Author: British Day

Devin Kelly | Longreads | September, 2020 | 16 minutes (4,304 words) I started to come apart sometime after midnight. I was cold, shiver-sweating, and shuffling alone on my 35th two-mile lap around a farm 40 miles west of Savannah, Georgia. I’ll back up in a second, and offer some context. But, for now, let’s remember the loneliness, and the absurdity. Let’s remember the darkness and how the stars looked like light shining through a thousand pinpricks in the vast blueblack tapestry of the night sky. And let’s remember how, when I shifted my head-lamped gaze from the few feet…

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | September 2020 | 13 minutes (3,433 words) Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon is one of the best-selling records of all time. Released in March 1973, the album didn’t leave the Billboard 200 chart for over 14 years. By 2006, EMI/Harvest claimed the album sold in excess of 40 million copies “and still,” according to a Billboard article from that year, “routinely moves 8,000-9,000 copies on a slow week.” Listening to a renowned album as cohesive as The Dark Side of the Moon, you would never guess that the follow-up to that historic…

Irina Dumitrescu | Longreads | August 2020 | 5,406 words (21 minutes) When I was a teenager I read James Thurber’s Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I fell in love with this story of a meek, middle-aged Connecticut man whose daydreams afford him temporary escape from a dreary shopping trip with his overbearing wife. Maybe it was because I was an incorrigible daydreamer too. Or maybe I read in his fantasies of being a fearless Navy commander, a world-famous surgeon, or a brandy-swilling bomber pilot a sense of my own opportunities in life, at that point still wide open if…

Before I traveled to Japan for the first time in 2014, I read as much about the country as time allowed. Japanese culture and ecology had interested me since I discovered anime in the fifth grade; I read books by Pico Iyer and Donald Richie, novels by Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, and collected countless online stories about everything from Japanese architecture to history to customs. I wanted to understand more about this island chain that has been inhabited since at least 30,000 BCE. I wanted to know more about this aggressively innovative culture simultaneously committed to tradition, a country…

Liza Monroy | Longreads | February 2020 | 15 minutes (3,637 words) On the verge of turning 40, all my habits felt ingrained. So I was surprised when, late last February, I became vegan one morning, following an intuitive stab out of the ether. It made no sense, not yet, and Joaquin Phoenix’s viral Oscar speech was still a year into the future, but I’d promised myself to always follow my instincts after, 10 years prior, that little voice within had attempted to warn me to hide my laptop before leaving my apartment. Perplexed by the absurdity of this non-thought,…

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (5,591 words) I first heard about American Dirt from Myriam Gurba’s scathing critique of the novel on Tropics of Meta. Her take immediately made sense, and it jolted me. Back in graduate school, I — a white, American woman — had written a novel about Mexico. I had lived there with my husband, Jorge, who is from Oaxaca, for five years. Many of our friends are Mexican; my extended family is Mexican. I speak fluent Spanish. I normally write nonfiction, and this was the only piece of fiction I had ever…

Maureen Stanton | Longreads | January 2020 | 26 minutes (6,448 words) In the early 1990s I joined a stream of people strolling past the AIDS quilt spread across a gymnasium floor in Lansing, Michigan, the room quiet but for our muffled sniffling. I hadn’t expected the quilt — a patchwork of many quilts — to affect me so powerfully, the clothes and artifacts and mementos stitched into tapestries, with dates of births and premature deaths, soft beautiful tombstones. Humans are the only creatures who cry for emotional reasons. Animals do not shed tears of emotion; apes have tear ducts…

Anonymous | Longreads | January 2020 | 20 minutes (4,879 words) “I’m Nobody! Who are you?/Are you — Nobody — too?”” — Emily Dickinson, 1891 “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” — Virginia Woolf, 1929 “No name? Well, the roads are full of nameless girls.” — George RR Martin, Feast of Crows.  * * * Years back, on a summer night in Oregon’s high desert, I was riding in a car with three other people. There were two women asleep in the backseat, leaning in opposite directions. I was…

Michael Mount | Longreads | Month 2019 | 25 minutes (6,236 words) The home I moved into was not what you might associate with Martha’s Vineyard: it wasn’t a sweeping palatial estate near the ocean with views of crispy white foam. It was a simple shingled house tucked far in the woods, sitting in a rustic subdivision near a graveyard and just beyond the commercial centers of the Island, with power lines cutting an artery through its backyard. I schlepped my things inside, bubbling with optimism about what my year of rest and revelation would bring. My housemate was a…

Catherine Texier | Longreads | October 2019 | 22 minutes (5,425 words) “I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.” — Virginia Woolf One day, around 20 years ago, towards the end of my marriage, we were walking through Central Park and sat for a moment on a knoll overlooking the lake. I don’t know what we had been talking about but I clearly remember saying: “I don’t see myself growing old in the States.” I was in my late 40s at the time. Perhaps the approach of 50 felt like a milestone,…