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All the Language in the World Won’t Make a Bookshelf Exist
Nina MacLaughlin | Hammer Head, W.W. Norton | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,383 words) The following is an excerpt from Nina MacLaughlin’s memoir Hammer Head—the story of MacLaughlin’s journey out of a...
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Vagabonds, Crafty Bauds, and the Loyal Huzza: A History of London at Night
Matthew Beaumont | Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London | Verso | March 2015 | 37 minutes (10,129 words) Below is a chapter excerpted from Nightwalking, by Matthew Beaumont, as recommended by...
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The Missing History of Ravensbrück, The Nazi Concentration Camp for Women
Sarah Helm | Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women | Nan A. Talese | March 2015 | 48 minutes (13,071 words) Below is a chapter excerpted from Ravensbrück, by Sarah...
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Love, Identity, and Genderqueer Family Making
Maggie Nelson | The Argonauts | Graywolf Press | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,137 words) Published to great acclaim earlier this year, The Argonauts blends memoir and critical theory to explore the meaning...
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The Girl Who Slept with God
Val Brelinski |The Girl Who Slept with God | Viking | August 2015 | 9 minutes (2,100 words) Below is an excerpt from the debut novel by Val Brelinski, as chosen by Longreads contributing editor Sari...
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‘Too Strong for That’: Margo Jefferson on Depression as Taboo in Affluent...
But one white female privilege had always been withheld from the girls of Negroland. Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to...
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My Unsentimental Education
Debra Monroe | My Unsentimental Education, The University of Georgia Press | Oct. 2015 | 14 minutes (3,487 words) A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe...
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Appropriate for a Seven-Year-Old Child
Marlo Mack’s podcast How To Be a Girl is a sensitive and honest exploration of the joys, fears, and struggles of raising of a transgender child. Earlier this year, Marlo and her seven-year-old daughter...
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The Politics of Poetry
David Orr | Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry | HarperCollins | 2011 | 18 minutes (4,527 words) The essay below is excerpted from David Orr’s 2011 book Beautiful & Pointless: A...
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The Teachings of Don Carlos
Mike Sager | Scary Monsters and Super Freaks | Thunder’s Mouth Press | December, 2003 | 85 minutes (21,125 words) Journalist Mike Sager originally wrote this article in 1999 as a long project for...
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Kidnapping a Nazi General: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Perfect Heist
Patrick Leigh Fermor | Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation in Crete | New York Review Books | November 2015 | 31 minutes (8,432 words) Below is an excerpt from Abducting a General, Patrick Leigh...
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Bad News: Censorship, Fear & Genocide Memorials
Anjan Sundaram | Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship | Doubleday | January 2016 | 27 minutes (7,197 words) Below is an excerpt from Bad News, by Anjan Sundaram, as recommended by Longreads...
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A Dead Superhero Is a Marvelous Corpse
Ramzi Fawaz | The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics | New York University Press| January 2016 | 25 minutes (6,662 words) The excerpt below is adapted from The...
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My Dinner With Rasputin
Teffi | Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi | New York Review Books Classics | May 2016 | 39 minutes (10,692 words) The essay below appears in the new collection Tolstoy, Rasputin,...
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A Reading List About Utopias
I recently finished an advance reader’s copy of Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson, which debuts in January 2017. Perfect Little World is the story of Isabelle Poole, a fierce but desperate single...
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The Moment Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’ Changed Course
KAHANE CORN COOPERMAN(field producer, later co-executive producer, 1996-2015): I produced a field piece, with Stacey Grenrock Woods as the correspondent, about a guy, Alexander P., who had been a rock...
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A Story of Racial Cleansing in America
Patrick Phillips | Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America| W. W. Norton & Company | September 2016 | 17 minutes (4,588 words) Below is an excerpt from Blood at the Root, by the poet...
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Hidebound: The Grisly Invention of Parchment
Keith Houston | The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time | W. W. Norton & Company | August 2016 | 18 minutes (4,720 words) Below is an excerpt from The Book,...
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Four Dead in Ohio
Today marks the 47th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, during which members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed unarmed college students who were protesting the Vietnam War, after they...
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My Parents Said I Bruised Easily
Jessica Berger Gross | Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home | Scribner | July 2017 | 13 minutes (3,194 words) For a good 20 years now, I’ve been working on various versions of a memoir. Some of...
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