“I may have seen all there is to see at the Bosque yet I keep returning each year. It’s as though I, too, migrate to the Bosque.”
book excerpt
Posted inFeature
I Remember the Bookstore
Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes) Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, […]
Posted inFeature
‘Some Things Never Leave You’: Christian Livermore on Poverty’s Indelible Marks
“For me, passing means trying to be anything other than what I was, and what I fear so desperately I always will be: poor white trash.”
Posted inNonfiction
Holiday Gift Guide: 8 Books We Excerpted on Longreads in 2021
A short list of books we loved (and featured) this year.
Posted inFeature
Even the Steam Had a Shadow
“He couldn’t remember coming here, or going anywhere. He looked down at himself. With a writhe of horror, he found he couldn’t even remember getting dressed. His clothes were unfamiliar.”
Posted inFeature
Happy is a Relative State
“The rest of my life will always be entwined with rheumatoid arthritis. But it’s my choice to also be something more, to not feel sick, to still find those shadows of a dancer, which is to say tiny flecks of magic, within me.”
Posted inFeature
The Fracking Lottery
“When I moved to Billtown, I worried most about whether fracking tainted groundwater. By the time I left the area, my biggest concern was whether the liberty granted to citizens to lease their land, or to otherwise act in ways that limits others’ access to environmental goods, taints democracy.”
Posted inNonfiction
Binders Full of Men
In an excerpt from her new book on fertility, feminism, and queer family-building, Jennifer Berney explores the possibilities of sperm banks.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
The Geography Closest In
In her new book, Miranda Ward explores the unique place of almost-motherhood — an uncertain landscape characterized by waiting, wanting, hoping, and not-knowing.
Posted inBooks, Design, Nonfiction, Story
The Powerful Decide
What makes good or bad design happen anywhere depends on who has the most power.