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Mass Extinction: The Early Years
Ashley Dawson | Extinction: A Radical History | OR Books | July 2016 | 13 minutes (3,487 words) Below is an excerpt from Extinction: A Radical History, by Ashley Dawson, who argues that contemporary...
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The Secret Nazi Attempt to Breed the Perfect Horse
Elizabeth Letts | The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis | Ballantine Books | August 2016 | 19 minutes (4,567 words) The excerpt below is...
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How the Brontës Came Out As Women
Claire Harman | Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart | Knopf | March 2016 | 32 minutes (7,925 words) The excerpt below is adapted from Claire Harman’s biography of Charlotte Brontë. It tells the story of...
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The Month That Killed the Sixties
Clara Bingham | Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul | Random House | May 2016 | 30 minutes (8,161 words) Below is an...
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Exxon, Rex, and Russia: A Deep Drilling
Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil and recipient of Russia’s Order of Friendship, has become our new Secretary of State. I took a deep dive into the archives, and, like all the amateur...
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You’re Fired! The Unemployable Trump Administration
At the one-month mark, we now have a working theory of what makes an employee fireable (or not even hireable) in the Trump administration. There are two main types. Fireable Offense Type #1: Be Drop...
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The Ban, the Wall: Bearing Witness
Reports say there is going to be another travel ban soon, perhaps even today. And so, standing on the precipice of our next great catastrophe, I have decided to take stock, as far as I can, of this...
View ArticleThis Month In Books: ‘Name the Very Specific Situation Around You’
Dear Reader, This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about truth and lies, fact and fiction. In his new book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, Stephen Greenblatt tells us Shakespeare was...
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This Month in Books: ‘Everything That We Are and Ever Have Been’
Dear Reader, This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about identities — mistaken, misunderstood, transformed, false, fictional or as anonymous as the op-ed. In his interview with Cooper Lee...
View ArticleThis Month In Books: “Once You Can See the Pattern”
Dear Reader, A lot of what you’ll read in this month’s books newsletter is about things not seeming to be what they really are. In an interview with Hope Reese, Rebecca Traister talks about how women’s...
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The Longreads 2018 Holiday Gift Book Guide
Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2018 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list. Books about being alone and really...
View ArticleEleven Books to Read in 2019
We asked eleven authors to tell us about an amazing book that we might have missed in 2018. Kiese Laymon Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi; author of several...
View ArticleThis Month In Books: ‘How Thick Was the Cane?’ and Other Questions About Things
Dear Reader, “The Senate committee asked as many questions about the cane as they did about Brooks,” Jason Phillips writes regarding the aftermath of the famous incident in which Congressman Brooks...
View ArticleThis Month In Books: ‘This Is Really Not What I Want To Be Reading’
Dear Reader, I spent a while thinking about what the theme of this month’s books newsletter ought to be. Should it be state censorship, like the kind experienced by both Denis Diderot, the French...
View ArticleThis Month In Books: The Anxiety of No Influence
Dear Reader, This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about pasts and futures, and how lineages stretch across time. Reviewer Thea Prieto writes about how Sophia Shalmiyev, in her memoir Mother...
View ArticleThis Month In Books: ‘Look at the World, and Not at the Mirror.’
Dear Reader, This month’s books newsletter is about seeing the big picture. It’s about that moment when you glance around a corner to figure out what you’re missing, and how sometimes you don’t like...
View ArticleWhat Is Elizabeth Rush Reading? : Books on Antarctic Adventure, Ice, Motherhood
Dear Reader, Take a listen to my recent conversation with Elizabeth Rush, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, about what she’s been reading — the first...
View ArticleThis Month in Books: ‘The Minor Figure Yields to the Chorus’
Dear Reader, I’m reading this book right now called The Manuscript Found in Saragossa; it was written in French during the Napoleonic Wars by a Pole named Jan Potocki. It’s a recursive...
View ArticleThis Month In Books: The Book Is an Escape Tool
Dear Reader, “I had to write this book. I think any writer that finishes a book would say the same thing: they didn’t have a choice,” says Mark Haber to Adam Morgan in an interview about his slim...
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The Longreads 2019 Holiday Gift Book Guide
Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2019 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list. Books of friendships & feuds....
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