My Body Is Not a Temple
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2020 | 10 minutes (2,540 words) Your bread is making me sick. I don’t have to eat it. I see it. Everywhere. In every tweet, every photo, every message. It’s spread...
View ArticleMolly and the Unicorn
Emily Flake | Longreads | April 2020 | 9 minutes (2185 words) My parents took me to see The Last Unicorn in the theater when I was 5. The experience is seared into my mind for a number of reasons:...
View ArticleNo Time Like the Present
Robert Burke Warren | Longreads | April 2020 | 5 minutes (1,174 words) What day is it? In pre-pandemic days, I said those words, or heard them, most often when traveling. Now, I say and hear them (or...
View ArticleThe Bigamist’s Daughter
Robin Antalek | Longreads | April 2020 | 18 minutes (4,599 words) In 1964, when my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, she found out that her husband, my father, had married another woman and...
View ArticleGrieving, but Calmed by a Different Kind of Storm
Stephanie Land | Longreads | April 2020 | 12 minutes (3,059 words) Almost a month into COVID isolation, I curled up on my bedroom floor under the window I’d opened to rid the room of my children’s...
View ArticleFunk Lessons in Sonic Solitude
Read an introduction to the series. DJ Lynnée Denise | Longreads | April 2020 | 16 minutes (4,096 words) Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them. * * * As a...
View ArticleSecret Museums
B. Pietras | Creative Nonfiction | Summer 2019 | 16 minutes (4,291 words) I was a freshman in high school when my religion teacher faced the class and asked, with a knowing smile, “How many of you...
View ArticleO! Small-Bany! Part 4: Fall
Elisa Albert | Longreads | April 2020 | 22 minutes (5,474 words) The first time I get rear-ended is at a stoplight on the corner of Central and North Lake, around 4pm. One minute I’m on my way to...
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Japan: A Longform Reading List of Longform Writing
Before I traveled to Japan for the first time in 2014, I read as much about the country as time allowed. Japanese culture and ecology had interested me since I discovered anime in the fifth grade; I...
View ArticleIn Search of Etty Hillesum
Elizabeth Svoboda| April 2020 | 16 minutes (4,136 words) It’s the eve of the summer solstice, a time when evening feels like high noon and people buzz with unearned adrenaline. I’ve spent all day on...
View ArticleFollowing the North Star
Shaheen Pasha | Longreads | April 2020 | 18 minutes (4,587 words) I received the call at work from Tariq’s brother. I knew him briefly, had seen him as a kid, but aside from a few conversations here...
View ArticleFear of Suffering Alone
Anne Liu Kellor | Longreads | May 2020 | 9 minutes (2,136 words) My ex and I used to watch the Doomsday Preppers reality show on the National Geographic channel together, and talk about how crazy those...
View ArticleWhat Happens If I Don’t Like Fiona Apple?
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,481 words) Even the way I first listened to Fetch the Bolt Cutters was oppositional. It wasn’t intentional. I knew I needed about an hour to listen...
View ArticleAnd Then We Grew Up
Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | May 2020 | 11 minutes (3,116 words) “I envy you,” my cousin told me once, as we were sitting on the front porch of a log cabin in the Ohio woods, eating peach pie. “You...
View ArticleAmerican Tests
Jakki Kerubo | Longreads | May 2020 | 13 minutes (3,314 words) I was afraid I’d be deported. Did the interviewer know about my parking tickets from those days when I hadn’t quite figured out New York...
View ArticlePhone Call in The Age of Coronavirus
Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | May 2020 | 6 minutes (1,765 words) When I imagine the call, it comes on a landline. Not a cell phone. A land line like the one propped on the little table in the hall...
View ArticleSelf Portrait With iPhone
Pam Mandel | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,453 words) The first thing I notice are the car selfies. So many of the profiles I see include car selfies. I overthink as I try to determine what this...
View ArticleWhat I Want to Know of Kindness
Devin Kelly | Longreads | May 2020 | 14 minutes (3,897 words) This is the second time we’ve been lucky enough to publish Devin Kelly. Read his first Longreads essay “Running Dysmorphic.” I remember...
View ArticleThe Lie of ‘One Last Time’ with My Ex
Ella Dawson | Longreads | May 2020 | 15 minutes (3,819 words) Henry and I had break-up sex on at least four different occasions, maybe more. I wanted to believe it was because we loved each other that...
View ArticleShelved: The Misfits’s 12 Hits From Hell
Tom Maxwell | Longreads | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,607 words) The Misfits have carved a niche in punk rock history. Their 1982 song “Skulls” has everything that defined them: the breakneck tempo,...
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