“Companies keep betting on the next bestseller. Literature is poorer for it.”
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Posted inEditor's Pick
The Race to Make the Greatest Christmas Ad
“How British retailers became obsessed with winning the nation’s hearts.”
Posted inNewsletter
Strong Mothers, Boundless Lives, and the Week’s Top 5
We connect in such curious ways; thus are we transformed.
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Deaths in donation bins, the Hardy boys, MAGA slop, billionaire playgrounds, and nostalgia for the complicated.
Posted inNewsletter
Where We Belong and Our Top 5
“With this 11-a-side tournament, these young men would be the first to carry their nation onto an international stage. It seemed fitting that it would happen here in Springdale, home to the largest population of Marshallese anywhere outside the islands.” This week at Longreads, I’ve been thinking about our sense of place. It’s something I […]
Posted inFeature
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, […]
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Commentary
This Week in Books: A B-Movie Storytelling Moment
Give me a Bolaño novel that starts with a guy walking into a bar, and then another guy starts telling him a story, and the rest of that novel is just the second guy telling that story.
Posted inStory
The Great White Nope
Canada’s old white publishing institutions are a lesson in what happens when your media industry contracts: journalism no longer serves the reality of the country.
Posted inBooks, History, Science & Nature, Story
Taming the Great American Desert
By advocating for agriculture in the arid West, Major John Wesley Powell challenged the way America viewed its right to develop the continent.
