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Reads

Great short works you can read right now, ranging from five minutes to two hours. Handpicked and updated regularly.

01

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion

The Saturday Evening Post, 1967

Down and dirty account of the underbelly of San Francisco towards the end of the 60's

“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together”
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02

Superman Comes to the Supermarket

Norman Mailer

Esquire, 1960

Part profile of JFK by Mailer, a brilliant writer, part account of the 1960 Democratic convention, but more focused on the emerging myth and aura around Kennedy, which still endures. Written after the primaries but before the election.

“Yes, the life of politics and the life of the myth had diverged too far. There was nothing to return them to one another, no common danger, no cause, no desire, and, most essentially, no hero. It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradiction and mysteries which could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people.”
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03

Shipping Out - On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise

David Foster Wallace

Harpers, 1996

Harpers sent Foster Wallace on an all expenses paid ultra luxury cruise, he did not enjoy it.

“Some weeks before I underwent my own Luxury Cruise, a sixteen-year-old male did a half gainer off the upper deck of a Megaship. The news version of the suicide was that it had been an unhappy adolescent love thing, a shipboard romance gone bad. But I think part of it was something no news story could cover. There's something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair”
04

Hiroshima

John Hersey

New Yorker, 1946

The New Yorker dedicated a full issue to this piece, the first major work (in the west, at least) to centre the victims of the bomb.

“She thought that before she began… she would chat for a moment with the girl at her right. Just as she turned her head away from the windows, the room was filled with a blinding light… Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.”
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05

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

Hunter S. Thompson

Rolling Stone, 1971

Gonzo. The most entertaining story on this list, true ish account of two drug charged trips to vegas. Entertainment value aside, it is one of the best reflections on meaning and failure of the counterculture of the sixties.

“Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough”
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06

The War with Catiline

Sallust

Scrolls, 44-40 BC

A work of ancient roman history, recounting the story of the Catiline conspiracy, an attempt to overthrow the republic, by a gang of rogues.

“If I had not already tested your courage and loyalty, in vain would a great opportunity have presented itself; high hopes and power would have been placed in my hands to no purpose, nor would I with the aid of cowards or inconstant hearts grasp at uncertainty in place of certainty. But because I have learned in many and great emergencies that you are brave and faithful to me, my mind has had the courage to set on foot a mighty and glorious enterprise”
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07

Meditations on Moloch

Scott Alexander

Slate Star Codex, 2014

Game theory, Ginsberg, ancient demons, the workings of the world. A modern classic.

“Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear: It is glorious that we can create something like this. It is shameful that we did. ”
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08

One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts

Shirley Jackson

Short Story, 1955

Short, sweet, brilliant twist. Great short story if you have 15 minutes to kill

“He remembered to fill his pockets with candy and peanuts, and then he set out to get himself uptown. He stopped in a flower shop and bought a carnation for his buttonhole, and stopped almost immediately afterward to give the carnation to a small child in a carriage, who looked at him dumbly, and then smiled, and Mr. Johnson smiled, and the child’s mother looked at Mr. Johnson for a minute and then smiled, too.”
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09

Ulysses

Alfred Tennyson

1833

Brilliant poem. The best tribute to that great spirit.

“I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour'd of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met.”
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10

Don't Eat Before Reading This

Anthony Bourdain

New Yorker, 1999

This was the work that launched Bourdain into the public eye. He describes his experience working in professional kitchens, from dishboy to head chef, and exposes the dark arts of the trade. Enlightening, disturbing and hilarious. Paywall but easily found online.

“Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.”
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11

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

Gay Talese

Esquire, 1966

A celeb profile, but possibly the greatest ever. Vanity Fair said it was “the greatest literary-nonfiction story of the 20th Century,” On their 70th anniversary Esquire said it was the best piece they ever published. Sinatra refused an interview so Talese spent three months following sinatra and speaking to anyone in his orbit willing to speak.

““Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel - only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him…””
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