Author Archives

Em Perper
Bookseller, writer, editor.

A Halloween Weekend Reading List

Photo: Allen

Boo! Read these stories about the scariest weekend of the year while getting over your candy hangovers.

1. “I Was a Halloween Costume Model.” (Freddie Campion, GQ October 2015)

Looking to make a little extra money, our anonymous hero answered a Craigslist ad.

2. “The Husband Stitch.” (Carmen Maria Machado, Granta, October 2014)

A sexy, spooky take on the tale of the woman with a ribbon around her neck. Read more…

Why Are Bras So Expensive?

Photo: AJ Batac

Cora Harrington, bra expert behind The Lingerie Addict, has seen both sides of the issue blossom as a consumer and consultant to brands. As a black woman operating as a blogger in the lingerie industry, she has a particular investment in the success of the one brand that is producing bras for her skin color. “Fast fashion always offers a discount and it makes people think sales are the norm. There’s a secrecy in the American market: you should get whatever you want, this should be on sale, the customer is always right. That’s not the case in lingerie. Let’s stop this trend of penalizing minority businesses because they don’t have access to the same resources as majority-owned corporations. If your budget can only stretch to Target, petition Target to carry bras in a range of hues. Ask Wal-Mart to carry some brown bras. Hit up the H&M Facebook page, and start tweeting at Forever21. But while we’re being honest, let’s talk about what’s feasible for a new brand, and acknowledge the business reality that cheap bras are something only a few global conglomerates can actually afford. Independent design is a different world, and the story is so much more complex than it’s given due.”

— Beauty writer (and lover of lingerie) Arabelle Sicardi writes at Racked about the small, independent designers and boutiques struggling to provide quality underthings in the face of climbing costs and customer entitlement.

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Season’s Greetings from Amazon Fulfillment

Is all this a matter of life and death? I’ll say no for the moment and come back to the question later. At that point I’ll say: not directly, but in a way yes. It’s a matter of how far death is allowed into our lives. Or the fatal, that which kills us. To be precise: compared to the fatal, death is nothing but a little orphan boy. Or: death, compared to the fatal, is a gentleman with good manners and a shy look in his eye.

From now on, the fatal is your constant companion; that much I can say. But first of all we’ll set out, because you have a job interview.

— Money is tight. To alleviate her ailing bank account and help support her family, author/translator Heike Geissler goes to work for an Amazon Fulfillment center in Germany. N+1 has published two excerpts from her nonfiction work, Saisonarbeit (“Season’s Greetings From Fulfillment”). Geissler’s use of second-person narrative blurs the line between reader and writer—her situation, she implies, could easily be yours. Read “The Interview” first, then “Training Day.”

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Strange Magic: Four Stories About Disney’s Dark Side

As much fun as it is, Disney can be scary. Any corporation of Disney’s magnitude and influence is scary, no matter how superficially benevolent it seems, or how many cartoon characters it employs. I say this as someone who devoured Disney World guidebooks as an 8-year-old, rode her first plane to Orlando, conquered her fear of roller coasters on Space Mountain, and performed with her high school choir in Tomorrowland. There’s an emotional connection. But I haven’t been to the most magical place on Earth in almost a decade, never as an adult. Revisit Disney through the eyes of these authors and see the good, the bad, and the creepy. Read more…

The Enduring Allure of ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’

Photo: Steph

Halloween is mere weeks away—what better time to revisit Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories? In grade school, these collections were highly prized. I read and reread every story, marveling at the disturbing illustrations that were so different from every other book in our school library. (Here’s the scariest, in my opinion. Trigger warning: Spiders.) At Electric Lit, Matt Bell and Amy Valente analyze their favorite stories from each collection, reminiscing about their childhoods. The quotidian becomes terrifying, once more. Here, Bell meditates on the short story, “The Haunted House”:

Do you know that there are Youtube clips of teenagers playing Bloody Mary? Testing the thresholds of reality, Millennial-style. “The Haunted House” is a story that taps the same anxious vein, about a preacher who spends the night sitting up and reading his bible in a house “in his settlement” that has been “haunted for about ten years” … And then, in my edition at least, you turn to the page to find one of Gammell’s most terrifying illustrations, perhaps the one I remember most vividly across all the years between readings of these books. “It look liked a young woman,” Schwartz writes, but this young woman has no eyeballs, just “a sort of blue light way back in her eye sockets,” and “no nose to her face” … Horror is all about getting the reader to imagine something worse than anything you might put directly on the page: What exactly does it sound like when a voice is “coming and going with the wind blowing it”? And why does it get more disturbing the more precisely I try to imagine it?

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Meet the Honey Badgers: The Women For Men’s Rights

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” wrote Mark Twain, and he’s not wrong. Case in point: the coterie of outspoken women who believe men’s rights are being trampled. They call themselves the Honey Badger Brigade, and they have podcasts, conventions and vlogs. At Marie Claire, Jen Ortiz interviews these rabid defenders of men and subtly refutes their every point in her investigation:

Just over a year ago, some of these women assembled in a hall at the Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, as part of an inaugural international conference on human rights. (They were supposed to meet at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Downtown Detroit, but plans changed last-minute because of reported threats by critics.) It was the first-annual International Conference on Men’s Issues. “It was really fantastic for all of us to be in the same room together,” says Janet Bloomfield, 36, one of the most prominent female faces of the men’s rights movement. “The idea that the movement is comprised of a lot of angry white men who can’t get laid is just simply not true—there were so many women!”

Bloomfield, a former bank productivity analyst, juggles being a stay-at-home mom of three “deep in the woods in Northern Ontario” with her work as a writer and unofficial MRA spokesperson. She grew up on a farm, in a family organized by traditional gender roles, where she “could never buy that this was oppression or bad.” A difficult relationship with her mother showed her that women are human—in other words, a woman has the capability to be just as terrible (or presumably, as not-terrible) as a man. Three years ago, she began her blog as a sort of inside joke with a close friend, but it quickly landed her in the manosphere with her take-no-prisoners style of writing about gender and culture. See: “The moment I knew feminism was a crock of shit.”

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Get to Know the National Book Award Finalists for Nonfiction

The National Book Awards, presented by the National Book Foundation, “celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America.” There are four categories: fiction, nonfiction, “young people’s literature,” and poetry. Several of this year’s nominees have been featured on Longreads before (see: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Adam Johnson, Noelle Stevenson), and this reading list features the five nonfiction nominees. The winner will be announced on November 18, 2015.

1. The Radical: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine, July 2015)

“Letter to My Son,” in The Atlantic, adapted from Between the World and Me

You must struggle to truly remember this past. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.

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In Search of a Separate Peace: Five Stories About Communes

What is the purpose, the lure, of communal living? Why have the residents of different communes in United States chosen isolation over convenience? In these five stories, you’ll meet men and women—many, members in the LGBTQIA+ community—who have chosen, with mixed results, to dedicate themselves to their chosen families.

1. “They Built It. No One Came.” (Penelope Green, New York Times, May 2015)

They changed their names and called themselves the Harmonists, rescuing and repurposing Colonial-era dwellings in Pennsylvania. Their numbers never swelled more than two. Can Zephram and Johannes make peace with their failed enterprise? Read more…

‘The Exorcist,’ My Father and Me

So often, we hear stories of people who get help just in time. They hit rock bottom and manage to climb back up. At Electric Literature, Adam Sturtevant has written “That Thing: A True Story Based on ‘The Exorcist.'” It is a terrifying yet beautiful meditation on the impotence of love in the face of an all-too-real demon—alcoholism:

Before performing an exorcism, it must be determined by a qualified priest whether or not the possession is authentic. There are a few ways to do this. A victim speaking fluently in a language he or she has never studied, for example, serves as proof that an outside spirit is at work, as opposed to a disorder of the mind.

One evening, as my mother and I were serving ourselves dinner, the old man staggered into the kitchen. In a stained, wrinkled T-shirt and sweatpants, his hair plastered to his head with sweat, every part of his body swollen and mottled, he looked about eighty years old, though he was only fifty-eight. Wearing that dazed, content look on his face, he opened the freezer and refilled his glass, then slowly shuffled back to his throne.

I had to do something, but there was a question standing in the way. Was it was a conscious act, destroying himself like this, or was he powerless against the booze? If he was powerless, that meant we could help him. We could call an ambulance, get him to a hospital, check him into rehab. But what if he didn’t want our help? What if he wanted to die? 

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The Honest, Creative Cuisine of Iceland

Photo: anroir

I’m no foodie. When I think “culinary haven,” Iceland doesn’t come to mind. Ethereal landscapes, yes; revolutionary cuisine, no. But I’m wrong. Nicholas Gill reports at Roads and Kingdoms:

Everywhere I went there was a person or a small group redefining what Icelandic food and ingredients can be. Many are alone. Trying to break free from the inside. Tiny isolated islands of change, surrounded by mountains and snow. They are Iceland, literally and figuratively.

Among the talented chefs Gill meets is Eyjólfur Fridgeirsson, a Zen Buddhist using a red alga called dulse in new ways, paying homage to the plant’s role in Iceland’s history:

[Dulse] became essential to the health and wellbeing for the people who lived in the inhospitable landscape. During the worst of times, it saved entire families from starvation…Dulse is sold fresh, pickled, or as salt, where it is dried on rocks in the same way the Vikings once did. He dries sugar kelp and makes a soy sauce from other seaweeds. Spices and teas are made from Angelica and arctic moss. There are jams and juices made from blueberries and a rub made of crowberries to put on lamb.

Fridgeirsson sees endless possibilities of what can be done with the plant life in Iceland. “The secret is just here,” he says with a shrug. “Being careful and putting my mind to it. As a good Buddhist, just putting loving care in what I’m doing.”

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