Father Left Behind, and the Life it Would Start Commentary When Alexander Chee’s father died at 43, he left behind a trust that would set the course of his son’s life.
Feature Wallace Shawn’s Late Night Feature The playwright has a lot to tell viewers about human nature and our depraved era. Too bad so few people have seen his plays.
Longreads Best of 2017: Essays Reading List We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in essays.
On the Contentious Borders of the American South Highlight Zandria F. Robinson narrates her coming of age Memphis while examining contemporary southernness.
Feature Derivative Sport: The Journalistic Legacy of David Foster Wallace Feature Editors and writers discuss the ways David Foster Wallace’s work influenced them and what it was like to work with him.
Teju Cole Delights in Sentence Fragments Highlight “For me it’s about recognizing that great art comes in all kinds of forms.”
Brit Bennett Reflects on Living the Past Year in “Trump Time” Highlight How the whiplash-like event of Trump following the nation’s first black president has “compressed time.”
Kevin Young Is Ready to Engage the Public with Poetry Highlight The new poetry editor of the New Yorker says that to find poetry, “you have to look in your backyard.”
Feature An Interview with MacArthur ‘Genius’ Viet Thanh Nguyen Feature 2017 MacArthur fellow Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses questions of justice, diversity in literature, and empathy across cultures.
The Genius of the Playboy Interview Commentary Dedicated research and hours of interviews crafted the gold-standard of pre-access celebrity journalism.
The End of ‘Rolling Stone’ As We Know It Commentary Jann Wenner created a magazine that lasted for 50 years because he understood nostalgia sells.
The Mastery and Magic of Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Reading List With her profiles of Toni Morrison, Dave Chapelle, James Baldwin, and more, Ghansah is an unparalleled chronicler of black excellence.
Confronting Wealth and Class Privilege as a Black Professor at a White College Commentary At Buzzfeed, Kiese Laymon tells the story of his early years teaching at an elite liberal arts college in New York.
It Takes a Village: A ‘Village Voice’ Reading List Commentary The paper redefined the alt-weekly and introduced readers to a new kind of journalist and critic.
Why Fiction Haunts Us: Pulitzer Prize Winner Viet Thanh Nguyen on His Ghosts Highlight Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about how ghosts and authors of fiction share a similar role in today’s culture.
Inside the Content Machine Highlight “…the viral is becoming more viral, and websites are mousetraps, and content the cheese,”
The 1923 Novel That Helps Us Understand Today’s Racial Climate Commentary ‘Cane’ is a series of vignettes about life in rural Georgia told from the point of view of an ambivalently black teacher from the north.
Feature Youth From Every Quarter Feature A teacher at an elite boarding school confronts her own confused leap up the ladder of class privilege.
