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Shot DownChapter 1 On the day he nearly killed two US airmen, Navy lieutenant junior grade Timothy W. Dorsey, age 25, had coffee and cigarettes for breakfast. He rolled out of his rack around 10 in…

Courtesy Stephen Rodrick In an airless stateroom aboard the USS Kitty Hawk, I find my dead father. Somewhere off the Vietnamese coast, the roar of an F/A-18 Hornet shot from the carrier's number two…

In 1994, when I was 16 and he was 54, my father George was killed in a car accident in Ukraine. He'd begun working in Ukraine, where he was born, after Communism fell, something that he didn't think…

[Best of 2012] Thanks to everyone who has participated in the Longreads community this year, and to all of our guests who shared their favorite stories of 2012. The below list represents our editors' favorite stories of the year, for both nonfiction and fiction.

Longreads is edited by Mark Armstrong and Mike Dang, with Kjell Reigstad, Joyce King Thomas, Hakan Bakkalbasi, Jodi Ettenberg and Erika Kussmann.

Thanks to all the writers and publishers who create outstanding work.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max Granta, 352 pp, £20.00, September, ISBN 978 1 84708 494 1 David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of…

Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Churchville, Maryland, May 15, 2012 My father, John Scocca, used to tell me something. The usual thing to do at a time like this is to quote the wisdom of the departed.…

Since 1992, Men's Journal has stood for solid journalism, fine photography, and uncompromising good advice. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we have published the original versions of the 11…

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons When Trisha comes to town we have to go out. She’s the bitterest soccer mom of all time and as part of her escape from home she wants to get drunk and complain…

Durahm, North Carolina: The complex bond between the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle and his sensitive fans:

"Rock-band worship is nothing new, of course, but the relationship between Darnielle and his fans has its own special hue. This is not the mass, global adulation of arena bands like U2. Nor is it fandom as lifestyle as practiced by Dead Heads. It’s the confessional-indie-troubador-and-his-flock-of-disciples model of Nick Drake, the Smiths, and Rufus Wainwright. Like those musicians and their tribes, Darnielle and his acolytes share an unusually intimate, and often pained, bond. Mountain Goats fans tend to have an air of sadness about them, and because Darnielle sings so openly and candidly about his own difficulties, he connects with his audience on a level that few artists are able to reach (the band is called the Mountain Goats, plural, but the group—and the fuss over them—is entirely about Darnielle). Darnielle sings about what his fans feel but can’t articulate. He’s their hero, but he’s also their soulmate, the one person in the world who understands them. That’s why Stephen Wesley and the legions of fans like him can’t get enough of the Mountain Goats. And that burden is crushing Darnielle."