Every piece we selected as our top story of the week in 2023, all in one place.
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Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2019: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks
Our top picks of the year, all in one place.
Posted inStory
“We’re All Still Cooking…Still Raw at the Core”: An Interview with Jacqueline Woodson
“When I look at that dress and how much intention went into the making of it…it’s like we want to have something that can’t be destroyed, because so much of the past has been destroyed…”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
‘I’m a Big Fan of Writing To Find Out What You Don’t Know.’
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…”
Posted inArts & Culture, Culture
Remembering James Ingram
The R&B singer and songwriter made it look easy, even when it wasn’t.
Posted inNonfiction
‘They Happen To Be Our Neighbors Across the Span of a Century, But They’re Our Neighbors.’
One hundred summers ago, black Chicagoans were terrorized by whites during the Red Summer. Poet Eve Ewing talks about reaching out to her neighbors across time in “1919.”
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Story
American Dirt: A Bridge to Nowhere
“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.”
Posted inStory
The Erotic Thriller’s Little Death
What/If references the celebrated steamy genre of the 80s and 90s, but lacks its guts. Why can’t any of the new neo-noirs go all the way?
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Story
The Teen Idol Vanishes
Luke Perry’s untimely death reminds us that Dylan McKay was one of the last icons of adolescence.
