Tag: fiction

This week, our editors recommend longreads by Benjamin Wofford, Josh Dzieza, Evan Osnos, Alice Wong & Ed Yong, and Dan Kois.

And he “…stopped in his tracks, wondering what in the world two little girls were doing alone in a canoe speeding toward the Falls, apparently oarless.”

“Pema wants to ask Jamal, Have you seen the news? But of course he hasn’t. He’s got other things to think about and now so does she.”

Longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj read and shared 276 short stories on the #longreads Twitter hashtag in 2021. Here are his favorites.

The inside story of author Blake Bailey’s grooming of middle-school girls.

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…”

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.

“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…”

“I was looking for texts that seem to go the extra mile in hiding something — texts that almost seem to be begging to be interpreted in terms of what’s not being said.”

In recent novels, Ocean Vuong and Nicole Dennis-Benn tell stories in which young queer characters affected by migration and displacement are worthy of seeing themselves reflected in others.

‘The history of the West is a deeply turbulent one… that kept the living population in a constant state of unrest. I thought this constant state of unrest must be true for the dead as well.’

Siri Hustvedt’s “Memories of the Future” is a fitting book for the #MeToo moment, which is as much about justice and reparations as it is about understanding the logic of memory.

“I thought for sure, I’ll never write about Rilke again. I’m done with Rilke! I’m sick of Rilke! Rilke — no more. But then the other day … I just started researching something about Rilke.”

“What’s considered high art? What’s lowbrow? What are those things? That’s something that, as a person who like, lives at 7-Eleven, I’m extremely interested in.”

Chia-Chia Lin talks about the wildness of domestic spaces and writing her novel “The Unpassing” through the early months of motherhood.

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 new homeowner reads two novels that revolve around surreal home-invasion scenarios, and considers what it is about his house that scares him.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine talks about her new short story collection “Sabrina & Corina,” her obsession with dualities, and Chicano and Indigenous history in Denver.

“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.”

“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”

In the midst of the Syrian Civil War, three grown siblings attempt to fulfill their father’s final wish. The journey is dangerous, but that’s no surprise; nowadays, death is always hard work.

In Scapellato’s new novel, a man is pulled into a noir detective mystery he doesn’t want to solve.

Laskar’s debut novel imagines an alternate ending to an incident from her real life: When law enforcement agents raided her home, and confiscated her unfinished novel, what if she had refused to comply?

In Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel “Bowlaway,” the past and future are mysteriously entangled.

Man Booker winner Marlon James immersed himself in African myths and history, so he could use that world as a springboard for a new fantasy series.

“It’s difficult to say what you really think. You’re too aware of the traps, the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs of utterance: all the ways we let cliché steer us in a certain direction, force us to say not quite what we mean…”

Tessa Hadley on gaining the sense of authority she needed to write fiction, the authors whose work opens the door for her to write, and the way we are formed by our connections with other people.

Sarah Moss’s tale of Iron Age reenactors and parental abuse is her way of addressing Brexit. “Putting the skulls of the ancestors up in some attempt to hold back history never works.”

No longer able to live on her freelance writing income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a holiday seasonal job at an Amazon fulfillment center.

Guy Gunaratne’s Man Booker-longlisted “In Our Mad and Furious City” recognizes multiple, overlapping versions of London and its inhabitants, examining the ways violence can bubble up through the city’s fissures.