For the tenth year in a row, we’re kicking off the reading year with a set of short stories hand-picked by longtime contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj.
Guernica
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we feature stories from Tom Scocca, Giles Harvey, Chris Walker, Krithika Varagur, and N.C. Happe.
Posted inEditor's Pick
On Beauty and Violence
“In lieu of toys, my closet filled with these tokens of violence: an antler, rodent bones, feathers and wings, and in a small paper bag crimped at the top, a lone cobbled talon curled to a fist.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Notable reads by Atef Abu Saif, Sonia Smith, James McNaughton, Dorothy Wickenden, and Kevin Koenig.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Flipping Grief
“This is loss. Memory, damp and compact as clods of earth, is dried out in the marketplace and burned as turf.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Notable reads by Marco Giancotti, Jessica Davey-Quantick, Reeves Wiedman, Emily Fox Kaplan, and C Pam Zhang.
Posted inEditor's Pick
When Horror Is the Truth-teller
“It is hard, in the era of the AR-15, to fear a vampire.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Extraction
“When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain.”
Posted inNonfiction
Best of 2022: Personal Essays
Five notable personal essays published this year, on friendship, loss, war, endings, and metaphors.