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.

Eldorado, Illinois

I’m always wary of writing about drugs — is it going to be preaching, or self-pity? Or all rock-n-roll celebration of the bad boy wild life? Chris Dennis gracefully avoids all of that here. If you can imagine the El Dorado he describes (as a midwesterner, I so easily can), you can imagine the kind of inner weather that invites the shelter of addiction.

There’s a timeline to this, but I can’t get it right yet. I wrote a book. I moved home. I was depressed. I started using drugs. I was arrested. I went to jail. I edited parts of that book while in jail. I’d devoted ten years of my life to writing the book, and then, just before it was about to finally arrive, this thing I had worked so hard to build, I burned my life to the foundation. Why? I wrote a book. I became addicted to meth. I was shooting meth every day. In the bathroom at Walmart. In the bathroom at McDonald’s. In a parked car on a gravel road. In a dozen motel rooms with people I hardly knew. In vacant lots. In abandoned buildings. In strange living rooms in towns I’d never been to before. I was arrested three times in under a year, cut off entirely from all my friends and family, my own son, the people I loved most in the world, and I still just kept shooting meth.

Inmate 76318-054: The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein

I’ve been spared (or have spared myself) much of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. You probably haven’t — so why read one more article? Well, what’s interesting about this one is that it tracks Epstein’s despair not to the discomfort of being of in jail, but the discomfort of Being In Jail. For a white man with a ton of money and power, the loss of privilege is, apparently, the worst thing that can happen. The details of how he experienced that loss of power, like his attempt to avoid his cell by paying a full-time staff of lawyers to conference with him daily, are telling — and truly batshit.

It is impossible to know why a person takes his own life. But an examination of Mr. Epstein’s last days by The New York Times, gathered from dozens of interviews with law enforcement officials, Bureau of Prisons employees, lawyers and others, suggests that Mr. Epstein’s death came after he started to realize the limits of his ability to deploy his wealth and privilege in the legal system.

11 years of top-selling book covers, arranged by visual similarity

This infographic by (of course) The Pudding is irresistible, especially when you start applying filters to it — books by women vs. men, fiction vs. nonfiction, mix and match. There are probably all sort of cultural observations to discover here, but for those too sleepy on a Sunday morning, it’s also just a lot of fun to poke around in.