David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category.
Search results
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
9 Traits of Southern Writing: A Reading List
Elizabeth Hudson (@elizahudson) is editor in chief of Our State magazine, an 81-year-old regional magazine all about the people, places, and things that make living in North Carolina great. A few weeks ago, I found a box in my attic labeled “Old College Papers.” After cringing through the first notebook on top — Lord, that […]
Posted inReading List
Reading List: If Christmas Were Forever
I wish Christmas lasted forever. Okay, maybe not forever, but at least a week. I try to make this a reality by visiting different family members and friends and exchanging gifts during the week between Christmas & New Year’s, “forgetting” these gifts and having to revisit aforementioned friends, listening to Christmas music longer than conventionally appropriate, and […]
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: 22 Outstanding Book Chapters We Featured This Year
This year we featured not only the best stories from the web, but also great chapters from new and classic books. Here’s a complete guide to every book chapter we featured this year, both for free and for Longreads Members:
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: 'The Poorest Rich Kids in the World'
Above: Doris Duke The Poorest Rich Kids in the World Sabrina Rubin Erdely | Rolling Stone | August 2013 | 38 minutes (9,653 words) Sabrina Rubin Erdely (@sabrinarerdely) is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. I often deal with interview subjects who tell variations of the truth. People don’t usually out-and-out lie, although that […]
Posted inUncategorized
“As a boy, I wanted to be a train. I didn’t realize this was unusual—that other kids played with trains, not as them. They liked to build tracks and have trains not fall off them. Watch them go through tunnels. I didn’t understand that. What I liked was pretending my body was two hundred tons […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Announcing the Longreads Member Drive: Help Us Reach 5,000 Members
My name is Mark Armstrong, and four and a half years ago, I created Longreads. What started as an afternoon project has now grown into something much bigger—a global community of readers, sharing what they love, across both nonfiction and fiction. Along the way we’ve built Longreads into a trusted service that recommends the best […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Andrew Wylie Rules
The renowned literary agent on his hatred of Amazon, commercial fiction, and the future of book publishing: “I didn’t think that [in 2010] the publishing community had properly assessed—particularly in regard to its obligations to writers—what an equitable arrangement would look like. “And I felt that publishers had made a huge mistake, because they were […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
First Chapters: ‘White Oleander,’ by Janet Fitch
This week we’re excited to introduce First Chapters, a new series on Longreads dedicated to sharing your favorite first chapters, nonfiction or fiction, past or present. Our first pick comes from Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, who has chosen Janet Fitch’s 1999 novel White Oleander. If you want to recommend a First Chapter, let us […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Reading List: 6 Stories for the Science-Fiction Newbie
Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She also happens to love science fiction, so she put together a #longreads list for sci-fi newbies.
