The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
October 24, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
In this edition:
- Haunted pages
- When fame fades
- Cracked open
- Striving forever
- Back to blogging
A Note on Paywalls
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1. Hidden in Plain Sight
Carolyn Ariella Sofia | Aeon | October 20, 2025 | 4,013 words
A chance meeting in a bookstore changed Carolyn Ariella Sofia’s life. The encounter was with Jerzy Kosiński, the Jewish Polish-American author of The Painted Bird, a harrowing novel about a boy wandering through Eastern European villages during the Second World War. Sofia describes the book with terrified awe: “a desperate note sent in a glass bottle that broke in my hands and made me bleed.” The two eventually go to dinner, where Sofia probes and unsettles Kosiński with her theory that one of his writing strategies is to “hide wartime details in female characters.” He resists exposure. Hiding had been deeply engraved into his psyche during childhood, when he survived the Holocaust by living with a Christian family, and Sofia cannot quite reach him. Their interactions remain taut and uneasy, almost menacing. He reveals little, even as he continues to draw her into a psychological game of cat and mouse. Beyond Kosiński, Sofia examines how the writers Georges Perec and Sarah Kofman divulge the fractured identities of their own war-torn childhoods, when they, too, suffocated their true selves to save their lives. This is no cozy read, but a piercing insight into how the inner turmoil of Holocaust survivors has painfully, gradually, turned into the raw material of their art. Sofia’s deft blend of psychology and literary analysis left me reeling at the complexity of survival, memory, and self-invention. —CW
2. One Four Two Five Old Sunset Trail
Joy Williams | Harper’s | October 22, 2025 | 3,945 words
I’m the kind of person who skims the first few lines of celebrity obituaries, hurrying to find the cause of death. A morbid habit, I know. The coverage of Gene Hackman’s death, however, required no skimming. The circumstances of the great actor’s end, alongside his wife and one of their dogs, were so strange and awful that they made headlines. So many headlines. In this quietly masterful essay, Joy Williams examines the fascination surrounding Hackman’s death, but rather than casting a critical eye on the subject, she comes to it from within. She counts herself among the fascinated. “Every once in a while,” she writes, “news of Death’s particular methods and attention to detail seizes our attention like the cougar does the clueless rabbit, and we suffer some serious confusion and fright.” Williams braids elegiac appreciations of Hackman’s career—the opening section is spectacular—with mournful imaginings about the last years of his life. She eases readers into the familiar, parasocial position of wondering what the hell happened to someone they felt like they knew. She conjures a vision of Hackman’s wife, Betsy, that lends her dimension she was often denied. Williams also tells a ghost story. “Death”—capitalized, personified—is the chief specter, but there are others. Williams is haunted by minds lost, by dignity erased, by suffering that goes unwitnessed. —SD
3. Cardiography
Ben Lerner | The New York Review of Books | October 16, 2025 | 3,599 words
Ben Lerner’s heart beats differently now. It’s more audible, for one. That’s the polyester that sits where part of his aorta was, reflecting and even boosting that lubba-dubba that Slim Goodbody taught us about as kids. But it’s also seemingly more aware, more sensitive, since the acclaimed novelist underwent the surgery that introduced his Dacron graft. How else could he so keenly articulate the body’s frailty and resilience? “I entered the literature when they touched my heart and changed the prosody of my body,” he writes, “and now I must await . . . heartbreak.” This is a tone poem of that dark and hazy period after being anesthetized, when perception hasn’t yet knitted itself into memories. Lerner writes of his early recovery as a series of extractions: the jugular line, the chest tubes, the pacer wires. Each returns his body one step closer to its original state, but also makes him newly aware of his physical self: “As they put some kind of liquid tissue sealant into my exit wounds, I repeated my mantras about care and gratitude, these good clichés I thought of as my spells, as sealants that might keep my newly hollow spaces from being filled with blues.” While Lerner has long been known for his autofiction, here there’s not a shred of make-believe to hide behind. To his credit, he doesn’t shy from the exposure; then again, he has no choice. Once you’ve been cracked open, interiority is all you have. —PR
4. Second and Long
Steve Yarbrough | The American Scholar | October 9, 2025 | 6,030 words
The perfect, they say, is the enemy of the good. But the inverse rings true, too—at least for some. Midway through his essay for The American Scholar, Steve Yarbrough describes a tense exchange with James Whitehead, a hulking former football player whose debut novel, Joiner, won the sort of critical acclaim any writer would relish. Yarbrough, then a graduate student and riding high on the praise of his classmates, met privately with Whitehead, who handed over his own notes. The manuscript, Yarbrough wrote, “was bleeding ink. He’d circled some words, drawn lines through others, posed questions in the margins of every page: top, bottom, left, and right. On the backs of some pages he’d written critical essays.” In the aftermath, Yarbrough asks Whitehead when his long-awaited second novel will finally be published. The answer? “When I know it’s ready. And not a goddamn minute before then.” Whitehead, who died in 2003, never published a second novel, which puts him in the company of a few other literary luminaries, including Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger. His personal archives hold hundreds of abandoned drafts, and other evidence of what one scholar called “near-paralysis.” Yarbrough offers a complex character study of Whitehead, whose self-assurance masks a debilitating fixation on an impossible ideal. It reminded me of something Leslie Jamison wrote about perfectionism: It “perpetuates an endless state of striving.” Perfection’s a clever enemy; we chase it at our own peril. —BF
5. What Made Blogging Different?
Elizabeth Spiers | Talking Points Memo | October 16, 2025 | 1,726 words
I once wrote on my blog about my growing fear of missing out online, and how checking Twitter felt like trying to jump onto a moving train. That post, which generated 135 comments, ended up marking the beginning of the end for my blog, and for the kind of personal writing I used to share in public. (The link rot in that post says as much about the web’s evolution as it does about mine.) In this short but resonant piece, Elizabeth Spiers is nostalgic for the early ’00s internet, when thinking in the open could be slow, and we were able to leave our doors open for anyone who visited our online homes—because comments, even disagreements, were respectful. “The sort of considered back and forth I remember from the thoughtful members of the early blogosphere is something that is harder to find now,” she writes. Growing up in rural Alabama in a conservative family, Spiers credits bloggers during that time with challenging her worldview and helping her evolve as a writer and thinker. “I still look for people with early blogger energy,” she writes. I do, too. (This is a perfect spot to plug Phil Gyford’s post on his website about discovering the internet in 1995, which I also picked this week.) We need more of these spaces, now more than ever. And I mean independent blogs and personal websites like Phil’s—not a bunch of people crammed into a Substack mansion. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the longform writing people are publishing there, but I miss clicking a link that takes me to someone’s own house, decorated exactly as they want it. Over the years, I’ve tried and failed to revive my neglected blog, but pieces like Spiers’s remind me of what being online could be like again, if only more of us were willing to rebuild those welcoming corners of the web. Maybe the internet we miss isn’t really gone—it’s just waiting for us to come home. —CLR
Audience Award
Congrats to the most-read editor’s pick this week.
It’s Dead Around Here
Lauren Hough | Texas Highways | October 13, 2025 | 2,799 words
What is a ghost town? Is it merely an abandoned settlement, a relic of the past, or is it something more enduring? With her road-trip companion, a dog named Woody Guthrie, Lauren Hough drives across Texas to find out. In this Texas Highways essay—which is full of dust, wanderlust, and wonder—Hough encounters the ruins of forgotten places, but also two dreamers determined to bring one such town back to life. —CLR
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/24/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-584/
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