Two-hundred and fifty years ago, Horace Walpole published ‘The Castle of Otranto,’ a strange, campy book that’s widely considered to be the first Gothic novel. In real life, Walpole’s family was beset by tragedy and his life’s obsession was a Gothic castle called Strawberry Hill.
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Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
This Is Living
How burdens and values pass from fathers to sons, and the search for that one true thing.
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Interview: Simon Rich on Guilt, Humor Writing, and Being the Worst Person Ever
“I’m certainly as revolting and privileged and narcissistic as any of the hipsters described in my book, if not more so. I mean, there’s nobody worse than me.”
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Interview: Caitlin Moran on the Working Class, Masturbation, and Writing a Novel
“I’m very much a bitch-gotta-pay-rent girl. I worked my way up from the ghetto and I think women should be paid for their great ideas.”
Posted inFeature
The Prodigal Prince: Richard Roberts and the Decline of the Oral Roberts Dynasty
He was the heir to the televangelist’s empire, but Richard Roberts soon disappeared from the university that his father founded.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Call It Rape
Margot Singer | The Normal School | 2012 | 23 minutes (5,683 words) The Normal SchoolThanks to Margot Singer and The Normal School for sharing this story with the Longreads community.Subscribe to The Normal School * * * Still life with man and gun Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats
Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words) 1st Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training. Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. *** 1. Ghosting: Confessions of a WikiLeaks Ghostwriter Andrew O’Hagan | London Review of Books | February 23, 2014 | 105 minutes (26,390 words) […]
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: Best Old Story That I Didn't Read Until This Year
Is John Lindsay Too Tall To Be Mayor? Jimmy Breslin | New York magazine | July 28, 1969 Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page. In the month since I happened upon Jimmy Breslin’s story about the 1969 New York […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Down Town
The city of Wilmington in Ohio, a “poster child of the Great Recession,” saw its unemployment rate shoot up to 19 percent after DHL, one of its biggest employers, left. The story of how the city is bouncing back: Ironically, Wilmington’s reputation as the face of the recession ended up working in its favor. The […]
