Every Friday Vulture finds a great story that’s a little too long to read on the computer screen. Fiction, long-form narrative journalism, epic blog sagas — any of these could be your Weekend Read. Print it out on the office printer, smuggle it home, and curl up with it after brunch.
Today’s Weekend Read comes from Five Chapters, the online literary magazine that publishes a full story every week in five-part serial form. One of the finest — among stories by Aimee Bender, Ben Greenman, and Vendela Vida — is “The Healthy Heart,†by Margo Rabb, author of Cures for Heartbreak, published earlier this spring by Random House. It’s a touching and funny short story of a 15-year-old girl dealing with her mother’s death, her father’s heart condition, and the disquieting fact that she has a crush on a kid in the cancer ward.