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, […]
Search results
The Price of a Baby
“When we arrived, she was sitting with a baby girl who she said was five months old and she had just snatched moments before, after winning the mother’s trust.”
The 25 Most Popular Longreads Exclusives of 2020
The original reporting, personal essays, columns, and collaborations that were our most-read stories of the year.
Shout Out to Myspace
The site that revolutionized how people released and listened to music has died multiple deaths since its 2003 debut, but it finally gets the eulogy it deserves.
Longreads Best of 2020: Essays
A small sampling of standout essays published this year.
Shelved: Pink Floyd’s Household Objects
On Syd Barrett’s time with Pink Floyd and making an album with household objects and found sounds.
Shelved: Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk
The posthumous Buckley industry began with this problematic album, proof that the people who control a musician’s estate don’t always have his music in mind.
Violence Girl
How a young bilingual Latina became one of punk’s enduring icons and helped create a new musical universe.
Lloyd’s Mattress
Scott Korb contemplates disgust — his own, yours — at the kind of magical thinking that promises (with fingers crossed) to protect us from all the causes of dying.
This Week In Books: I Bought Some Books
Am I ghoul for buying all these plague books?
