“Jane O’Sullivan on first lines in fiction.”
Writing
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 inEditor's Pick
The Hardest Part Of History To Tell Is How It Felt
“Historians and nonfiction authors often glide over lived experience. They prefer actions, citations, details, dates. But I had just gone through something primal—something beyond my control and beyond the boundaries of modern life.”
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 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
Masking My Autism Made Me Sick
“The rules dictated that I hide not only my sensitivity but my essential being in the world.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Thinking in the Margins
“What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read.”
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Julian Brave NoiseCat
The author of We Survived the Night and co-director of Sugarcane responds to our 25 questions on writing, reading, and creativity.
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Rebecca Solnit
The author of The Beginning Comes After the End talks about jackrabbits, her own “informational hypervigilance,” and the one word she won’t stop using.