Social: Longform Article Reading Club

Discuss a longform magazine or newspaper article with a group of longreads fans in this monthly club from the Magazines and Newspapers Center. It’s like a book club, but instead of books we discuss periodical articles of approximately 10,000 words in length, which take about an hour to read.    

To participate, read the month's selection ahead of time, then join the discussion at the appointed time and location.   

The agenda of the meeting includes round-robin introductions, a forty-five minute discussion utilizing the shared inquiry method, and then a final twenty minutes to share any other thoughts the article brought up for you.   

Typically, selections can be investigative journalism, creative writing, personal essay or another genre, as long as it was originally published in a periodical.   

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Get the monthly selections and after-discussion summary delivered to your inbox. 

September 2026 Selection 

“Silicon Valley Circuits” by Hua Hsu 

Places Journal, July 2026 

Hua Hsu grew up in Cupertino when Apple was just another company in an anonymous office park—which is to say, before Highway 85 transformed the southern reaches of Silicon Valley. Now, he uses the artery’s arrival to chart the development of the region, his family and himself. With the stories of so many highways being ones of displacement and inequality (see: New York, Chicago, Oakland), it’s a treat to read one that feels more like a memoir of possibility. 

Access options: 

• Read on the Places Journal website (free) 
• Email mnc@sfpl.org to request a PDF  

Header image courtesy of Places Journal

October Selection

(rescheduled from July 25, 2026)

“The Missing Person: Kafka the Tourist” by Kate Zambreno  

Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2019  

Judging from how Kafka talks about traveling in his diaries, he’s a frail and neurotic man urged by the obsession to write—but in this patchwork essay of tidy squares and literary headings, Zambreno associates him with photography, Paris, Lake Maggiore, art theft and historical occurrences both literally connected to his life and figuratively relevant. Does Kafka get what Kafka complains about wanting? In reconstructing Kafka’s history through her own obsessive research and placing the writer’s process within the essay itself, Zambreno presents a portrait both splintered and replete of the famous Czeck author as a young man. 

Register on Zoom

Access options:  

• Read on the Virgina Quarterly Review website  
• Read in digital replica on eLibrary, a library database (SFPL card required) 
• Read on JSTOR   
• Email mnc@sfpl.org to request a PDF of the article

November Selection

“Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit” by Leslie Marmon Silko

Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, 19 Dec 1993

In this essay that went on to become the title piece of her 1996 book, Native American literary giant Leslie Marmon Silko writes about the concept of beauty as held by the old timers of Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, a concept informed by the mythology of Yellow Woman (Kochininako) and taught to her as a child by her great-grandmother. In sharing these stories and beliefs, she invites us to explore Native ideas of beauty, sturdiness and gender roles that contrast with white, Christian ideals. These beliefs celebrate female sensuality and fertility, peering into the spirit and determination of a person rather than judging their static outward appearance. 

Register on Zoom

Access options:  

• Read on ProQuest (SFPL card required)
• Read on the LA Times Website (a paid account may be required)
• Read on Hoopla (SFPL card required)
• Email mnc@sfpl.org to request a PDF of the article