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 […]
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Posted inFiction, Guest Pick, Story
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Dorthe Nors | Longreads | August 2015 | 8 minutes (1,904 words) Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a previously unpublished short story by Danish writer Dorthe Nors, translated into English by Misha Hoekstra, and chosen by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers, who writes: “I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 inNonfiction, Reading List
Borders: A Reading List
In reading for this list, I read about all sorts of boundaries—in jazz music, in science fiction and in desert landscapes. Borders are implicit in the designation of which bookshelves belong to me and which are my partner’s.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
‘Puro Amor’: A New Short Story by Sandra Cisneros
The truth was that the Mister had always been dishonest. Not with his feelings but with his heart. He would be the first to tell you how honest he was about his dishonesties. He was like a chronic bed-wetter; he could not control himself. He would always be a bed-wetter even if he were not […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘The Truth of Life’: Paula Fox on the Re- (Re-) Release of Her 1970 Novel
Sari Botton talks to Paula Fox about Fox’s 1970 novel “Desperate Characters.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
The Fierce and Misty Flood: Barbara Comyns on the Quiet Seduction
Barbara Comyns’s novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) follows the doomed marriage of two young, bohemian artists during England’s Great Depression. The excerpt below is a simple, gentle seduction; I love the way in which the protagonist, Sophia, swiftly and casually dismisses her husband and her own sense of identity. The scene strikes me […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
The Family That Would Not Live
What can haunted houses and their history tell us about American history and culture? Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America’s haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
‘Perhaps Lucia Berlin Will Begin to Gain the Attention She Deserves’
Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Work in Progress site has excerpted the first story from A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, the newly released collection of short fiction by the late Lucia Berlin–who died in 2004, and was largely overlooked while she was alive. In the book’s foreword, author Lydia Davis writes, “Perhaps, with the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Marilynne Robinson on Writing and Discipline
INTERVIEWER Do you keep to a schedule? ROBINSON I really am incapable of discipline. I write when something makes a strong claim on me. When I don’t feel like writing, I absolutely don’t feel like writing. I tried that work ethic thing a couple of times—I can’t say I exhausted its possibilities—but if there’s not […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Borders: A Reading List
In reading for this list, I read about all sorts of boundaries—in jazz music, in science fiction and in desert landscapes. Borders are implicit in the designation of which bookshelves belong to me and which are my partner’s.
