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Longreads Member Exclusive: The Anthologist (Excerpt), by Nicholson Baker

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This week’s Longreads Member pick is Chapter 1 from Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, The Anthologistpublished 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.

Read an excerpt here.

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring Slate, Gizmodo, The Awl, Two Serious Ladies, Time, fiction from The New Yorker, and a guest pick by Anna Hiatt.

What's the Best Sentence You Read this Week?

We’re back on Branch this week for another round. Share your favorites here.

“Beat By Dre: The Exclusive Inside Story of How Monster Lost the World.” Sam Biddle, Gizmodo

Longreads Member Exclusive: An Excerpt from 'Sempre Susan' by Sigrid Nunez

For this week’s Longreads Member pick, we’re excited to share an excerpt from Sigrid Nunez’s memoir Sempre Susan, which comes recommended by Emily Gould, the proprietor of Emily Books, who writes:

This memorable passage from Sigrid Nunez’s gemlike memoir of the year she spent under the influence of Susan Sontag begins with a description of a trip to New Orleans with Sontag, who was then at the height of her literary powers and intellectual fame. Nunez goes on to detail some of the explicit lessons Sontag taught her—about treating writing as a vocation rather than a career, about giving yourself permission to devote yourself to reading and writing even when that devotion is difficult to justify. With great subtlety, Nunez uses her intimate experience of the particulars of Sontag’s work habits and lifestyle to illuminate some of the tensions that all writers experience—tensions between the need to write without fetters and the need to make money, and between the confidence that’s necessary to accomplish anything and the insecurity that can act as a goad, or a filter.

“If you’re lucky, you might have had a great boss, teacher, leader, guru, parent or friend who encountered you at a receptive moment and shaped the direction your life would take from that moment on. If you’re unlucky, you might have had a boss, teacher, leader, guru, parent or friend who encountered you at a vulnerable moment and warped the direction your life would take from that moment on.  There’s a fine line between these two varieties of experience—or maybe there is no line. Maybe to shape is always to deform.  Here, Nunez treats readers to a succinct cost-benefit analysis of the pleasures and perils of acquiring a charismatic mentor.  The unlucky—or is it lucky?—among us will relate.

Read an excerpt here.

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


Illustration by Kjell Reigstad.

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries.” George Saunders, The New Yorker (Oct. 2012)

Quote found by Charlie Stadtlander

“Diary: Google Invades”—Rebecca Solnit, London Review of Books

Quote found by Michael Kruse

Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring The New Yorker, Esquire, Miami New Times, Columbia Magazine, New York magazine, and a guest pick by Greg Spielberg. 

What's the Best Sentence You Read this Week?

We’re doing a little experiment with Branch today. Share what you loved reading this week…

Longreads Member Exclusive: A Catastrophic Failure of Prediction, by Nate Silver

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This week we’re proud to share a Longreads Member pick from Nate Silver‘s new book The Signal and the Noise, published by The Penguin Press. Chapter 1, “A Catastrophic Failure of Prediction,” comes recommended by Janet Paskin, editor of Businessweek.com, who writes:

Could there be a more appropriate hero for our time than Nate Silver? We can quantify and track and poll and log almost everything—and so we usually do, even if we’re not sure how to make sense of it all. But Silver is—or at least, he can tell you exactly how likely it is that he’s right. 
His nerd-god omniscience during the 2012 election cycle made him a blast to watch, read and retweet. He was consistent, and he was right, and it made a lot of people think a little differently about the relentlessness of our political pageantry and punditry. 
Here, in the first chapter of his new book, he revisits the housing crash, and the failure of the ratings agencies to spot it. It’s not new criticism. Even so, the prediction game is Silver’s strength, and he makes the whole thing feel outrageous again. He takes to task the errors in the rating agencies’ models and in their psychology. There are charts, graphs, and 101 footnotes, and in the end, it’s reassuring: If Silver thinks we can avoid making the same mistakes again—well, even a skeptic like me wouldn’t bet against him. After all, he knows the odds better than I do.

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

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad