Short Month, Long Form

Sometimes it’s fun to mix things up. If your book club—or, for that matter, your personal reading habit—is like most others, you read a novel or non-fiction book together about once a month. Today, I’d like to suggest an alternative I’m calling Short Month, Long Form.

In the short month of February, why not try something new and read some long form pieces together? You may object that you’re already reading long works, but the term “long form” is somewhat deceptive, since it actually refers to short works.

Let me explain. Short stories tend to run, for argument’s sake, between 10 and 20 pages in a double-spaced manuscript. Many literary journals cap their length around 7,000 words and usually go no higher than 10,000. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but that’s the ballpark. There’s also a form called “flash fiction” that runs much shorter.

Long form stories, on the other hand, take a more luxurious pace. They eschew the typical word limits and take as long as they need to tell their story. There’s even a literary journal, Longreads, devoted to publishing them. The line between a long short story and a novella is blurry, but that’s beside the point as far as Short Month, Long Form is concerned. What you’re looking for is one or two or three long stories that will provide you with an interesting change of pace and a great discussion.

The term “long form” can also be applied to journalism. Again, it’s used to distinguish a piece from its shorter counterparts. Think, for example, of a news item in The New York Times, which might run to 1,200 words on the long side. A news brief will be much shorter—just a quick take on something reporters are keeping an eye on. Then think of the more in-depth type of story you’d find on the weekend in The New York Times Magazine, which will run for several pages and might take 30 minutes or longer to read. That’s an example of long form journalism. It's not only longer to read; the reporter has been working on it for a long time, too. It’s more likely to carefully set the scene. It’s more likely to dig into the background of the story—in fact, to tell a story, unfolding it over time through the eyes of a number of different players (“characters,” except this isn’t fiction). This makes long form journalism, too, an interesting choice for a book club that’s looking for a change of pace in the shortest month of the year.

I’ve already mentioned a couple of sources for finding long form pieces in both fiction and nonfiction, and I’ll list a few more at the end, along with a few of my personal favorites. But before I do that, consider how your book club might read for Short Month, Long Form:

• Everyone picks their own long form piece to read and reports back on it at the book club meeting, creating a bank of long form pieces for others to choose from for their own follow-up reading.

• The group splits into subgroups for the month, each reading a different piece and meeting in a more intimate group for discussion. Each group writes up a little synopsis and overview of their conversation for the other groups.

• The group reads two long form pieces in the same genre (fiction or nonfiction) and uses that month’s discussion to talk not only about the pieces but also about the form itself, using the two readings as a compare/contrast model for how writers do it.

• A round robin is set up by email. Everyone reads a long form piece each week, and on Sundays, you “pass” it to the person who’s next on the list. That means everyone chooses one long form piece and reads three chosen by someone else. (Obviously, this works with any number—but since there are four weeks even in the shortest month, four is a good number.) That month’s discussion may help the most compelling pieces float to the top, and those who didn’t get to read them will then have the chance.

You can come up with other ways to do this, of course. Whatever you try, please tell us about it in the Comments below so others can learn from your experiment!

Here are a few suggested sources to get you started, with links where they’re available online (paywalls may exist):

Longreads (fiction and non-fiction)

The Best American Short Stories (fiction, both long and short)

The New York Times Magazine (non-fiction)

Wired (non-fiction)

And here are just a few of my long form favorites:

“Carried Away” by Alice Munro (fiction)

“Foster” by Claire Keegan (fiction)

“Evidence” by Kathryn Schulz (non-fiction)

“Slow Ideas” by Atul Gawande (non-fiction)

I’ll be reading four more long form pieces in February and sharing them with you in my Wednesday posts!