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.
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‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist
“If you survive me, tell them this: I never gave up.”
Autistic and Searching for a Home
Between jail and the hospital, Savannah Shannon’s life is in limbo.
This Is Living
How burdens and values pass from fathers to sons, and the search for that one true thing.
For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.
“I never figured out why they did that to me.”
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.”
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.
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 […]
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 […]
Making the Magazine: A Reading List
27 must-read stories on the making of the world’s greatest magazines.
