This Week in Books: Farewell Longreads! I’m Taking This Rodeo to Substack. By Dana Snitzky Commentary To read my “This Week in Books” newsletter in the future, follow me on substack.
This Week in Books: We’ve All Been Briefed By Dana Snitzky Commentary “They have washed their hands for you. / And they take the bus home.” —Jericho Brown
This Week in Books: Pain and Power By Dana Snitzky Commentary “And it will hurt, but we won’t be the ones doing all of the feeling, finally.” -Harmony Holiday
This Week in Books: Pale Horse on the One Hand, Pale Rider on the Other By Dana Snitzky Commentary I sometimes forget that it’s all the same thing.
This Week in Books: Anarchist Ice Cream and Other Dairies By Dana Snitzky Commentary Or, the newsletter in which I conclude that time is a flat circle.
This Week in Books: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask! By Dana Snitzky Reading List “Oh, all the one-way tickets! / I haven’t found anything / more sorrowful than you / in the pockets of the world.”
This Week in Books: Several Nihilistic Frenchmen By Dana Snitzky Commentary This week critics have looked to Huysmans, Camus and Jean-Philippe Toussaint for COVID-era inspiration.
This Week In Books: I Bought Some Books By Dana Snitzky Reading List Am I ghoul for buying all these plague books?
This Week In Books: The New Lord and Lady of the Apartment By Dana Snitzky Commentary “Infamously … Goethe dismissed the younger writer as diseased.”
This Week in Books: A B-Movie Storytelling Moment By Dana Snitzky Commentary Give me a Bolaño novel that starts with a guy walking into a bar, and then another guy starts telling him a story, and the rest of that novel is just the second guy telling that story.
This Week in Books: An Everlasting Meal By Dana Snitzky Commentary The book that’s been the most help to me during lockdown is a book I’ve never read.
This Week In Books: Too Small For the Occasion By Dana Snitzky Commentary He screamed, and I mean really screamed, to no one and to every one of us who was peeking at him out our windows: “What are we even doing out here!!??”
This Week In Books: A ‘Melancholia’ or ‘Take Shelter’ Situation By Dana Snitzky Reading List I will become power-mad and lock my boyfriend inside forever!
Why I’m Giving Myself Permission to Keep Writing at This Time By Sari Botton Highlight Our stories matter. And they are our legacies for future generations. (Plus: some free writing resources.)
This Week in Books: This Moment Doesn’t Remind Me of Anything By Dana Snitzky Commentary Lawrence Wright did it again; Jordan Peterson in a coma?; Myriam Gurba forced out of her job; Woody Allen canceled by his publisher’s employees; THE VIRUS; and more.
“The Anger of Women is an Earth-shattering Thing”: Lidia Yuknavitch on Resisting the Hero Narrative and the Body as a Generator of Stories. By Jane Ratcliffe Commentary “I’m going to say a blasphemous thing, which is we are so fucking done with the hero’s journey. It has been to our peril.”
This Month in Books: The Decameron Is Online By Dana Snitzky Reading List We can all quarantine alone, together, in one big villa in the cloud.
“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom By Jacqueline Alnes Feature “We were interested in dead girls, but so interested in them that we were trying to do the opposite of what had been done before.”
William Gibson on How Science Fiction Portrays Reality By Krista Stevens Highlight “Every fiction about the future is like an ice-cream cone,” Gibson says, “melting as it moves into the future.”
This Month In Books: What Did We Miss? By Dana Snitzky Commentary The end of the year is a time for regrets. What are the books we didn’t feature?
The Queering of the Baby Bells By Longreads Feature Highly public pressure campaigns against telephone companies were the crux of early LGBTQ activism.
‘They Were Growing Seedlings…Which Would Sprout To Become Supreme Court Justices’ By Hope Reese Feature Ruth Marcus discusses the Federalist Society’s 30-year Justice-grooming project, the botched investigations, and everything else that brought us “too big to fail” Brett Kavanaugh.
The Longreads 2019 Holiday Gift Book Guide By Dana Snitzky Commentary Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2019 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list.
Why I Wanted To Finish My Father’s Life’s Work By Karen Brown Feature Karen Brown recalls the pain and joy of fulfilling a deathbed promise.
Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis By Kelli María Korducki Feature If masculinity really is in crisis — and that’s a big if — we should at least be able to agree that it’s not women’s responsibility to fix it.
‘By Choice, and Not By Choice…Time Is Going To Change You.’ By Zan Romanoff Feature Nina MacLaughlin discusses her retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “[In] my very vague high school memories…there was no discussion of the fact that this book is just rape after rape after rape.”
This Month In Books: The Book Is an Escape Tool By Dana Snitzky Commentary Sometimes telling a story is the only way to escape it.
‘I’m a Big Fan of Writing To Find Out What You Don’t Know.’ By Adam Morgan Feature Mark Haber discusses “Reinhardt’s Garden” and its protagonist’s quest for a true understanding of melancholy: “not a feeling but a mood, not a color but a shade, not depression but not happiness either…”
‘I Was Trapped Forever In This Present Tense’: Carmen Maria Machado on Surviving Abuse By Hope Reese Feature “She was always afraid of my voice. That was the defining factor of our relationship — fear of what I would say and write and do. She’s afraid of … the narrative that I possess.”
