About This List Thanks to everyone who has participated in the Longreads community this year, and to all of our guests who shared their favorite stories of 2012. The below list represents our editors’ favorite stories of the year, for both nonfiction and fiction. Longreads is edited by Mark Armstrong and Mike Dang, with Kjell Reigstad, […]
fiction
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring New York magazine, Gawker, Virginia Hughes, Grantland, Michigan Quarterly Review, fiction from The New Yorker and a guest pick by Jeremy Kressmann.
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There Is Just One Problem with Feeling Alive
“Sophie stood on the gravel path, thinking. She tried to think extra hard about being alive so as to forget that she would not be alive forever. But it was impossible. As soon as she concentrated on being alive now, the thought of dying also came into her mind. The same thing happened the other […]
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Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring The New York Times Magazine, Washington Monthly, The New Yorker, Spirit Magazine, Stanford Medicine Magazine, plus fiction and a guest pick by TIME’s Kate Pickert. Sign up to receive it every week.
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“Brad And Angie Go To Meet The African Pee Generator Girls.” —Sarah Miller, The Awl More from The Awl
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[Fiction] An aunt recalls how she met her husband. (From Mo Yan, 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.) ‘If you want to know why I married Hao Dashou, I have to start with the frogs. Some old friends got together for dinner on the night I announced my retirement, and I wound up […]
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[Fiction] A father uses his lottery winnings for an extravagant birthday party for his teenage daughter: September 3rd: Having just turned forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax. Exciting to think how in one year, at rate of one page/day, will […]
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[Fiction] A young boy and his nuclear family leave their extended family in a remote village for the city slums: One cold, dewy morning, you are huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot. Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been thrown away, whose remote controls are out of […]
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Vicissitudes, CA
[Fiction] A story about an unemployed ethnomusicologist, gray whales, and Miranda July: ‘Garfield was my favorite president,’ said Brandon. ‘James A. Garfield?’ said Kara. ‘President from March to July of 1881?’ ‘From Ohio?’ she said. ‘That’s the one,’ said Brandon. He said: ‘I think he would have proven to be an effective leader if he’d […]