Author Archives

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The Winners and Losers in the Book Business

“It begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of ‘basic’ publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in The New York Times Book Review or by being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.”

Daniel Menaker, in a New York magazine excerpt from his memoir, My Mistake, on life in publishing.

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Photo: gpoo, Flickr

What It's Like When You Are Desperate for a New Life

“One thing was certain: neither Youssef nor Rashid, nor Anoush nor Shahla, were going to get to the place they believed they were going. Rashid would never be reunited with his wife and sons in some quaint Australian suburb; Youssef would never see his children ‘get a position’ there; Anoush would never become an Australian policeman; Shahla would never benefit from a secular, Western education. What they had to look forward to instead — after the perilous voyage, and after months, maybe years, locked up in an isolated detention center — was resettlement on the barren carcass of a defunct strip mine, more than 70 percent of which is uninhabitable (Nauru), or resettlement on a destitute and crime-ridden island nation known for its high rates of murder and sexual violence (Papua New Guinea).

“How do you tell that to someone who has severed himself utterly from his country, in order to reach another? It was impossible. They wouldn’t believe it.”

-From a stunning 2103 New York Times story by Luke Mogelson and Joel Van Houdt, who went undercover on a boat taking refugees from Indonesia to Christmas Island in Australian territory.

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Photo: diacimages, Flickr

 

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Sunmyungmoon

Our picks of the week, featuring The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, Philadelphia Magazine, The New Republic and Politico Magazine, with a guest pick by Casey N. Cep. Read it here.

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side: Our Longreads Member Pick

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side

Mark Oppenheimer | The Atlantic Books | November 2013 | 88 minutes (22,700 words)

 

Longreads Members not only support this service, but they receive exclusive ebooks from the best writers and publishers in the world. Our latest Member Pick, The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, is a new story by Mark Oppenheimer and The Atlantic Books, about Eido Shimano, a Zen Buddhist monk accused of sexually exploiting students.

We’re excited to feature the first chapter below, free for everyone. If you’re not a Longreads Member, join today to receive the full story and ebook, or you can also purchase the ebook at Amazon

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EIDO SHIMANO, a Zen Buddhist monk from Japan, arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 31, 1964, New Year’s Eve. He was 32 years old, and although he had just spent four years in Hawaii, part of the time as a university student, his English was poor. Besides his clothes, he brought with him only a small statue of the Buddha and a keisaku, the wooden stick a Zen teacher uses to thwack students whose posture sags during meditation. Before flying east, he had been offered temporary lodging by a couple who lived on Central Park West. Not long after he arrived—the very next day, according to some versions of the story—he began to build his sangha, his Zen community. He did this, at first, by walking the streets of New York. The followers just came.

“It was the middle of the 1960s, full of energy,” Shimano recalled when we met for lunch in 2012. “And all I did was simply walk Manhattan from top to the bottom. And in my Buddhist robe. And many people came. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ So I said, ‘I am from Japan and doing zazen practice’”—Zen meditation. It was a kind of Buddhism, he told the curious New Yorkers. Now and again, somebody asked to tag along. Yes, Shimano told them. Of course. Before long, he had a small space to host meditation sessions, and all were invited. “Little by little, every single day, I walked entire Manhattan,” Shimano told me in his still-fractured English. “And every single day I picked up two or three people who were curious. And that was the beginning of the sangha.”

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The Wisdom of Mr. Rogers

The below YouTube video recently resurfaced on Twitter to remind me about everything I loved, and still love, about Mr. Rogers. It’s a clip from the 1997 Daytime Emmys, where Fred McFeely Rogers accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award:

In just three minutes, he reduced Linda Dano to tears and reminded us how conscientious we can strive to be when it comes to recognizing the important people in our lives and telling them how much they mean to us.

The clip brought me back to one of my all-time favorite stories: Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire profile or Mr. Rogers:

Can You Say… Hero?

“Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, ‘The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.’”

Read Junod’s 2003 eulogy for Mr. Rogers

…and it then sent me on a Mr. Rogers YouTube-watching binge. Here he is defending PBS before Congress in 1969:

Mr. Rogers Defending PBS before the U.S. Senate (1969, 7 minutes)

Sponsored Longreads: Promote Your Content

If you’re a brand or a publisher, Longreads can help you promote your content and message with Sponsored Longreads.

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Email us at hello@longreads.com and we’ll schedule your promotion—or just use our self-service page to purchase your sponsorship, and we’ll get in touch to confirm your message and schedule a promotion date.

Longreads can also host your content in a Sponsored Longreads article template. And we work with outstanding writers and publishers from all around the world, so we can also help you create great content for your brand. Email us to get started.

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