In 1955, playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman, published the essay “The American Theater” in the American travel magazine Holiday. Holiday ran from 1946 and 1977. Joan Didion’s “Notes from a Native Daughter” first appeared in Holiday. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Paul Bowles and John Steinbeck wrote for it. Though E.B. White’s […]
Search results
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Rewards of a Literary Marriage
A profile of the writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne from the New York Times magazine, circa 1987.
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 inNonfiction, Quotes
Tom Wolfe on the Birth of the ‘New Journalism’
In 1973, Tom Wolfe published The New Journalism; the seminal book was part manifesto for a new style of nonfiction writing and part anthology of its early greatest hits. It contained work by Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, among others. Below is a short excerpt from the book’s first chapter, where […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
California’s Water Crisis: A Reading List
Here are five perspectives on California’s water war, from one journalist’s report from the farms of the Central Valley to an ever-resonant essay on water by Joan Didion, written 35 years ago.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
California’s Water Crisis: A Reading List
Here are five perspectives on California’s water war, from one journalist’s report from the farms of the Central Valley to an ever-resonant essay on water by Joan Didion, written 35 years ago.
Posted inNonfiction
A Meditation on Pain
“Once, when the pain came, I grabbed for a knife, my fist tight around it, contemplating digging out my right eye. I was twenty-one.”
Posted inFiction, Nonfiction, Reading List
Reading List: Leaving the Places We've Lived
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there […]
Posted inFiction, Nonfiction, Reading List
Reading List: Leaving the Places We've Lived
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
A Meditation on Pain
“Once, when the pain came, I grabbed for a knife, my fist tight around it, contemplating digging out my right eye. I was twenty-one.”
