Now that we’ve all had a chance to finish watching Orange is the New Black (who am I kidding — we all binge watched it in a day or two, right?), I thought I’d share four pieces that clarify and critique the way prison is represented on the show. The first two pieces cover season one, for […]
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Posted inBooks, Quotes
On Watching a Person Deteriorate
In the Guardian, an adaptation of The Iceberg, a memoir by Marion Coutts about her husband’s last months after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. She writes: “There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part.” 13 […]
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. Sixty-nine Days Héctor Tobar | The New Yorker | June 30, 2014 | 58 minutes (14,378 words) An in-depth account of how […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
He Remade Our World
A series of decisions, made more than a decade ago by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, still shape the world we live in today: In the end, perhaps inevitably, Bush would disappoint Cheney, bowing, in the steely unforgiving view of the older man, to the shoddy demands of politics and the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?’
Cartoonist Roz Chast’s illustrated memoir on the final years of her parents’ lives. It’s no accident that most consumer ads are pitched to people in their 20s and 30s. For one thing, they are less likely to have gone through the transformative process of cleaning out their deceased parents’ stuff. Once you go through that, […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, First Chapters
'Friendship': The Full First Chapter from Emily Gould's New Novel
Emily Gould | Friendship | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | July 2014 | 8 minutes (1,893 words) Below is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book from […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Yes, All Women Part II: A Reading List of Stories Written By Women
My last Yes, All Women reading list was a hit with the Longreads community, so here’s part two. Enjoy 20 pieces by fantastic women writers. 1. “When You’re Unemployed.” (Jessica Goldstein, The Hairpin, June 2014) “The first thing to go is the caring…You develop a routine: changing out of sleeping leggings and into daytime leggings.” […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Smearch, Fidgital, Skinjecture: Creating New Terms for the Modern World
Lizzie Skurnick on her new book of neologisms and why she’s republishing beloved young adult books from her youth.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Budd & Leni
The story of Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s unlikely collaboration with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
Posted inEditor's Pick
An Interview With a Therapist Who Was Once Insane
Joe Guppy is a writer, actor and psychotherapist living in Seattle. Thirty-five years ago, he was 23 years old and a mental patient. He spent 10 weeks in a mental hospital and another 10 weeks in a halfway house after Atabrine, an old-school malaria medication, gave him visions that he was living in hell and […]
