Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction

Life, Death and Witchcraft in the Niger Delta: Our Longreads Member Pick

Jessica Wilbanks | Ninth Letter | Fall/Winter 2013 | 27 minutes (6,860 words) For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share “On the Far Side of the Fire,” an essay by Jessica Wilbanks, which first appeared in Ninth Letter and was awarded the journal’s annual creative nonfiction award. This is the first time it has been published online. Become a […]

Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction

Life, Death and Witchcraft in the Niger Delta: Our Longreads Member Pick

Jessica Wilbanks | Ninth Letter | Fall/Winter 2013 | 27 minutes (6,860 words) For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share “On the Far Side of the Fire,” an essay by Jessica Wilbanks, which first appeared in Ninth Letter and was awarded the journal’s annual creative nonfiction award. This is the first time it has been published online. Become a […]

Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story

On the Far Side of the Fire: Life, Death and Witchcraft in the Niger Delta

Jessica Wilbanks | Ninth Letter | Fall/Winter 2013 | 27 minutes (6,860 words) Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle) Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks) One of our previous Longreads Member Picks, an essay by Jessica Wilbanks, is now free for everyone. “On The Far Side of the Fire” first appeared in Ninth Letter and was awarded the  journal’s annual creative nonfiction award. This is […]

Posted inNonfiction, Story

My Tears See More Than My Eyes: My Son’s Depression and the Power of Art

Alan Shapiro | Virginia Quarterly Review| Fall 2006 | 20 minutes (4,928 words) Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. This essay first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (subscribe here). Our thanks to Shapiro for allowing us to reprint […]

Posted inNonfiction

My Tears See More Than My Eyes: My Son’s Depression and the Power of Art

Alan Shapiro | Virginia Quarterly Review| Fall 2006 | 20 minutes (4,928 words) Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. This essay first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (subscribe here). Our thanks to Shapiro for allowing us to reprint […]

Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

How You (and Your Spouse, Your Children and Your Therapist) Get Targeted When You Become a Whistleblower

“That’s what I’ve been talking about in earlier answers: the ability of the government to go back to taps collected years earlier to look for material with which to influence potential witnesses in the present. (See their interest in the allegation that the wife of one journalist may have been accused of shoplifting in her […]

Posted inNonfiction, Reading List

A Brief History of ‘It’ Girls

“It isn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just ‘It’.” —Rudyard Kipling 1. “Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Clara Bow, ‘It’ Girl,” (Anne Helen Petersen, The Hairpin, May 2011) Clara Bow was the original It girl, so much so that her 1927 film, titled—what else?—“It,” more or less defined the phenomenon. This piece, from Petersen’s […]

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