In “A Girl’s Guide to Sexual Purity,” a striking essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Carmen Maria Machado explores an adolescence steeped in “purity culture”: sexual assault, conservative youth groups, purity rings, curbed fantasies and an unusually close relationship with her youth pastor.
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Posted inBooks, First Chapters, Nonfiction
My Unsentimental Education
“I wanted him to understand my life—that I’d been caught in the local pattern and found the safest way forward, but if I’d lived somewhere else I’d be someone else and still could.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Revisiting Frida Kahlo’s Style and Cult of Personality
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the traumatic trolley accident that hospitalized artist Frida Kahlo and inspired, perhaps cruelly, her artistic path. Despite her global popularity, there’s still more to learn about this extraordinary artist. For five journalists, exploring the textiles of Frida Kahlo’s homeland gives her rich legacy a new texture.
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Dorthe Nors | Longreads | August 2015 | 8 minutes (1,904 words) Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a previously unpublished short story by Danish writer Dorthe Nors, translated into English by Misha Hoekstra, and chosen by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers, who writes: “I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 inBooks, Nonfiction
Hell—Nothing Less—And Without End: Six Days in Warsaw
“The uprising,” we told each other immediately, like everyone else in Warsaw. Strange. Because no one had ever used that word before in his life. Only in history, in books.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
My Dinner With Rasputin
Writing in 1924, Teffi, a Russian writer in exile known for her wit, recalls a series of humorous (but increasingly ominous) encounters with the trusted friend of the last Tsar of Russia.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Truman Capote Compiled the Guest List for His Famous Black and White Ball, According to Gloria Steinem
What gave the Black and White Ball “its intoxicating piquancy,” according to Amy Fine Collins, was the fact that Capote’s guest list had “flung together, in a gilt-edged melting pot, the most alluring power brokers in the worlds of high society, politics, the arts, and Hollywood—disconnected universes that collided, if not for the first time that evening, then at least with unprecedented force.”
The Ball also found an unlikely chronicler in Gloria Steinem, an invited guest who had made Capote’s acquaintance after she interviewed him for Glamour the year before. Steinem wrote a feature on the party for Vogue in January 1967 in which she described the luminaries, feathers, masks, ball gowns, and jewels all whirling around the room: “The effect was like some blend of Hollywood, the Court of Louis XIV, a medieval durbar, and pure Manhattan.”
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
I Would Rather Be Herod’s Pig: The History of a Taboo
The story of how pigs became the world’s most divisive meal.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Changed Woman
Amanda Barbour endured 10 years of conversion therapy. But she finally got her dream wedding.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Story of a Journalist Turned Wedding Photographer
Just the other day, I received an e-mail from a photographer looking for an internship. His short note almost brought me to tears: “I come from Sarajevo, Bosnia, and my life has put me though many challenges. I am saying this because I have had the chance to see the worst in humans and was […]
