“For decades, Scott Frank earned up to three hundred thousand dollars a week rewriting other people’s screenplays. Finally, he decided to stop playing ventriloquist.”
storytelling
Posted inNonfiction
Best Of 2023: Features
At the time of this writing, Longreads editors have created nearly 650 recommendations in 2023, and just about every one of them can be considered a feature. However, you’ll find that the stories contained herein are features in the classic sense: marriages of deep reporting and indelible prose. Some are light, others emotionally taxing. Their […]
Posted inReading List
Stories of Quarantine and Upheaval: A Reading List on the Power of Personal Narrative
During times of isolation and dramatic change, our stories from around the world are an essential global historical record.
Posted inEditor's Pick
What If We Cancel the Apocalypse?
“How the aesthetic, utopian yet pragmatic movement of Solarpunk reimagines a future without a climate catastrophe.”
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
Behind the Story: Mailee Osten-Tan on Reporting on Gender Confirmation Surgery in Thailand
Mailee Osten-Tan on learning how to be a better ally to the members of marginalized communities and what she discovered while reporting on trans healthcare issues for Longreads.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Tale Spin
What is storytelling? Megan Marz explores stories, narratives, blog posts, and vibes in this Real Life essay. While I could recognize that blog posts were narrative constructions, and many of them had conventional arcs, they seemed to break with a tradition that to me defined what stories were. They appeared to leak literary expression back […]
Posted inNonfiction
‘Every Single Person Migrating Has a Story’: Caitlin Dwyer on the Emotional Underlayers of Family Separation
The writer describes her process of reporting and shaping her recent essay, “The State of Waiting,” which explores love in the shadow of war and immigration policy.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Storykiller and His Sentence: Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein
Rebecca Solnit considers Harvey Weinstein’s 23-year prison sentence through the lens of storytelling, and who gets to do it now that at least two men who were “in charge of stories” — Weinstein and Woody Allen — have in the past week lost so much of their power, and women are now finding their voices.
Posted inArts & Culture, Blog Post, Books, Nonfiction, Reading List, Writing
8 Longreads by Will Storr on the Science of Storytelling
Eight must-read stories that investigate science, belief, and the human impulse to tell stories.