Longreads

For this week's Member Pick, we're thrilled to share the first chapter of Drew Magary's new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt  (Gotham Books). Magary, who writes for  Deadspin and  GQ, has been  featured on Longreads many times in the past, and he explained how his latest book came together.

This week, we're excited to share a Member Pick from Narratively, the New York-based (and Kickstarter-backed) storytelling site that launched last fall and has been featured on Longreads in the past.

"Watch Dog," by Kerri Anne Renzulli, will be published in a two weeks, and they were kind enough to make the story available early to Longreads Members. Renzulli, a journalist and Columbia grad student, investigates the difficult task of training guide dogs for New York City—and helping develop relationships between the dogs and their future owners.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

This week's Member Pick comes from Antonia Crane, the Los Angeles-based writer whose work for The Rumpus has been featured on Longreads in the past. We're excited to feature "Yellow," a story about her relationship with her mother, about stripping, and about loss. The piece will be published in Black Clock #17, due out this summer, and it's adapted from her forthcoming book Spent. Thanks to Antonia and Black Clock for letting us share this story with our members.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

This week's Longreads Member Pick is the first chapter from the best-selling memoir After Visiting Friends, GQ deputy editor Michael Hainey's story of his father's death and his search for answers. Hainey was 6 years old when his father, newspaperman Bob Hainey, died suddenly, but questions remained about the circumstances around his death. 

We're proud to feature the book. Thanks to Michael and Scribner for sharing this story.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

This week, we're thrilled to feature Jason Zengerle, a contributing editor for New York magazine and GQ  who has been featured on Longreads  many times. Our Member Pick is Jason's 1997 story on Michael Moore for Might magazine: "Is This Man the Last, Best Hope for Popular Liberalism in America? And, More Importantly, Does He Have a Sense of Humor?"

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

This week's Member Pick is "Symmetrical Universe," an essay by physicist Alan Lightman, published in the latest issue of Orion magazine. In it, Lightman explores the wonder of nature and the principles that guide its design—helping to answer questions like why a honeycomb is a hexagon, or why human-created art embraces asymmetry.

Lightman is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of books including Einstein's Dreams and Mr g: A Novel About the Creation.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

This week's Longreads Member pick is "Graveyards," a short story by Scott McClanahan about a family visit to the cemetery. The piece was published last year in Harper Perennial's Forty Stories collection, and it will appear in McClanahan's forthcoming book Crapalachia, a portrait of growing up in rural West Virginia, published by Two Dollar Radio.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

This week's Longreads Member pick is "Contest of Words," Ben Lerner's October 2012 essay from Harper's Magazine. Lerner is author of the award-winning 2011 novel Leaving the Atocha Station and three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw and Mean Free Path.

The story comes recommended by Matt O'Rourke, a longtime Longreads community member and creative director for Wieden and Kennedy in Portland (he also runs the Twitter account @fuckyesreading).

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

This week's Longreads Member pick is Chapter 1 from Nicholson Baker's 2009 novel, The Anthologist, published by Simon & Schuster. The excerpt comes recommended by Hilary Armstrong, a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She writes:

"Someone I love once told me that they don't understand poetry. It's all random line breaks and rhythms she can hear aloud, but not read on paper—and what is a poem other than the observer of something beautiful showing off? What is there to condense in a poem that hasn't been done already? Why is poetry so highfalutin and important?

"The Anthologist follows a man who loves poetry but is struggling with it, or, more specifically, struggling to write an introduction to a poem anthology. He talks about poems as song lyrics, as logical progressions, and as the backbeat to all art. He answers the common questions surrounding poetry, and clarifies some of the deeper ones. If you are a writer, reading this book has a similar effect that reading High Fidelity does after a breakup.

"In The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker accomplishes something amazing and resonant—reading it feels like having one of those really savory conversations with someone else, someone who 'gets' you like no one else at the party does."

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.