This week’s Longreads Member pick is Chapter 1 from Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, The Anthologist, published by Simon & Schuster. The excerpt comes recommended by Hilary Armstrong, a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She writes: Someone I love once told me that they don’t understand poetry. It’s all random line breaks and rhythms […]
For this week’s Longreads Member pick, we’re excited to share an excerpt from Sigrid Nunez’s memoir Sempre Susan, which comes recommended by Emily Gould, the proprietor of Emily Books, who writes: This memorable passage from Sigrid Nunez’s gemlike memoir of the year she spent under the influence of Susan Sontag begins with a description of a trip to […]
For this week’s Longreads Member pick, we’re thrilled to share “Let’s Dance,” Sasha Frere-Jones‘s 2010 New Yorker profile of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. Frere-Jones writes: “When you begin writing a profile, your first worry is access. Does the subject talk in soundbites? Will he or she let you see anything that hasn’t been rehearsed? (‘Accidental’ meetings […]
This week’s Longreads Member pick is “The American Nonconformist in the Age of the Commercialization of Dissent,” a 1992 essay by Thomas Frank from The Baffler, the magazine he cofounded with Keith White in 1988. Frank writes: “In republishing this bit of juvenilia from 1992—my very first exploration of an idea that I reworked and reconsidered […]
Michael Kruse, an award-winning staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times who also contributes to ESPN’s Grantland, this year gave a TEDx talk and had a story make the anthology Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. 1. Chris Jones on the animals in Ohio. What a way to start: The horses knew first. And want […]
Isaac Fitzgerald is managing editor of The Rumpus, co-founder of Pen & Ink, and uses Twitter. Disclaimer: I know many of the people on this list. One of the wonderful things / occupational hazards of working for a site like The Rumpus is that I’ve come to meet a lot of great writers. These stories stand on their own regardless. […]
Justin Heckert is a writer living in Indianapolis. His work has recently been anthologized in the book Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. Most Beautiful Story: “Never Let Go,” Kelley Benham, Tampa Bay Times Best Essay: Lisa Taddeo, “Why We Cheat,” Esquire Most Entertaining Profile: Jason Fagone, “Schoolly D is Living the American Dream,” Philadelphia […]
Howard Riefs is a prolific Longreader and a communications consultant in Chicago. Best Series This Land, Dan Barry, The New York Times “The dateline is Elyria, Ohio, a city of 55,000 about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. You know this town, even if you have never been here. A place buffeted by time and the economy, a place […]
Jodi Ettenberg is the founder of Legal Nomads, a contributing editor to Longreads and Travelreads, and the author of The Food Traveler’s Handbook. It is always hard to narrow down my favourites from a full 12 months of longreading, so here are five—but certainly not all—of the standouts from the last year. They’re food-themed, mainly […]
Geoff Van Dyke is the editorial director of 5280 Magazine in Denver, Colorado. His writing has appeared in Outside, Men’s Journal, and The New York Times. These are the stories that I emailed, posted, and tweeted the most this past year (and filed away in the digital filing cabinet for further reading). They are all […]
Emma Carmichael is the managing editor of Gawker. She lives in Brooklyn. The Best Thing I Read About A Woman Who Got Blamed For Everything The Woman Who Took the Fall for JPMorgan Chase, by Susan Dominus (New York Times Magazine) I tend to steer clear of stories about finance because I assume they’ll either […]
Nicholas Jackson is the digital editorial director for Outside magazine. A former associate editor at The Atlantic, he has also worked for Slate,Texas Monthly, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and other publications. Best Argument for the Magazine”The Innocent Man, Part One” (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly)”The Innocent Man, Part Two” (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly) I was going to give this two-parter from the always-great Pamela Colloff […]
Elliott Holt‘s first novel, You Are One of Them, will be published by The Penguin Press in June 2013 One of my two favorite short stories published in 2012 is “Member/Guest” by David Gilbert, which appeared in The New Yorker the week of November 12, but since that story is not available online without a subscription, […]
Maria Bustillos is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work for The Awl and Los Angeles Review of Books was featured on Longreads this year. In the essay “Freedom Is Overrated,” the theologian and scholar Sancrucensis contrasts the humanism of Jonathan Franzen with that of David Foster Wallace. A transcendentally beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on self and other. […]
Reyhan Harmanci is deputy editor of Modern Farmer, a not-yet-launched publication devoted to issues of farming and food (and animals!). Picking these stories activated an obsessive part of my brain and I’m already regretting throwing the “best” around without spending a few months reading all of the Longreads of 2012. But there’s always 2013! Best […]
Burt Helm is Senior Writer for Inc. Magazine. His stories, “The Forgotten Founder,” “Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?” and “Hard Lessons in Modern Lending,” were featured on Longreads in 2012. Best Takedown of an Old, Established Writer by a Young, Hungry Writer in an Awkward Press Junket Setting Sarah Nicole Prickett, “How to Get […]
Andrea Pitzer is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. Best Innocence Story “The Innocent Man” (Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly) What if you were convicted of murdering your wife, and you didn’t do it? What if, after decades in prison, you learned that the prosecution had held proof of […]
This week’s Longreads Member Exclusive comes from Margot Singer, whose essay “Call It Rape” was published in the Fall 2012 issue of The Normal School. Singer is the author of The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review,Conjunctions, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is […]
Emily M. Keeler is a writer and the founding editor of Little Brother Magazine. Best Pair of Essays on Loneliness Emily Cooke, “The Lonely Ones” – The New Inquiry Susan Sontag is a force that continues to be reckoned with, and the publication of her second volume of journals this year occasioned this incredible piece. […]
Chris Jones is a writer for Esquire and ESPN and the winner of two National Magazine Awards. Favorite new writer discovery of 2012 I’m always scared of making lists like this, because a year is a long time, and I read a lot, and invariably I’ll forget writers and pieces that I liked very much. […]
Doree Shafrir is the Executive Editor of BuzzFeed. Her story, “Can You Die from a Nightmare?” was featured on Longreads in September. This year I read a lot of great personal essays, but these were my favorites. Meaghan O’Connell, “Places I’ve Lived: A Nanny’s Room, the Perfect Sublet, and a Place You Can Instagram,” The […]
Paige Williams is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose stories have been anthologized in five Best American volumes. She teaches at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and edits Nieman Storyboard. For elegance + acute observation in the service of theme Belle Boggs’ “The Art of Waiting,” on fertility (Orion) “The family as a […]
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