When Haruki Murakami walked the long distance between his childhood home outside Kobe and the city center, he found a city changed by the great Kobe earthquake, and the constant spector of violence.
Granta
Posted inNonfiction, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from May Jeong, Leslie Jamison, Irina Dumitrescu, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Matt Wake.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Barbara Ehrenreich on Writing to Think
Barbara Ehrenreich on thinking as an antidote to “the unknown and potentially menacing.”
Posted inNonfiction, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Megan Twohey, Jodi Kantor, Susan Dominus, Jim Rutenberg, and Steve Eder; Eliana Dockterman, Stephanie Zarachek, and Haley Sweetland Edwards; John Woodrow Cox; Nadim Roberts; and Phil Klay.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Quotes
Parsing Her Identity With A Long-Lost Folder, Plus the Internet
A.M. Homes wrestles with her ambivalence toward learning more about her birth parents and the circumstances of her adoption.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The File: Lost Then Found
A personal essay in which A.M. Homes — who ten years ago published The Mistress’s Daughter, a memoir about meeting her birth parents — reports on the experience of recently being given her long lost adoption file, and the effects of the information on her understanding of her origins.
Posted inArts & Culture, Crime, Nonfiction, Quotes, Uncategorized
Welcome Nowhere: The Plight of the Rohingya Refugees
Myanmar’s Rohingya people escape systematic discrimination at home only to suffer depredations in search of new homes.
Posted inCurrent Events, Nonfiction, Quotes
Stories of Immigration as Protest: Letters to Donald Trump
Barbara Zitwer, Colm TóibÃn, Elham Manea, Linda Coverdale, Kyung-sook Shin, and Anne Landsman share their stories of immigration to protest Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Suddenly I Knew Why I Was Writing a Story at Any Particular Moment’
To learn the craft, I’d just written random stories, whatever came into my head, attempting to storify any thought as practice for figuring out what works and what doesn’t. But just writing whatever wasn’t really being a writer. A writer, it seemed to me at the time, was someone with a creative or intellectual project that lasted not the length of a story but over years of writing many different things.
Posted inNonfiction
On Going Back Home: A Reading List
On the elusive, ever-evolving concept of home.