Tag: novel

“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…”

Mary H.K. Choi discusses her latest novel, which examines how “holograms and digital envoys” represent us online, and why it feels like her “second book signals the death of my first.”

‘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.’

Susan Choi talks about feeling unsure of oneself, as a writer, as a performer — or as a victim — and about how her latest novel evolved in uncanny tandem with the real world.

Nathan Englander talks about the “super-American world” of Orthodox Judaism, Philip Roth’s funeral, and training himself to write his new novel “kaddish.com” while daydreaming.

“I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”

In Ling Ma’s “Severance” — a novel she began to write after getting laid off, while living partly on severance pay — the characters keep going to work, even though they know it’s the end of the world.

The first page was blank. On the second page, in an almost illegible calligraphic script, was written “Manifesto for a House in the Sky.”

An excerpt from Val Brelinski’s debut novel, about three daughters who’ve been raised by devout evangelical Christians in Idaho.

In classical anthropology, there’s a rigid distinction between “field” and “home.” Field’s where you go to do your research, immersing yourself, sometimes at great personal risk, in a maelstrom of raw, unsorted happening. Home’s where you go to sort and tame it: catalogue it, analyze it, transform it in to something meaningful. But when the […]

In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.

Sittenfeld’s smart debut novel about social dynamics at an exclusive boarding school remains relevant—and not just as a “coming of age novel”—a decade after it was first published.

Emily Gould | Friendship | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | July 2014 | 8 minutes (1,893 words)   Below is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book […]

Roxane Gay | An Untamed State | May 2014 | 11 minutes (2,742 words) * * * Roxane Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, is out this week, and we’re excited to present the opening chapters with the Longreads community. Our thanks to Gay and Grove Atlantic for sharing it here. For more, read our Roxane […]