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.”
Carrying Histories of Protest By Longreads Feature Jaquira Díaz witnesses her father’s rebellious fight for a better life, and her homeland’s fight for its place in the world.
The Corpse Rider By Colin Dickey Feature “I could see the ghosts,” recalled Lafcadio Hearn about his early childhood. Late in life, he became a celebrated chronicler of Japan’s folk tales: stories of strange demons and lingering visitations.
A Green New Jail By Will Meyer Feature What does environmental justice look like in a landscape overrun by prisons? Where the incarcerated suffer from unusually polluted surroundings, and prisons are a toxin in their own right?
‘I Was Being Used in Slivers and Slices’: On Feminism at Odds With Evangelical Faith By Jane Ratcliffe Feature “I wasn’t unified in my being. I wasn’t able to bring my whole self to the table,” says Cameron Dezen Hammon about her life as a worship leader for an evangelical megachurch.
‘I Was Interested in the People Who Are Stuck With These Memories.’ By Victoria Namkung Feature Steph Cha discusses her new novel “Your House Will Pay,” the LA Riots, the Korean American Angeleno community, her 3,600 Yelp reviews, and pushing back against gatekeepers in publishing.
Surviving the Shattering of My Mind and My Marriage By Longreads Feature Andrea J. Buchanan contemplates the way illness and pain can freeze a sufferer in time, as if encased in glass.
This Month In Books: ‘One Degree Is About the Uncanny’ By Dana Snitzky Commentary This month’s books newsletter is suspended in a state of anticipation.
‘Writing This Book Was a Weird Séance ’: An Interview With Deborah Levy By Tobias Carroll Feature “If you have the depth, the surface can be as light as it’s possible to make it…I don’t mind that ‘Swimming Home’ is sometimes described as a ‘beach read’ — actually that’s a triumph.”
‘I Went Quiet…and That Allowed Me To Understand’: The Life of a Molecatcher By Tobias Carroll Feature Marc Hamer discusses life, death, and the lost art of catching a mole.
When the Dishes Are Done, I Wonder About Progress By Sarah Rose Haas Feature In “Coventry,” Rachel Cusk draws a connection between politeness and narrative death, rudeness and tragedy, storytelling and war.
It’s Time To Talk About Solar Geoengineering By Longreads Feature We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process.
A Single Sentence By Longreads Feature In an clandestinely written memoir, a jailed Turkish novelist and political dissident remembers the single sentence that changed everything at the moment of his arrest.
“We’re All Still Cooking…Still Raw at the Core”: An Interview with Jacqueline Woodson By Adam Morgan Feature “When I look at that dress and how much intention went into the making of it…it’s like we want to have something that can’t be destroyed, because so much of the past has been destroyed…”
