Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses, a 1985 collection of testimonials from then-Soviets who were children during the Second World War, has been translated into English and excerpted at the Paris Review. “It became connected like that in my memory, that war is when there’s no papa.”
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I Remember the Bookstore
Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes) Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Tressie McMillan Cottom, Kashmir Hill, R.O. Kwon, Jaime Lowe, and Steve Edwards.
This Week In Books: Too Small For the Occasion
He screamed, and I mean really screamed, to no one and to every one of us who was peeking at him out our windows: “What are we even doing out here!!??”
Judge a Book Not By its Gender
Lisa Whittington-Hill suggests there’s a distinct gender bias in celebrity memoirs. Where female celebrities are expected to expose all, male writers get to write about whatever they want.
This Week in Books: Anarchist Ice Cream and Other Dairies
Or, the newsletter in which I conclude that time is a flat circle.
This Month in Books: The Decameron Is Online
We can all quarantine alone, together, in one big villa in the cloud.
Longreads Best of 2019: Music Writing
We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in music writing.
Best of 2023: All of Our Number One Story Picks
Every piece we selected as our top story of the week in 2023, all in one place.

