Andrea Pitzer is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. Best Innocence Story “The Innocent Man” (Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly) What if you were convicted of murdering your wife, and you didn’t do it? What if, after decades in prison, you learned that the prosecution had held proof of […]
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Longreads Member Exclusive: The Anthologist (Excerpt), by Nicholson Baker
This week’s Longreads Member pick is Chapter 1 from Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, The Anthologist, published by Simon & Schuster. The excerpt comes recommended by Hilary Armstrong, a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She writes: Someone I love once told me that they don’t understand poetry. It’s all random line breaks and rhythms […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, First Chapters
First Chapters: ‘White Oleander,’ by Janet Fitch
Janet Fitch | White Oleander, Little, Brown and Company | 1999 | 19 minutes (4,640 words) Our latest first chapter 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 know and we’ll feature you and your pick: hello@longreads.com.
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction
‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist
“If you survive me, tell them this: I never gave up.”
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.
“I never figured out why they did that to me.”
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Everything to Live For
Jennifer Mendelsohn | Washingtonian | June 1998 | 36 minutes (8,995 words) Jennifer Mendelsohn is the “Modern Family” columnist for Baltimore Style magazine. A former People magazine special correspondent and Slate columnist, her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Tablet, Medium, McSweeney’s and Jezebel. This story first appeared in the June […]
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Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only We Let Him
Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only We Let Him Mike Bloomberg has become important because he represents a great American dream, not the one about owning a home or becoming more successful than your father but the one beneath all of those, the foundational American dream — the dream of freedom from […]
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She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words, which occur several hundred times, and often several times per page, in this book of nearly six hundred pages: “whore” (and its derivatives “whorey,” “whorish,” “whoriness”), applied in many contexts, but almost never to actual prostitution; “myth,” “emblem” (also “mythic,” “emblematic”), used with apparent intellectual […]
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I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. […]
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Featured Longreader: Writer Kevin Lincoln. See his story picks from Jim Romenesko, Ben Cohen, Poetry Magazine and more on his #longreads page.
