Success! Your account was created and you’re signed in.
An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link.
Sign up to receive our Editors’ Picks, delivered fresh each day—or go even deeper with our Top 5 of the Week.
When you search for the term "longreads," you're looking for a great story to sink into. For 15 years, Longreads has published and curated the best longform writing on the web—and we wouldn’t exist without the support of readers like you. Make a one-time donation today and ensure that quality journalism continues to flourish.
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. ‘You Want A Description Of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem Harriet Ryan, Scott Glover, Lisa Girion | Los Angeles Times | May 5, 2016 | […]
How we feel about a person’s privacy seems to correlate with how much control they have in the decision to open up.
Proceedings of the Chekhov-Saunders Voltron/Humanity Kit Test Drive, held in Brooklyn on November 15th 2016. Participants: Sarah Miller (SM), Ryan Bradley (RB), David Lipsky (DL), and Maria Bustillos (MB). Sarah Miller is the author of Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl and lives in Nevada City, CA. David Lipsky’s cultural history […]
But really, what is a musician’s voice if not distinctive? Isn’t that… good? Entire pieces have been written about the voices of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, so American and vital and wise in their manly scratchiness, like unshaved bristle and whiskey and dirt. Man voice make music good. Woman voice music bad: Too high. […]
Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major […]
[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]
In the wake of a troubled ex-lover’s suicide, novelist Masha Hamilton tries to make sense of it in a correspondence to his ghost.
In 1961, Joan Didion reviewed J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey for The National Review.
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 […]
In the wake of a troubled ex-lover’s suicide, novelist Masha Hamilton tries to make sense of it in a correspondence to his ghost.
