Whatever Happened to ______ ?
Anonymous | Longreads | January 2020 | 20 minutes (4,879 words) “I’m Nobody! Who are you?/Are you — Nobody — too?”” — Emily Dickinson, 1891 “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems...
View Article10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2020
The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short...
View ArticleThe Disease of Deceit
Dvora Meyers | Longreads | January 2020 | 38 minutes (9,656 words) In June, I woke to an alert from Facebook, a notification of a memory from five years ago. It was a photo of a woman in a park,...
View ArticleTelling Stories In Order to Live: On Writing and Money
Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | January 2020 | 14 minutes (3,866 words) I made the decision to write full time in the summer of 2008. I was leaving a teaching position in Beijing, and moving back to...
View ArticleThrough a Glass, Tearfully
Maureen Stanton | Longreads | January 2020 | 26 minutes (6,448 words) In the early 1990s I joined a stream of people strolling past the AIDS quilt spread across a gymnasium floor in Lansing, Michigan,...
View ArticleLeadership Academy
Victor Yang | Longreads | January 2020 | 16 minutes (4,128 words) Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. * * *...
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In Pocahontas County, Deep Divisions and a Gruesome Discovery
Emma Copley Eisenberg | Longreads | excerpt from The Third Rainbow Girl | January 2020 | 14 minutes (3,877 words) It starts with a road, a two-lane blacktop called West Virginia Route 219 that spines...
View ArticleIn Defense of Boris the Russki
Ayşegül Savas | Longreads | January 2020 | 10 minutes (2,603 words) Recently while running, I listened to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch on audiobook. It was recommended to me because of my interest in...
View ArticleMenace Too Society
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 | 10 minutes (2,378 words) It’s taken two years for #MeToo to wake up France, but at least it did. The country appears to finally see the men it has created,...
View ArticleEating To Save My Mind
Claire Fitzsimmons | Longreads | January 2020 | 18 minutes (3,796 words) I’m at my neighbor’s house for a Super Bowl party. Taylor is a wonderful cook and a generous host. We’ve had Thanksgiving and...
View ArticleInking Against Invisibility
Talia Hibbert | Longreads | January 2020 | 8 minutes (2102 words) When people see my tattoos, they ask me, “Did it hurt?” My mind says, “That depends. Do you know what hurt is?” because my mind has a...
View ArticleAt Mrs. Balbir’s
Jillian Dunham | Longreads | January 2020 | 12 minutes (3,036 words) I sat on the edge of the bed in my hotel room in Bangkok and dialed. Below me, longboats and water taxis bounced across the Chao...
View ArticleWaiting for Alice
Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | January, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,577 words) Alice is destroying my marriage. It began unexpectedly and accelerated quickly, and now we’re in the thick of a potentially...
View ArticleRemembering the Things That Remain
Amos Barshad | Longreads | January 2020 | 20 minutes (4,985 words) In the spring of 2019 I start getting emails from a guy in Poland named Grzegorz Kwiatkowski. He’s a poet and a musician from Gdansk,...
View ArticleBe a Good Sport
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 | 9 minutes (2,284 words) I hate jocks. Like a good Gen X’er, I walked around my high school with that patch on my backpack — red lettering, white backdrop,...
View ArticleAll Mom’s Friends
Svetlana Kitto | Longreads | February 2020 | 6 minutes (1,503 words) Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. * *...
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‘I Want Every Sentence To Be Doing Work’: An Interview with Miranda Popkey
Zan Romanoff | Longreads | February 2020 | 17 minutes (4,459 words) “What I’m trying to say,” the narrator explains midway through Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, Topics of Conversation, “the theorem...
View ArticleAmerican Dirt: A Bridge to Nowhere
Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (5,591 words) I first heard about American Dirt from Myriam Gurba’s scathing critique of the novel on Tropics of Meta. Her take immediately made...
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The Ancient Waterways of Phoenix, Arizona
Bruce Berger | A Desert Harvest | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | March 2019 | 25 minutes (4,980 words) As Mars was once thought to be, Phoenix is crisscrossed by canals. Except for what remains of its...
View ArticleRegarding the Pain of Oprah
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 | 8 minutes (2,233 words) On the cover of Susan Sontag’s 2003 book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others, her last publication before her death, is a Goya...
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