Author: British Day

Jessica L. Pavia | Longreads | February 21, 2023 | 20 minutes (5,721 words) I spent most of my time in his room. Every day the same routine: 15 minutes before the bell rang, 45 at the end of the day. My excuse at first was that I didn’t have many friends. Good friends. But that wasn’t true. Entirely. When I found myself in his class, the side effects of several friendless, depressive years still clung to my skin. The pull of his bright room, the shining praise he left on my papers, called to the deep aches within me. So I made up excuses for…

Cassidy Randall | Longreads | February 16, 2023 | 4,141 words (15 minutes) Ben carries a Pulaski ax filched from the cabin’s woodshed as we walk the trail along the Canadian border. Half a mile back, we stepped over a mountain lion’s broad track imprinted fresh on the damp banks of the river, her cub’s pocket-sized paw laid just behind it. Claw marks score the aspens at heights above my head, tufts of fur from the enormous bears who left them snagged by the peeling bark. Yesterday we heard a wolf howl far off in the forest.  The ax is…

Christy Tending | Longreads | February 2, 2023 | 14 minutes (3,768 words) There are things that able me. A chair. One person speaking to me at a time. Shoes that are not cute, but spare me nerve pain. A hot bath with epsom salts: so hot it would scald most, but my skin is like Kevlar. It craves the heat and wishes for it to dig deeper. These are simple but necessary things that make my life more livable. They do not “enable,” marking conspiracy in a habit I am trying to quit; I am not done yet with my…

Devin Kelly | Longreads | January 2023 | 17 minutes (4,692 words) In late November, I am standing near the front of the church at my fiance’s grandfather’s funeral. I am not feeling great, I would say. Earlier that morning, I woke up a little achy and anxious about the achiness. I am wearing the suit I will get married in and standing next to the person I will marry, and, halfway into service, I kneel down as part of the ceremony, feel something go wonky in my head and my mouth and my body, think nope nope nope, and…

Before he sits down to write, Pravesh Bhardwaj looks for inspiration. Nearly every day, he reads a short story freely available online and shares it on his Twitter thread. Each year he chooses his 10 favorites to share with Longreads readers. Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You is a collection of interlinked short stories following a Jamaican family living in Miami. “In Flux” is excerpted from this collection. “Why does your mother talk so funny?” your neighbor insists. Your mother calls to you from the front porch, has called from this perch overlooking the sloping yard time and time again…

Will McCarthy | Longreads | January 2023 | 12 minutes (3,313 words) Somewhere near the center of Nevada, on the western slope of the Toiyabe Range, there’s a little meadow beside a creek running down from the mountains. In 2019, long before I had ever been there, a man named James Fredette drove his mobile home down the gravel road from the highway and went fishing. It was a lucky day: He caught three big rainbow trout. Then, as the light turned golden and began to fade from the canyon while Fredette packed up his gear, he thought, why not,…

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning. All through December, we’ve been featuring Longreads’ Best of 2022. Today, we close out this year’s Best of Longreads package with a list of every story that was chosen as No. 5 in our weekly Top 5 email. Number five stories often have a special quality; sometimes light, sometimes humorous, often poignant, each number five story is a welcome distraction and a very important part of our weekly mix. Enjoy! — January…

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning. All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2022. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email. — January — Simon van Zuylen-Wood | The Washington Post Magazine | January 4, 2022 | 6,044 words Five years ago, J.D. Vance was enjoying the success of his acclaimed 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Today, he’s running for Senate in his home state of Ohio,…

Lisa Bubert | Longreads | November 30, 2022 | 11 minutes (3,072 words) When I was 19, a nursing home hired me to work as an aide. There wasn’t much to the interview that I remember, other than I agreed to come to work on time and take the certification course the home provided. In this course, I learned how to lift a frail person out of bed, how to wipe them, how to bathe them if bed-bound; how easily their skin tears, and how to touch so as not to cause a bruise. The head nurse was a short…

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, though you’d never know that, scrolling online. The back cover even features a blurb by Don DeLillo. Let’s linger on it. I remember the bookstore, long gone now, on Forty-Second Street. I stood in the narrow aisle reading the first paragraph of The Recognitions. It…