“Sixty years after the Cultural Revolution began, a writer looks back to her childhood in Beijing during its peak, and the banned books that sustained her through the tumult.”
reading
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring s.e. smith
The All My Dead Cats and Other Losses author and Flytrap co-founder on grief, breaking and fixing things, and Alice Wong.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Man Who Reads Books For a Living (One Every Two Days)
“Clarke Seicher is something much more specific and much rarer: a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation.”
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Vauhini Vara
The author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age and The Immortal King Rao on memorable meals and books about whales.
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Ibram X. Kendi
The Stamped and How to Be an Antiracist author on the superpower he’d like to have, the outlets he likes to read, and his latest work, Chain of Ideas.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Politics After Literacy
“Postliteracy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type.”
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Patrick Radden Keefe
The New Yorker staff writer and author of the new book London Falling on running, writing in the morning, a life-changing childhood trip, and more.
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring R. O. Kwon
The author of The Incendiaries and Exhibit on the bed as refuge, the power of movement and exercise, a life of writing, and more.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?
“A critic considers the strange moral pressure we feel to read to the very last page.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Thinking in the Margins
“What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read.”