Steve Salerno | Missouri Review | Winter 2004| 24 minutes (6,016 words) Steve Salerno’s essays and memoirs have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire and many other publications. His 2005 book, SHAM, was a groundbreaking deconstruction of the self-help movement, and he is working on a similar book about medicine. He teaches globalization and […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Television vs. the Novel
Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, writing in The New York Times Book Review, about television vs. the novel: Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel. In the future, novelists need not abandon plot and character, but would do well to bear in mind the novel’s weirdness. At this point in our technological evolution, […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads
Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) I. In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. 1. Ghosts of the Tsunami Richard Lloyd Parry | London Review of Books | February 6, 2014 | 28 minutes (7,185 words) The writer […]
Posted inFeature, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact
David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category.
Posted inReading List
Famous Cases of Journalistic Fraud: A Reading List
Washington Post Investigation of Janet Cooke’s Fabrications Bill Green | Washington Post Ombudsman | April 19, 1981 In 1980, Janet Cooke made up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict, won the Pulitzer Prize for it, then, two days later, gave it back. Here’s the internal investigation of how the Post leaned on her to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
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 inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: The 10 Stories We Couldn't Stop Thinking About
A list of stories that resonated with us.
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year
Every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Winners and Losers in the Book Business
“It begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of ‘basic’ publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then […]
