Longform Archive

Literary Silence in the Time of Pandemic

Author: | Categories: Longform No comments
From the Black Death to the AIDS epidemic, the history of literature is suffused with gaps. Such a history is a record of mourning. It’s a record of all the things that cannot be spoken while living with upheaval and grief.

The World Will Be Tlön

Author: | Categories: Longform No comments
"I recalled Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ when trying to make sense of my daughter’s intellectual disability as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Like Orbis Tertius, the DSM seemed to me like a product of a secret society gradually working to shape

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Grave Encounters

Author: | Categories: Longform No comments
On March 29, 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the tomb of his wife, Ellen, and opened her coffin. Twenty-five years later, Emerson once again opened the lid of a coffin—this time his son’s.

Language of Return

Author: | Categories: Longform No comments
I imagine there is something about my grandmother that would have resisted translation. The best way I know to understand her, the site where my retina and hers overlap, is in language.

The Power of Reading About Your Home

Jaquira Díaz’s 2019 memoir resonated deeply with me in a way that a bronzed Al Pacino never could, and that a book never had.

Writing Racist Characters

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays, Longform No comments
There are uniquely white stories that all white people know intimately, and that we aren’t telling: stories of white people perpetrating racism.

“I Refuse to Review”: Literary Criticism and Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death

Author: | Categories: Longform No comments
Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection recognizes the necessity of tracing lives erased and extinguished by political repression, patriarchy, and capitalist imperialism.

Dirty Realism, Veteran Transition, and Contemporary War Literature

Author: | Categories: Longform No comments
Somewhere between “fiction” and “nonfiction” sits the military veteran, pen and paper in hand, wondering why they lived while their friends died.

Passing

Author: | Categories: Longform No comments
Edith Maud and Winnifred Eaton, sisters from the turn of the century, dealt with racial ambiguity throughout their lives, learning to navigate how others interpreted them in vastly different ways.

Living in Multiple Worlds: Immigration in Lucky Boy and The House of Broken Angels

When you immigrate, you bring an entire world along with you, a fifth limb impossible to detach, though internal and external forces demand its removal. Immigrants enter into a state of constant negotiation, deliberating what stays and what goes within their sociopolitical space.