Turning one’s lived experience into fiction can be a very fruitful exercise, leading the story far from its factual origins, but the need for readers to identify the bits of the author’s real life misses the way fiction can reveal larger truths.
Search results
Posted inUncategorized
How to Pitch Personal Essays to Longreads: An Updated Guide
New submissions guidelines, plus information about our new essay series.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘I Spent Two Years Researching Before I Wrote a Single Line’: Geeking Out With Marlon James
Man Booker winner Marlon James immersed himself in African myths and history, so he could use that world as a springboard for a new fantasy series.
Posted inStory
‘I’m Always Writing Against This Idea That Denver’s a White Space.’
Kali Fajardo-Anstine talks about her new short story collection “Sabrina & Corina,” her obsession with dualities, and Chicano and Indigenous history in Denver.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Food, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Helen Oyeyemi on ‘Gingerbread,’ Fairy Tales, and What Self-Branding Is Doing to Childhood
“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
Navigation
“The whiteboy said there was nothing left for me in Houston, he said that I didn’t have to punish myself, and he said my name, my actual name.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Quotes
Between Jesmyn and Ta-Nehisi
Author Jesmyn Ward sits down with Ta-Nehisi Coates to discuss slavery, superheroes, and how much you have to hate yourself to enjoy being famous.
Posted inStory
Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2021
Pravesh Bhardwaj read and and shared 304 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2020. Here are his favorites.
Posted inNonfiction
Me and You
Two friends, Hurricane Katrina, a suicide, and the pain and beauty that holds us all together.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Fiction, Story
Time To Kill the Rabbit?
In two new novels, the bunnies are anything but cute. (Unless … you use magic to turn one of them into a pre-TB Keats, or a talky Tim Riggins.)
