Each week, the Sunday Post highlights just a few pieces of longform writing that we loved reading. Settle in with a cup of coffee, or tea, if that's your pleasure — we saved you a seat! Read an essay or an article online that you loved? Let us know at submissions@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Need more browse? You can also look through the archives.

The Cost of Reading

There have been so many angry essays by women in the past few years, and because I am a woman who is often angry, I try to take care, try not to populate every Sunday with frustration.

Ayşegül Savaş is worth pushing my self-assigned quota. This piece about women and men and time and success is astonishing, especially because it so rarely voices emotion directly, and yet carries strong emotion in every paragraph.

It is about books, and who tells the story of what should be read, and who tells the story of what matters. And it is about love, and family, and finally about who is willing to pay for what.

In my childhood, my father was very strict about assignment deadlines he gave me and my brother: memorizing poems, writing essays, drawing maps from memory. He was very strict about time in general; being late was among the worst possible sins. Alongside the lesson of promptness, I internalized a dread of wasting my father’s time.

When my father left for work trips, time in our household suddenly expanded. There were no deadlines, no family meetings to discuss important topics. We could often sweet-talk our mother into letting us stay up late or skip some work we had to do, or walk our dog while we slept in.

What had we internalized about our mother’s time?

Frank Chimero on causing 'good trouble'

Katy Cowan interviews designer Frank Chimero, who promptly takes the air out of a lot of damaging ideas about achievement and status and creativity. What’s nice about this is that deflation isn’t erasure — Chimero isn’t flattening anything, he’s just taking it down to a reasonable size.

Working writers, working designers, any other kind of working creator — we need to hear what Chimero has to say, and believe it.

I read once that hunting and gathering societies only work about 20 hours a week. Learning that got under my skin really bad. Wednesday is just as much a part of your life as Saturday, but you have to remind people of that. So in Frankball, there’s a lot figuring out how to pace projects and follow through on responsibilities with strength and quality, all while carving out time to play hooky. My life is going to be filled with just as many Wednesdays as Saturdays, and I would like to claim more than 2/7ths of my life for myself, thanks.

“I Did Not Die. I Did Not Go to Heaven.”

After his son Alex was gravely injured in a car accident, Kevin Malarkey published an account of Alex’s experiences with angels (and demons) when he was close to death. Now Alex claims it’s all a lie. A crazy and poignant account of what a book about heaven means to the family that published then recanted it, and a fascinating look at the world of Christian publishing.

“As Christians, we believe in miracles and believe in angels, but you have to make sure the source is credible,” said Vander Zicht, who retired from Zondervan last year after 33 years. As an editor, she says, she vetted spiritual accounts by whether they came through a reputable literary agent, and by talking with authors to get a gut sense of their trustworthiness; occasionally she asked theologians to assess books for biblical correctness. She said she wouldn’t have rejected a heaven story out of hand.