Author: British Day

Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 26, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,149 words) Let me tell you a ghost story. My street—East 21st Street in Brooklyn, on the border of Flatbush and Ditmas Park—is filled with ghosts. A block up from me, in late 2020, there began to appear a series of strange signs in the Japanese elms that line the street. They were made from tile of marble, 6 by 18 inches, strung around the limbs of the trees that lined the block. Someone had used a Dremel to carve words and pictures on them. One in white marble…

Megan Marz | Longreads | October 24, 2023 | 4,164 words (15 minutes) This spring, the literary critic Laura Miller got annoyed with Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans. A fan of Taylor’s “brilliant” Substack and “irresistible patter” on Twitter, she found his book disappointingly lugubrious. “Brandon Taylor’s online writing is vibrant, funny, and true,” read the subhead of her review. “Why is his fiction trying so hard to be something else?” The Slate piece subjected the novel to some churlish complaints. But it was the inclusion of “online writing” that attracted minor controversy; writers and critics tweeted in…

The dark side of the seafood industry. The morality of mortality. memory and belief. A flying cowboy lights up the western skies. The food service secret of tableside fire starters. This week’s issue has all that (and more!). Ian Urbina | The New Yorker | October 9, 2023 | 9,573 words Where does your seafood come from? Who caught and processed it? The more you read about overfishing, illegal industry practices, and terrible working conditions, the more it stinks. Each year, China catches more than 5 billion pounds of seafood through its ocean-going fleet, much of it squid. These ships…

Mariam Quraishi| Longreads | October 19, 2023 | 13 minutes (3,470 words) When I was little I remember trying to figure out what Allah looked like. There was a cassette in my grandparents’ room, on its cover an image of Masjid-e-Nabwi along with an extremely pious-looking man with a very large white beard. It had a lot of Arabic script on it—naturally this equated to religion. It might’ve been a cassette full of na’ats, I cannot say, but to me it looked Maximum Holy. I asked my Dadi if this man was what Allah looked like. Tobah! is all I…

Spooky season has officially arrived. If you’re looking for some mood-boosting reading recommendations, we’ve rounded up some of our favorites. long lead Part below. Consider Leslie Finn’s The Final Girl, A Terrible Place, a poignant essay about horror films, the male gaze on women’s bodies, and American patriarchy. Let’s take a closer look at Janna Kadlec’s explanation of the witch/mother archetype. maleficent A movie that is part of her disney demolition series. Or why not try Corpse Rider, Colin Dickie’s work about Lafcadio Hearn, a famous chronicler of Japanese culture including ghost stories and folk tales. We also have editor’s…

Selene Nelson is a Rest Less author, freelance journalist, and lifestyle writer. After she graduated with a degree in English Literature from the University of Sussex, Selene began writing for many major newspapers and websites, she wrote for the BBC, Sunday, The Times, Independent, Town & Country, and Huffington Post. I have contributed to etc. Her specialist subjects include food, travel, and health, but she enjoys writing about a wide range of topics (for example, her two books are about veganism and psychopathy, respectively! ). She enjoys cooking (especially pasta and Asian noodles), reading, traveling, hiking, staying healthy, and watching…

In 2014, Longreads published the first-ever Taylor Swift reading list, recognizing her (perhaps somewhat provocatively for the time) as a music business genius. But how could anyone have predicted what became of the Taylorverse after that? The past nine years have been filled with new albums, re-recorded “versions,” tours, arguments, encounters (musical, romantic, and otherwise), and failures. , a rebound, a friendship with an ex, and the collapse of the National Football League. The Eras tour is expected to gross $2.2 billion in North America alone, and its re-release on October 27th. 1989 (Taylor version) approach, and Taylor Swift’s genius…

Capturing a Nazi in his 90s, trying to live forever, repeating his overwhelming desire to go home, forgiving his father, and finding humor in being scammed. Tom Lamont | GQ | September 12, 2023 | 6,622 words Thomas Will is – wait a minute – the head of the Central Bureau of the National Judicial Service for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. He is a Nazi hunter. The last person who held the role in the same position. It will end in the 2020s, with the last generation of perpetrators already in their 90s. Tom Lamont spent a lot…

Tom Donaghy | Atavist Magazine | September 2023 | 1,531 words (5 minutes) This is an excerpt from the issue. Episode 143 “Who killed the Fudge King?” fudge sold Copper Kettle’s was so creamy, so sweet, so incomparable that many candy shops on the Ocean City boardwalk didn’t even sell fudge because it just didn’t make sense. During summer vacations to the Jersey Shore in the 1970s, my father would take his brother and me there as a treat. A cute girl in a pinafore greeted us outside with a tray of free shavings. We loaded her stuff until her…

Harrison Scott Key| Longreads | October 3, 2023 | 14 minutes (4,055 words) In 2014, the National Rail Passenger Corporation, best known as Amtrak, pulled off one of the epic marketing coups of U.S. railroad history—granted, there haven’t been many of late—when they announced the Amtrak Residency for Writers, where they would send 24 writers on cross-country trips, meals and beds gratis, to write the Great American Novel. The announcement of this perfect marriage of two beloved dinosaurs—trains and publishing!—set Twitter aflame, like hearing Panasonic and Oldsmobile had teamed up to launch a new line of gas-powered fax machines.  Around…