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The first in a two-part series deconstructing the case against Michael Morton, who was convicted in 1987 of killing his wife but has maintained his innocence:

Michael was breathing hard. ‘Is my son okay?’ he asked.

‘He’s fine,’ Boutwell said. ‘He’s at the neighbors’.’

‘How about my wife?’

The sheriff was matter-of-fact. ‘She’s dead,’ he replied.

Boutwell led Michael into the kitchen and introduced him to Sergeant Don Wood, the case’s lead investigator. ‘We have to ask you a few questions before we can get your son,’ Boutwell told him. Dazed, Michael took a seat at the kitchen table. He had shown no reaction to the news of Christine’s death, and as he sat across from the two lawmen, he tried to make sense of what was happening around him. Sheriff’s deputies brushed past him, opening drawers and rifling through cabinets. He could see the light of a camera flash exploding again and again in the master bedroom as a police photographer documented what Michael realized must have been the place where Christine was killed. He could hear officers entering and exiting his house, exchanging small talk. Someone dumped a bag of ice into the kitchen sink and stuck Cokes in it. Cigarette smoke hung in the air.

“The Innocent Man, Part One.” — Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly

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The Longreads Membership: What You're Paying For, and Why We're Doing It

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By now you’ve probably seen our Longreads Member Picks—a mix of outstanding magazine stories, book chapters and more from the best writers and publishers in the world.

You may have already subscribed to Longreads—and if you have, thank you. Your financial support is what allows us to keep Longreads running every day, offering great recommendations and supporting this growing community (for more than four years now).

Longreads is committed to building an independent platform that helps readers find something wonderful to read, and helps writers and publishers to reach a broader audience.

We also realized that simply promoting a story doesn’t change the economics of writing and reporting. It costs a lot of money to fund that work, so we wanted to create a way for the Longreads community to help pay writers and publishers. That’s what the Longreads Membership does.

So when you subscribe to Longreads, you 1.) help us (the editors) maintain our daily service, 2.) receive a stream of stories, served up every week in email and ebook formats, and 3.) help pay the writers and publishers who are featured as Member picks.

If you are a book or magazine publisher, or a self-published author, we’re paying to license rights to new and classic magazine stories and book excerpts. If you have a story that you’d like to share with this community, email me at mark@longreads.com

Thanks everyone for your support.

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[Fiction] An aunt recalls how she met her husband. (From Mo Yan, 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.)

‘If you want to know why I married Hao Dashou, I have to start with the frogs. Some old friends got together for dinner on the night I announced my retirement, and I wound up drunk – I hadn’t drunk much, less than a bowlful, but it was cheap liquor. Xie Xiaoque, the son of the restaurant owner, Xie Baizhua, one of those sweet-potato kids of the ‘63 famine, took out a bottle of ultra-strong Wuliangye – to honour me, he said – but it was counterfeit, and my head was reeling. Everyone at the table was wobbly, barely able to stand, and Xie Xiaoque himself foamed at the mouth till his eyes rolled up into his head.’

“Frogs.” — Mo Yan, Granta

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Longreads Member Exclusive: How the Light Gets In

Our latest Exclusive comes from author Elissa Schappell, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and co-founder and editor at large of Tin House, which is where she published “How the Light Gets In”—a story about a life changed by seizures. See it here.

p.s. You can support Longreads—and get more exclusives like this—by becoming a member.

“The Beautiful Game.” — Patrick Symmes, Outside

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[Fiction] A father uses his lottery winnings for an extravagant birthday party for his teenage daughter:

September 3rd: Having just turned forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax. Exciting to think how in one year, at rate of one page/day, will have written three hundred and sixty-five pages, and what a picture of life and times then available for kids & grandkids, even greatgrandkids, whoever, all are welcome (!) to see how life really was/is now. Because what do we know of other times really? How clothes smelled and carriages sounded? Will future people know, for example, about sound of airplanes going over at night, since airplanes by that time passé? Will future people know sometimes cats fought in night? Because by that time some chemical invented to make cats not fight? Last night dreamed of two demons having sex and found it was only two cats fighting outside window. Will future people be aware of concept of ‘demons’? Will they find our belief in ‘demons’ quaint? Will ‘windows’ even exist? Interesting to future generations that even sophisticated college grad like me sometimes woke in cold sweat, thinking of demons, believing one possibly under bed? Anyway, what the heck, am not planning on writing encyclopedia, if any future person is reading this, if you want to know what a ‘demon’ was, go look it up, in something called an encyclopedia, if you even still have those!

Am getting off track, due to tired, due to those fighting cats.

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries.” — George Saunders, The New Yorker

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Those Summers, These Days

A woman who grew up near her grandmother’s farm with a large extended family recalls her childhood, and how things will be different for her children and their children as her family shrinks. (A Best American Essays 2012 notable essay):

This shift is evident in our family.  Counting spouses and not counting our cousins’ kids, I have 17 aunts and uncles and 22 cousins on my side of the family, and Brandon has ten aunts and uncles and 16 cousins on his side.  On the other hand, my three kids have two uncles and an aunt on my side, with hopes of cousins, someday, and an aunt and uncle and two cousins on my husband’s side.  And that’s it.  Our family is gradually shrinking.

As more families choose to have two or fewer children, the population is beginning to plateau.  I don’t know what that means economically, but I know for me it means a growing void.  As our family ages and our grandparents pass away, there will come a time when the large extended family will no longer get together for every holiday; with the patriarchs and matriarchs alive only in our jokes and memories, we will eventually begin to celebrate special occasions with our more immediate family.  Fifty of my grandma’s descendants attended her 80th birthday party.  Today, celebrating my dad’s birthday with just his offspring would include five children and three grandchildren.

“Those Summers, These Days.” — Sarah M. Wells, Ascent

“Lost in Space.” — Mike Albo, Narratively

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“The Tragedy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi.” — Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, New York Review of Books

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An illiterate child from a small town in India falls asleep on a train and ends up lost in Calcutta, unable to find his way back home. Twenty-five years later, while living with his adoptive family in Australia, he locates his lost hometown using memories and Google Earth:

This was it, the name of the station where he was separated from his brother that day, a couple hours from his home. Saroo scrolled up the train track looking for the next station. He flew over trees and rooftops, buildings and fields, until he came to the next depot, and his eyes fell on a river beside it—a river that flowed over a dam like a waterfall.

Saroo felt dizzy, but he wasn’t finished yet. He needed to prove to himself that this was really it, that he had found his home. So, he put himself back into the body of the barefoot five-year-old boy under the waterfall: ‘I said to myself, Well, if you think this is the place, then I want you to prove to yourself that you can make your way back from where the dam is to the city center.’

Saroo moved his cursor over the streets on-screen: a left here, a right there, until he arrived at the heart of the town—and the satellite image of a fountain, the same fountain where he had scarred his leg climbing over the fence 25 years before.

“A Home at the End of Google Earth.” — David Kushner, Vanity Fair

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