Search Results for: fiction

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring New York magazine, Gawker, Virginia Hughes, Grantland, Michigan Quarterly Review, fiction from The New Yorker and a guest pick by Jeremy Kressmann. 

There Is Just One Problem with Feeling Alive

imgsophies world3

“Sophie stood on the gravel path, thinking. She tried to think extra hard about being alive so as to forget that she would not be alive forever. But it was impossible. As soon as she concentrated on being alive now, the thought of dying also came into her mind. The same thing happened the other way around: only by conjuring up an intense feeling of one day being dead could she appreciate how terribly good it was to be alive. It was like two sides of a coin that she kept turning over and over. And the bigger and clearer one side of the coin became, the bigger and clearer the other side became too.

“You can’t experience being alive without realizing that you have to die, she thought. But it’s just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how incredibly amazing it is to be alive.”

Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, which follows Sophie Amundsen, a teenager living in Norway, as she begins to open her mind to philosophy and the history of the world’s most famous thinkers. Read more fiction in the Longreads Archive.

***

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

A Good Deuce

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A grieving teen and his friend look for a place to drink:

“‘Hey, you know what? Roy’s grandparents were Nazis.’ Phillip leaned back and took a drink from his beer and put an arm around Veronica. ‘I’m not even kidding. Tell them. Tell them about that time you found the swastika armbands and all that shit in your grandpa’s closet.’

“It was something I thought I had seen once, and maybe I had or I hadn’t, I wasn’t sure, and when I tried to remember what I had seen in that closet, and I put myself back in that room, all I could smell was talcum powder and see my grandma standing at the window, stiff and straight, staring out at nothing in the weak light, her back to me, the tears streaming because I had said it, I had said names, called her things, told her how my mother would disappear every time she got off the phone with her, my grandmother with her thick accent and twisted language, harsh, guttural, clipped through the phone, and for seventeen years I never once remembered my mother asking me how I felt—not once—how do you feel? Because feelings, she said, were lies. The only truth was in what you could see.”

Author: Jodi Angel
Source: Tin House
Published: Nov 28, 2012
Length: 26 minutes (6,676 words)

Foster

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A young Irish girl goes to live with her aunt and uncle:

“Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford toward the coast, where my mother’s people came from. It is a hot August day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh, where my father lost our red shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew, where the man who won her sold her not long afterward. My father throws his hat on the passenger seat, winds down the window, and smokes. I shake the plaits out of my hair and lie flat on the back seat, looking up through the rear window. I wonder what it will be like, this place belonging to the Kinsellas. I see a tall woman standing over me, making me drink milk still hot from the cow. I see another, less likely version of her, in an apron, pouring pancake batter into a frying pan, asking would I like another, the way my mother sometimes does when she is in good humor. The man will be her size. He will take me to town on the tractor and buy me red lemonade and crisps. Or he’ll make me clean out sheds and pick stones and pull ragweed and docks out of the fields. I wonder if they live in an old farmhouse or a new bungalow, whether they will have an outhouse or an indoor bathroom, with a toilet and running water.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 15, 2010
Length: 41 minutes (10,462 words)

Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring The New York Times Magazine, Washington Monthly, The New Yorker, Spirit Magazine, Stanford Medicine Magazine, plus fiction and a guest pick by TIME’s Kate Pickert.

Sign up to receive it every week.

Three Days

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A woman visits her mother and brother at a family farm on Thanksgiving:

“Their mother has put a feather in her hair for the holiday, her ‘Indian headdress.’ She can’t stand it that her son is a pothead and sometimes she’ll get a look, as if she’s trying not to cry just thinking about it. She’s a very good actress. She stares at Clem. She is drunk. They all are. Beatrice’s mother can make her bottom jaw tremble so slightly that the movement is barely perceptible. She looks just like Clem—dark hair, red skin, and papery lips. She stares at him with her mouth wide open, waiting for him to feel guilty. Beatrice looks away. It is extremely difficult for Beatrice to think of her mother as someone with thoughts and desires, with plans and schemes, as someone who, quite possibly, keeps a Rimmed Rod vibrator in her bedside drawer, the way Beatrice does, as someone who might dream about a tremendous ice cube, the size of a sofa, melting in the middle of a hot desert, and wake up having absolutely no idea what the dream means—someone just like Beatrice.”

Source: New Yorker
Published: Jan 16, 2006
Length: 27 minutes (6,816 words)

Brad And Angie Go To Meet The African Pee Generator Girls

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A celebrity couple’s ill-fated trip to Lagos:

“She put her pen down and thoughtfully chewed the silky inside of her left cheek. She stared hard at the photo on her iPod of those beautiful, strong young African women who had just invented this amazing generator that made electricity out of human urine. She shook her head. It was amazing the things that people did in the face of adversity. She continued shaking her head, trying to comprehend the humanity of humanity.

“‘Be careful shaking your head,’ said her son Maddox, who was sitting on the other side of the enormous bed, watching ‘Homeland’ on his iPad. ‘A shard of your beauty just hit me in the face.’ She barely heard him. She let her eye cast around the room for a moment. All her children were here, Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax, each with his or her iPad. Maddox was next to her on the bed, Zahara was stretched out along the foot. Pax was on one corner of a pink velvet couch, Shiloh on the other. All four were staring at their iPads. In the bedroom foyer, Knox and Vivienne were making a cat out of wooden blocks.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Nov 17, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,100 words)

Submit a Story to Longreads

Publishers, writers, readers: You can submit a story to be featured as one of our upcoming Longreads Member Exclusives.  

We choose one story per week to send to our paid members, and we pay rights holders to reprint the story. 

Submission guidelines are below. You can email your submission, as a PDF or text file, to members@longreads.com

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• We accept stories or book excerpts over 2,500 words. Priority will be given to stories that have been, or will be, published in a print magazine, online magazine, or as a book/ebook.

• Stories can be nonfiction or fiction, old or new.

• We do not currently accept stories that are already available for free on the web. (Stories behind a paywall, or stories featured in Google Books are acceptable.)

• We also accept reader recommendations! If you simply want to suggest a story or book that you love, please do so. If we like the story we will feature you alongside your recommendation.

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Financial Times, Grantland, Rany Jazayerli, The Baffler Magazine, The New Yorker, fiction from The Guardian, and a guest pick from Mark Berman.

Lizards’ Colony

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] An Iraqi-born American woman works as an interpreter inside a prison camp:

“She opened the door of the trailer, the rising sunlight submerging her. The still air was saturated with extreme humidity, making it feel like Basra, and the temperature was close to thirty-five degrees Celsius. The heat might have been tolerable but not the humidity, which left heart, soul, and spirit filled with loathing. Besides, something somewhere was making a stench like rotten eggs—no, decaying fish. Was it the sewers or the rank smell of the sea? Was she imagining it? Was this a result of the shock of the rape that had kept her in the hospital for ten days? Who could say?

“During those ten days she had consumed nothing but liquids. How could a person work in a hostile environment with everyone else lying in wait? She was raped and lacerated. She had entered a hospital the first day and had received her work there; no one cared about what had paid happened to her. Before she had time to heal, a load of documents had been dumped on her head, documents she had to review: dozens of tape recordings for her to hear and reconcile with the huge, companion file. She started in the hospital and then finished in the small, cramped, stifling trailer. She read while the pains racking her midsection grew increasingly intense and tears came uninvited to her eyes. She speculated about the appearance of Ahmad, the able-bodied terrorist covered by this huge file and the many tapes. He was no doubt an awe-inspiring, powerful, grand giant with a muscular body. She gazed at the sky. Why did it look pale blue in the morning?”

Published: Nov 9, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,665 words)