Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press.
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Posted inFeature
A Brief History of Class and Waste in India
“This is the man who transformed teenage rebellion into a toilet revolution.”
Posted inNonfiction
My Tears See More Than My Eyes: My Son’s Depression and the Power of Art
Alan Shapiro | Virginia Quarterly Review| Fall 2006 | 20 minutes (4,928 words) Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. This essay first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (subscribe here). Our thanks to Shapiro for allowing us to reprint […]
Posted inFirst Chapters, Nonfiction
‘There Is Nothing New in Wall Street’: A Stock Trader’s Life in the 1920s
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 the […]
Posted inUncategorized
Forty Years Later: How 'Oregon Trail' Was Born
Forty Years Later: How ‘Oregon Trail’ Was Born For the next two weeks, Dillenberger and Heinemann spent each night wedged into a tiny computer office—a former janitor’s closet at Bryant Junior High School—tapping code into a teletype machine. The teletype was a screen-less, electromechanical typewriter connected via telephone to a mainframe computer that could issue […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, First Chapters
First Chapters: ‘White Oleander,’ by Janet Fitch
Janet Fitch | White Oleander, Little, Brown and Company | 1999 | 19 minutes (4,640 words) Our latest first chapter comes from Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, who has chosen Janet Fitch’s 1999 novel White Oleander. If you want to recommend a First Chapter, let us know and we’ll feature you and your pick: hello@longreads.com.
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction
‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist
“If you survive me, tell them this: I never gave up.”
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Autistic and Searching for a Home
Between jail and the hospital, Savannah Shannon’s life is in limbo.
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s
Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words) ‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’ When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Making the Magazine: A Reading List
27 must-read stories on the making of the world’s greatest magazines.
