Longreads

The decaying, downtown shopping section of memphis still another Main Street lay, the weekend before Martin Luther King s funeral, under a siege. The deranging curfew and that state of civic…

Diana AthillOf course I read The Golden Notebook as soon as it came out. Everyone did. But I took against it. I and most of my friends, who were more or less the same age as Doris Lessing, felt, as…

The best novelists create a world around the reader. You can feel it bubbling up in irrepressible invention. So we have "a guy by the name of Booker, a twenty-five-year old super-dude twice…

Hunter S. Thompson was just 22-years-old in 1959 when he first began writing The Rum Diary, or what he initially called “the great American rum novel.” He envisioned it as something of a contemporary and rum-soaked version of The Great Gatsby, one of Thompson’s favorite books. Based on the time Thompson spent working for an English language newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico, The Rum Diary fictionally chronicles the drunken and debauched life of Paul Kemp, an American journalist sauntering through San Juan with a savage lust for women, blood and booze. Once finished, Thompson spent nearly a decade revising and shopping it to publishers before reverting to other projects. It wasn’t until 1998 that Thompson was finally able to publish The Rum Diary.

I guess that I should begin by conceding the slightly disingenuous quality of my title. I actually happen to be one of those people that is interested in declaring for the…

This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools. “Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else.

If you wonder why writers write, there's a succinct answer at least on behalf of the male ones in Nicholson Baker's new novel House of Holes, an anthology of orgies set in a playland where…

Amy Winehouse passed away on Saturday, and public reaction to the news says quite a bit about the arc of her short career, most of it very sad and some of it downright ugly. While…

Install this theme How to Write About Africa Always use the word Africa or Darkness or Safari in your title. Subtitles may…