Longreads

Alfred Anaya was a genius at installing secret compartments in cars. If they were used to smuggle drugs without his knowledge, he figured that wasn’t his problem. He was wrong. Illustration:…

Photo: Vincent FournierFrom a German border town on the banks of the river Neisse, the anatomist Gunther von Hagens commands a fortress of death. The former textile mill has glorious skylights and a…

Author Katherine Dunn     On a summer day the year before he died, I sat with Smokin’ Joe Frazier at a big table in his Philadelphia apartment. He picked at a plate of grapes and…

When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or "old man," or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, "Breath of My Nostrils." (National Magazine Award winner 2011)