Reimagining Harper Lee’s Lost True Crime Novel: An Interview with Casey Cep By Adam Morgan Feature “Somewhere along the way it became very clear to me that I was writing the book she never would.”
There Is No Other Way To Say This By Melissa Batchelor Warnke Feature “Tell them on the outside,” Carolyn Forché’s Salvadoran mentor instructed her. Her memoir is her latest attempt. Its elliptical lyricism, like that of her poetry, runs circles around censorship.
This Month In Books: ‘What Creates That Need To Leap?’ By Dana Snitzky Commentary This month’s books newsletter has one foot out the door.
Technology Is as Biased as Its Makers By Longreads Feature From exploding Ford Pintos to racist algorithms, all harmful technologies are a product of unethical design. Yet, like car companies in the ’70s, today’s tech companies would rather blame the user.
High Expectations: LSD, T.C. Boyle’s Women, and Me By Christine Ro Feature “Outside Looking In” dramatizes the discovery of LSD and the cult of personality surrounding Timothy Leary. Our reviewer drops acid and thinks about how, for women, it can be safer to be a downer.
I Entered the World’s Longest, Loneliest Horse Race on a Whim, and I Won By Longreads Feature Somehow, implausibly, against all the odds, I became the youngest person and first woman ever to win the Mongol Derby. What made me so sure I was ready, when I was totally unprepared?
‘The Home Is a Place as Wild as Any in the World.’ By Alex Madison Feature Chia-Chia Lin talks about the wildness of domestic spaces and writing her novel “The Unpassing” through the early months of motherhood.
The Age of Forever Crises By Linda Kinstler Feature We need to learn how to talk about our irreversible mistakes. Historian Kate Brown says the first step is to resist the Chernobylization of knowledge.
The Women Characters Rarely End Up Free: Remembering Rachel Ingalls By Ruby Brunton Feature The recently re-appreciated novelist Rachel Ingalls passed away last month. She was among a cohort of twentieth-century women writers who were ‘famous for not being famous.’
A Dispatch From the Fast-Paced, Makeshift World of High-End Catering By Longreads Feature The unsung heroes of the food world battle against time and chaos, cooking haute cuisine over lit cans of Sterno in the gloomy back hallways of New York’s civic landmarks.
‘Midwesterners Have Seen Themselves As Being in the Center of Everything.’ By Bridey Heing Feature In “The Heartland,” Kristin L. Hoganson says America’s Midwest has been more connected to global events than popular history allows — especially popular history as told in the Midwest.
Lock Your Doors? By Ryan Chapman Feature A new homeowner reads two novels that revolve around surreal home-invasion scenarios, and considers what it is about his house that scares him.
United States of Conspiracy: An Interview with Anna Merlan By Rebecca McCarthy Feature “Most people in America believe in one conspiracy to some extent, but the far end of the pool … is this desire to show that you really do reject all knowable authority.”
This Month In Books: Botanize Your Past To Save the Future By Dana Snitzky Commentary This month’s books newsletter is overflowing with regional fiction, travel writing … and retro-botany.
The Anarchists Who Took the Commuter Train By Longreads Feature The Stelton colony, initially associated with the likes of Emma Goldman and Eugene O’Neill, was a radical suburb whose anarchist residents took the commuter train to New York.
‘What Is Missing Is Her Soul’: Women and Art, Girls and Men By Alana Mohamed Feature In a new book, Camille Laurens examines the life of the model for Degas’ masterpiece, “Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen.” But there’s still so much we don’t know.
Against Hustle: Jenny Odell Is Taking Her Time at the End of the World By Rebecca McCarthy Feature The attention economy is killing us and the planet. Artist and writer Jenny Odell talks about why slowing down could be the only way to survive.
‘I Don’t Think Those Feelings of Self-Doubt Ever Go Away.’ By Amy Brady Feature Susan Choi talks about feeling unsure of oneself, as a writer, as a performer — or as a victim — and about how her latest novel evolved in uncanny tandem with the real world.
‘I’m Always Writing Against This Idea That Denver’s a White Space.’ By Adam Morgan Feature Kali Fajardo-Anstine talks about her new short story collection “Sabrina & Corina,” her obsession with dualities, and Chicano and Indigenous history in Denver.
The Unreliable Reader By Wei Tchou Feature In Esmé Weijun Wang’s book of personal essays, “The Collected Schizophrenias,” it’s the reader, not the writer, who is an unreliable narrator.
When Zora and Langston Took a Road Trip By Longreads Feature In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston gave Langston Hughes a lift to Tuskegee in her Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie.” It was one of most fortuitous hangouts in literary history.
‘There’s Virtually No Conversation In Chicago … About the Aftershocks of the Violence.’ By Hope Reese Feature In “An American Summer,” journalist Alex Kotlowitz tries to report on gun deaths on Chicago’s South Side with the same attention to survivors, anniversaries, and aftershocks that is paid to mass shootings.
Wonder Woman By Longreads Feature Of all the genes parents pass down and values they instill, how does one take hold so much stronger than the others?
‘Craft Is My Belief System. My Obligation To Writing Is Religious.’ By Lily Meyer Feature Nathan Englander talks about the “super-American world” of Orthodox Judaism, Philip Roth’s funeral, and training himself to write his new novel “kaddish.com” while daydreaming.
Namwali Serpell on Doing the Responsible Thing — Writing an Irresponsible Novel By Tobias Carroll Feature “I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”
‘Imagine Us, Because We’re Here’: An Interview with Mira Jacob By Naomi Elias Feature Mira Jacob talks about why she wrote a graphic memoir, and why she is tired of performing her pain in order to help white people understand racism.
The Day New York Rose Up Against the Nazis On the Hudson By Longreads Feature In 1935, a group of New York communists boarded a German luxury liner during a lavish sending-off party attended by celebrities, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts. Their goal: capture the swastika.
Irvine Welsh on Brexit, Existential Panic, and His Latest ‘Trainspotting’ Sequel By Tobias Carroll Feature “The books from ‘Trainspotting’ onwards have been about deindustrialization … the cruel existential panic that we feel, in the sense that we don’t really know what we’re here for anymore.”
‘Women Can Be Required To Wear Something That’s Painful.’ By Victoria Namkung Feature Summer Brennan talks about femininity and suffering, beauty and biology, and the startlingly dark turn she found herself taking when writing about women and power in her new book ‘High Heel.’
Navigation By Longreads Feature “The whiteboy said there was nothing left for me in Houston, he said that I didn’t have to punish myself, and he said my name, my actual name.”
