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Dan Kois is a senior editor at Slate and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. (See his Longreads page here.) *** First of all, I am not even going to bother listing John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Disney World piece because it was obviously the best thing anywhere this year but everyone agrees and […]

Maria Bustillos is a journalist who writes frequently for The Awl. *** The power of Allison Benedikt’s “Life After Zionist Summer Camp” (The Awl) derives from the purity of its point of view, which is that of one person’s lived experience, minutely and honestly detailed. Benedikt swings gracefully between humor and searing candor in this […]

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night. (See more on his Longreads page.) *** My Top Fiction Longreads for 2011: • Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place”, The New Yorker, Feb. 11, 2011: Beautiful, seemingly casual, smart and terrifying, it is the story of a man worried […]

Logan Sachon writes for The Awl and other places also. She lives in Virginia.   *** • “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” by Maria Bustillos (The Awl) This piece just blew me away, and I’m not even a DFW devotee (I’ve yet to tackle any of his books). To go to his library, to transcribe notes […]

Sady Doyle is a writer and the proprietor of Tiger Beatdown.  *** There is no slogan more misunderstood, or more widely abused, than “the personal is political.” This phrase was one of the most transformative ideas to emerge from second-wave feminism, or from the 20th century. It’s the underpinning assumption of all my own work. […]

Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) is the founder of Nieman Storyboard. She is also writing what she hopes will be a very surprising book about Vladimir Nabokov. *** I’m contrary by nature. So when I sat down to pick my Longreads for 2011, I reviewed the lists that Mark had published to date and decided not to include a […]

Jodi Ettenberg is a frequent Longreader, ex-lawyer and founder of Legal Nomads, which documents her travels (and food adventures) around the world. *** 2011 was a banner year for long-form journalism and storytelling on the web, and correlatively a time to appreciate people like Mark who have propelled the Longreads movement forward. I love how this […]

Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a writer for Wired UK, Design Observer, and The Atlantic, among others, and an MIT Futures of Entertainment fellow, spending far, far too much time curating the web’s interestingness as @brainpicker. *** I’ve always found reading, writing, and thinking to be so tightly interwoven that, when […]

Howard Riefs is a prolific Longreader and a communications consultant in Chicago.  *** It was another strong year for long-form content and journalism. There was no shortage of attention-grabbing longreads in traditional media, online-only outlets, alt-weeklies and literary journals—both in the U.S. and abroad, and written as profiles, personal essays, historical accounts and op-eds. And […]