Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates. * * * There’s a wonderful, creepy Shirley Jackson story—you may already know it—called “The Summer People.” It’s about a couple from New York […]
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Posted inUncategorized
‘Let’s Suck This Week Less Than We Did Last Week’: An Oral History of The Stranger
Twenty-five years after its debut, here is the story of an independent newspaper in Seattle that spawned Dan Savage and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Posted inFiction, Story
Desperate Characters
An excerpt from the 1970 novel by Paula Fox: Status-conscious Sophie and Otto Bentwood attend a dinner party in Brooklyn Heights in the late sixties, shortly after Sophie sustains a bite on her hand from a stray cat.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Who Gets to Be a Genius? A Reading List
Why does it often take decades, even centuries, for work by women to be “discovered” and appreciated?
Posted inFiction, Guest Pick
Hygge: The Dark Side of Danish Comfort, a Story by Dorthe Nors
Dorthe Nors | Longreads | August 2015 | 8 minutes (1,904 words) Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a previously unpublished short story by Danish writer Dorthe Nors, translated into English by Misha Hoekstra, and chosen by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers, who writes: “I first came across the intriguingly sparse work of Dorthe Nors in the pages of the literary magazine, […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
At Guernica, an Excerpt of Annie Liontas’s Debut Novel
That night, the whole village watching, Stavros Stavros finally proved his manhood: on the dance floor. With the pomp of the traditional syrtos that suggested respite before battle, the resting of the soul, he rejected the pappas’s interference, his mother’s control, his father’s weakness. When he felt like showing off, he showed off. During one […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
A Case of Mistaken Identity: Percival Everett’s New Collection of Stories
After a night in a motel I returned to the library the next morning and looked at images of Graham Greene. The man in my photograph did look a lot like Graham Greene, but also different. Regardless, I didn’t know where next to look. I decided to try the sheriff’s office. The inside of the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Twisting History to Tell Universal Truths
Readers often wonder how much of an author’s real life ends up in their novels. In 2013 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, novelist Nina Revoyr described how she combined elements of her life with the real lives of silent-film era actors Sessue Hayakawa and Mary Miles Minter in her book The Age of Dreaming. Revoyr […]
Posted inNonfiction
The Shaming of the Cherry Sisters
How “Vaudeville’s worst act” fought for fame and respect on the stage.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
‘Barbados was Bimshire’: Naomi Jackson’s Debut Novel
In Brooklyn, Barbados was bimshire, a jewel that Bajans turned over in their minds, a candy whose sweetness they sucked on whenever the bitter cold and darkness of life in America became too much to bear. Avril, while she reserved a healthy amount of disdain for Bird Hill and its people, still felt something like […]
