Longreads Best of 2015: Essays & Criticism

The Best Books of 2025

The New Yorker’s editors and critics choose this year’s essential reads in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

Bite-sized: 50 great short stories, chosen by Hilary Mantel, George Saunders and more

Quick and easily shared, is the short story the form for our times? Hilary Mantel, Mark Haddon and others pick their favourites

Academia: The Evolving Case For Reading

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

21 Very Short and Addicting Stories You Can Read Online

It can be extremely hard to find time to read these days. With our lives cluttered with work, school, life, and new amazing episodes of…

Short-Short Stories - American Literature

Short stories, children's stories, classic literature, poems, essays, idioms, history, teacher's resources and more

Robert Hanks · On Putting Things Off

Job gone, I sat around trying to write, managing bits and pieces, but earning very little. And then my marriage drifted away too, leaving me, in Alan Partridge’s phrase, clinically fed-up boo-hoo. My wife, having said she would leave, took two and a half years to find a way of doing it – there is a small consolation in not being the only procrastinator in the relationship. While this was going on the LRB commissioned me to write about Richard Hughes, who wrote A High Wind in Jamaica. I like Hughes and it seemed like a job I could get on with. I cheerfully settled to the research, reading the novels I hadn’t read, rereading the ones I had. Then I started writing, or that’s what I told myself: some paragraphs, some sentences, a sketch of a plan, then some rewriting, rearranging, scrubbing, more rewriting, more scrubbing, pauses to reconsider. Then I did some more research: the short stories, the children’s stories, the poems and plays, the journalism, Richard Perceval Graves’s biography, then back to the rewriting …

The revolt of the reader | The Observation Deck

Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life. And because reading is important to me, writing is too: writing not only allows us to convey our ideas, but the very act forces us to test and distill them — at once making our ideas more robust while providing the vehicle by which to share them.

Can Longtermism Save Us All?

William MacAskill, author of What We Owe the Future, and Robert Wright debate longtermism.

Long Links

My Long Links blog fragments curate long-form pieces that I think worth an investment of time, acknowledging that most people with jobs and lives and so on can’t read all of them, in the hopes that one or two will reward, Dear Reader, an intrusion into your scarce free time. Here’s another offering. But first, why haven’t I written any since December 2022?

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simon…

Discover and share books you love on Goodreads.

Social Dramas and Stories about Them

Victor Turner, Social Dramas and Stories about Them, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, Autumn, 1980, On Narrative

11 Very Short Stories You Must Read Immediately

This weekend, Lydia Davis—crowned master of the very short story, not to mention a preeminent translator of classic French literature—turns 70. Davis didn’t invent flash fiction, but she is c…

At Leopardi’s house

Writers betrayed by readers

Toward a durable writing stack – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

I have benefited over the years from others who have documented their writing setups, and so I feel some obligation to pay the favor forward by doing so with my own. The stack I’ll describe here is one I’ve been iterating on for about twenty years, starting from when I began discovering the pleasures of plain-text writing. Every aspect of it has changed over that period, but the some basic goals and flows have been with me through the writing of my college thesis, five books, and hundreds of articles. I am quite happy with where I am, and others might benefit from what I’ve come up with.