Longreads

How Quentin Tarantino created the film that launched his career and redefined movies in the 1990s:

"Just seven years earlier, in 1986, Tarantino was a 23-year-old part-time actor and high-school dropout, broke, without an apartment of his own, showering rarely. With no agent, he sent out scripts that never got past low-level readers. 'Too vile, too vulgar, too violent' was the usual reaction, he later said. According to Quentin Tarantino, by Wensley Clarkson, his constant use of the f-word in his script True Romance caused one studio rep to write to Cathryn Jaymes, his early manager:

"Dear Fucking Cathryn,

"How dare you send me this fucking piece of shit. You must be out of your fucking mind. You want to know how I feel about it? Here’s your fucking piece of shit back. Fuck you."

[Fiction] The first chapter of a serialized novella, about a pickle maker from the early 1900s who is transported to modern-day Brooklyn:

"The science men come and explain. I have been preserved in brine a hundred years and have not aged one day. They describe to me the reason (how this chemical mixed with that chemical, and so on and so on) but I am not paying attention. All I can think of is my beautiful Sarah. Years have passed and she is surely gone. Soon, though, I have another thought. When I freeze in brine, Sarah was with child. Maybe I still have family in Brooklyn? Maybe our dreams have come true?

"The science man turns on computing box and types. I have one great-great-grandson still in Brooklyn, he says. By coincidence, he is twenty-seven years, just like me. His name is Simon Rich. I am so excited I can barely breathe. Maybe he is doctor, or even rabbi? I cannot wait to meet this man—to learn the ending of my family’s story."

"'How about Thai fusion?' Simon asks me, as we walk along the street where I once lived. 'This place has these amazing gluten-free ginger thingies.'"

Until this fall, Ray Kachel had lived virtually all of his fifty-three years within a few miles of his birthplace, in Seattle. He was a self-taught Jack-of-all-trades in the computer industry, who…

In my dream, a long-fingered witch was zapping me with heart attacks (Feel that? Feel it coming?), and then, disconnectedly, I was in a car with Larry David, driving through…