How the Go-Go’s emerged from the L.A. punk scene in the late ’70s to become the first and only female band to have a number one album in Beauty and the Beat.
Books
I Remember the Bookstore
Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes) Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, […]
“I Am In Between”: A Q&A with Sorayya Khan
Author Sorayya Khan on what it means to grow up between two cultures, and on mothering and being mothered in a global world.
‘Some Things Never Leave You’: Christian Livermore on Poverty’s Indelible Marks
“For me, passing means trying to be anything other than what I was, and what I fear so desperately I always will be: poor white trash.”
Holiday Gift Guide: 8 Books We Excerpted on Longreads in 2021
A short list of books we loved (and featured) this year.
Even the Steam Had a Shadow
“He couldn’t remember coming here, or going anywhere. He looked down at himself. With a writhe of horror, he found he couldn’t even remember getting dressed. His clothes were unfamiliar.”
Happy is a Relative State
“The rest of my life will always be entwined with rheumatoid arthritis. But it’s my choice to also be something more, to not feel sick, to still find those shadows of a dancer, which is to say tiny flecks of magic, within me.”
Judge a Book Not By its Gender
Lisa Whittington-Hill suggests there’s a distinct gender bias in celebrity memoirs. Where female celebrities are expected to expose all, male writers get to write about whatever they want.
‘The Fledglings Are Out!’
“Peering in, I see that last week’s eggs are now chicks. Tiny bright-yellow beaks, mouths opening and closing silently. This is the magic.”
‘Can You Imagine How That Felt?’: Blake Bailey’s Predations, As Told By His Students
The inside story of author Blake Bailey’s grooming of middle-school girls.