Search Results for: fiction

A Holocaust Survivor Raised a Fist to Death

Longreads Pick

She was Jewish, but to live she needed a Christian name. She could not be Natalie Leya Weinstein, not in wartime Warsaw. Her father wrote her new name on a piece of paper. Natalie Yazinska. Her mother, Sima, sobbed. “The little one must make it,” Leon Weinstein told his wife. “We got no chance. But the little one, she is special. She must survive.” He fixed a metal crucifix to a necklace and hung it on their daughter. On the paper, he scrawled another fiction: “I am a war widow, and I have no way of taking care of her. I beg of you good people, please take care of her. In the name of Jesus Christ, he will take care of you for this.”

Published: Aug 5, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,634 words)

Reverting to a Wild State

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) I spotted a golden feather on the edge of the concrete platform, waiting for me, while I was waiting for the train. I thought of a joke, about rats devouring an entire golden pigeon—but there was no one around to share the joke with. A bum slept expertly on a too small bench, a woman pulled herself inward and stood far away, watching her toes, and a very young man gave me a very rough look. I picked up the feather, which was on a thin gold chain, but I stayed squatted, close to the edge, leaning my head into the danger zone.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 1, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,865 words)

Sold

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) It’s all about finished now. I took sick in the night back in the fall, past frost. When Coulter Branch came over to see about me the next morning I was down and couldn’t get up. Coulter called Wilma on the telephone. He was afraid to leave me to go get her, and she had to come from their house on the tractor, driving with one hand and holding the baby with the other. That’s a good girl, I’ll tell you. They got me up and fairly dressed and took me to the hospital. The hospital helped me over my sickness, but seemed like I was old after that and not fit to look after myself. And so the old place and all had to be sold.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 28, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,721 words)

Via Negativa

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel. His index finger is the color of tea, his smile filled with bad teeth. He knows literature, however. His sad bones are made of it. He knows what was written and where writers died. His opinions are cold but accurate. They are pure, at least there is that.

Published: Sep 1, 1972
Length: 12 minutes (3,246 words)

Little Sister

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) Whatever Marla did, she did so well. The golden spoon she’d been born with had never failed her, but her little sister had gagged on the same spoon. Little Sister wasn’t so little. She was a twelve-pound baby who inherited most of Marla’s toys. When she couldn’t solve their intricate engines, Marla would have to be called in. Little Sister had a name, but no one seemed to recollect it. She’d turn glum or fall into terrible fits. She struck Marla with a shoe when she was three and Marla was four.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 25, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,288 words)

The Dogs In Renoir’s Garden

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) Her little Renoir painting which she missed most was not allowed her. The insurance company had pronounced the security at the nursing home inadequate. May considered that ironic. She had found the security so effective that in the year and ten months of her stay, and in spite of the unlocked doors, she had never ventured out of the home by herself. But then her daughter had placed her there, and May was always ready to accept the appraisal of others.

Source: VQR
Published: Jan 1, 1982
Length: 14 minutes (3,730 words)

Somebody Up There Likes Me

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) In my last mail to Snookie Lee, I had sent some morsels like these — affectionately, to make her smile — and she’d taken them all wrong: the whole story of Snooks and me. She was in San Antonio and I was in San Jose, and some people say that when a woman moves 1,500 miles from her mate to get a Ph.D. in women’s studies, it’s the beginning of the end, if not the end of the end, and refuting those prophets of woe is not easy. Yes, we had taken some bad falls, Snookie Lee and I. We were edging into the Humpty Dumpty zone. But I thought we could put it together again, and I was doing my best to convince Snookie of that.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 1, 1994
Length: 34 minutes (8,675 words)

Lily

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) Careering toward Lily Stith in a green Ford Torino were Kevin and Nancy Humboldt. Once more they gave up trying to talk reasonably; once more they sighed simultaneous but unsympathetic sighs; once more each resolved to stare only at the unrolling highway. At the same moment, Lily was squeezing her mop into her bucket. Then she straightened up and looked out the window, eager for their arrival. She hadn’t seen them in two years, not since having won a prestigious prize for her poems.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 1, 1984
Length: 14 minutes (3,548 words)

Waiting for Big Bird

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) Jonathan jumps up from his seat, knocking over his mug of coffee, when Mona tells him she thinks she is in labor. They are having brunch at Café Bar. It is one of their favorite things to do. “You aren’t due for two weeks,” he says. Mona agrees. She is not due for another two weeks, and she cannot be sure that what she feels is labor, because she has never been in labor before. “I’m pretty sure,” Mona says.

Source: Fictionaut
Published: Feb 1, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,729 words)

The Visitor

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) The new boy was three-quarters gone. Both legs below the knee and the left arm at the shoulder. Candy spent her lunch hour lying on the lawn outside the V.A. hospital, sending nicotine clouds into the cloudless sky, wondering whether it would be better to have one leg and no arms—or, if you were lucky enough to have an arm and a leg left, whether it would be better to have them on opposite sides, for balance. In her six months as a nurse’s aide, she had become thoughtful about the subtle hierarchy of human disintegration. Blind versus deaf—that was a no-brainer, no brain being perhaps the one wound in her personal calculus that could not be traded in for something worse.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 3, 2007
Length: 25 minutes (6,358 words)