The Man in a Shell Sarah Miller This story, the first in Chekhov’s little trilogy, is a story within a story — all the stories in the trilogy follow this format — about a teacher named Burkin and a veterinarian named Ivan Ivanych who stop and spend the night at the home of a friend […]
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Posted inUncategorized
File, Deduct, Hide: Six Essential Stories About Taxes
The rich hate them, the poor need them, and everyone has to do them. Well, almost everyone.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Living Differently: How the Feminist Utopia Is Something You Have to Be Doing Now
Lynne Segal points out that if the dystopia is already here, then the utopia must be here too.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
George Saunders on How We Deal with Anxiety
I’m interested in the way that Americans — well, probably people in general — tend to address their anxiety with yap. I know I do. This tendency to lack the self-confidence to simply not do anything — to refrain, to be silent, not react, not shoot, just stay out of the shit — that seems […]
Posted inReading List
Longreads Best of 2015: Essays & Criticism
Story picks by Leslie Jamison, Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay, Tom Scocca, Ann Friedman, Rachel Syme, Francesca Mari, Sari Botton, and Emily Perper.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Advice from George Saunders
“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Author-Editor Interview: George Saunders and Andy Ward
How an editor and writer work together: “Ward: A lot of people say to me, ‘God, it must be so fun to work with George Saunders. Do you even have to edit him at all?’ And they say it like they assume you shun all editing, or don’t allow editing, which is always really funny […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year
On the “writer’s writer,” George Saunders: “We talked for a while about his relationship to Wallace. For all the ways in which their fiction might seem to be working similar themes, they were, Saunders said, ‘like two teams of miners, digging at the same spot but from different directions.’ He described making trips to New […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Writing Advice from George Saunders
“You may remember some of my other biggies, such as, ‘Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey,’ and ‘Aunts and uncles are best construed as the heliological equivalent of small-scale weather systems,’ or (the mother of all advice-quote-pairs): ‘The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to […]
