Five notable personal essays published this year, on friendship, loss, war, endings, and metaphors.
Kenyon Review
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, our editors recommend stories by Elizabeth Bruenig, Joshua St.Clair, Tan Tuck Ming, José Vergara, and Eleanor Cummins.
Departures
“Tang tells the heartbreaking story of one woman, Daisy, who’s given up so much. Sadly, it’s the story for so many.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, our editors recommend stories by Ryan Devereaux, Tess McNulty, Alyssa Harad, Leland Cecco, and Caitlin Giddings
To Live in the Ending
In this intense and gorgeous braided essay, Alyssa Harad contemplates the end of the world, alternatives to catastrophe narratives, and the many small endings that occur each day, everywhere, to everyone and everything. It’s that tsunami siren and its relationship to the rest of the novel that haunts me now. Situated in the deep background, […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Greg Tate, Alicia Inez Guzmán, Christian Wallace, Laura Hoffman, and Connie Wang.
Keep This to Yourself
“I am carried, cared for, not yet touched by our culture’s casting of my body as other, as divergent. It is less like memory and more like myth.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Sarah Zhang, Jameson Rich, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Tristan McConnell, and Merritt Mecham.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers on Helping Elderly Black People to Vote in 1976
“I called out the names, and they’d tell me who they wanted to vote for. Then, very carefully, I put my finger by each name they’d chosen.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Hannah Dreier, Doug Bock Clark, Samanth Subramanian, Michael Hobbes, Jonathan Cohn, Kate Sheppard, Alex Kaufman, Delphine D’Amora, Chris D’Angelo, and Emily Peck, and Kris Willcox and Michelle Ruiz.