Author Archives

Longreads
The staff of Longreads.

Kalyn Heffernan is 24 years old, weighs 53 pounds, and measures three feet, six inches tall. She’s light enough to carry, compact enough to hide under a winter coat, and is sometimes mistaken for a child. But Kalyn, who has the brittle-bone disability osteogenesis imperfecta, is hardly innocent, precious, or inconspicuous: The Colorado native dabbles in graffiti, cusses gloriously, and has a septum piercing. She raps, scribbles rhymes, and has been known to cover the viral YouTube video “My Vagina Ain’t Handicapped.” If you ask—and even if you don’t—she’ll eagerly lift her shirt to show off the words “CRIP LIFE” inked on her stomach, an homage to Tupac Shakur’s THUG LIFE tattoo.

Kalyn is the founding member of Wheelchair Sports Camp, a fledgling jazz-hop trio cheekily named after a week-long youth-disability program she attended growing up and, by her own admission, “corrupted.”

“Wheelchair Sports Camp’s Crip Life.” — Camille Dodero, Village Voice

More from Dodero: “Live from Insane Clown Posse’s Gathering of the Juggalos.” Village Voice, Sept. 8, 2010

Writer Elliott Holt: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Elliott Holt is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer who is almost finished with her first novel. (See her Longreads page here.)

***

I love short stories, so I decided my picks should be mostly short fiction. It’s no secret that the likes of The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, One Story and Tin House publish great fiction, but there are also a lot of excellent online literary magazines, so I wanted to include work from a couple of them here. I had to include one story from The New Yorker, though, because Alice Munro is one of my favorite writers.

***

Reese Okyong Kwon, “Stations of the Sun” in Kenyon Review 

Alice Munro, “Gravel” in The New Yorker

Nahid Rachlin, “Bijan” in Guernica

Laura van den Berg, “Mansion” in Guernica

Colson Whitehead, “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia” in Grantland

Photo credit: Rebecca Zeller

In my study of African American history, the Civil War was always something of a sideshow. Just off center stage, it could be heard dimly behind the stories of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr., a shadow on the fringe. But three years ago, I picked up James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and found not a shadow, but the Big Bang that brought the ideas of the modern West to fruition. Our lofty notions of democracy, egalitarianism, and individual freedom were articulated by the Founders, but they were consecrated by the thousands of slaves fleeing to Union lines, some of them later returning to the land of their birth as nurses and soldiers. The first generation of the South’s postbellum black political leadership was largely supplied by this class.

“Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic

See more #longreads on civil wars

Slate's Dan Kois: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Dan Kois is a senior editor at Slate and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. (See his Longreads page here.)

***

First of all, I am not even going to bother listing John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Disney World piece because it was obviously the best thing anywhere this year but everyone agrees and has read it anyway. Here is the link just in case. But this doesn’t count as one of my five.

• I thought “The Lost Yankee,” by Bill Pennington in the Times, was really quite extraordinary. The Yankees signed Japanese pitcher Kei Igawa in 2007 to a $46 million, 5-year contract. Then they sent him to the minors after several disappointing outings, where he has pitched ever since, in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, cashing gigantic paychecks and setting minor league records. His contract just expired and I hope someone else gives him a chance.

• My favorite book review of the year was Elaine Blair’s good-hearted, incredibly funny review of Nicholson Baker’s “House of Holes” in the New York Review of Books. Best part: When she advises parents to just sneak a copy to their kids, and soon. “You will have to make sure that they accidentally stumble on it soon, before they find the Internet, if they are to have a fighting chance at being wholesome and delightful fuckers instead of hopelessly depraved ones like yourself.”

• I’m really happy that many outlets (like The A.V. Club, Vulture, and others) now publish long, in-depth interview transcripts, on the grounds that someone out there is interested in them. I particularly loved this Q&A, on Ain’t It Cool News, with Steven Soderbergh, about Contagion but also about ten million other things, like his annoyance when other people’s movies go over budget.

• Any music fan who missed it the first time around should be sure to read Chris Richards’ awesome WaPo story about trying to track down George Clinton’s lost Mothership in the woods of Prince George’s County.

• And I’m pretty sure I did not laugh as long and as hard at anything anyone wrote this year as I did at “Dressing Up My Boyfriend As Marc Anthony In His Terrible Kohl’s Clothes,” by Sarah Miller, in The Awl.

Hunter Thompson lobbied Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone to hire George, who had been writing freelance music reviews. In a letter to George, Thompson wrote, “I want Wenner to have the experience of dealing with someone more demonstrably crazy than I am—so that he’ll understand that I am, in context, a very reasonable person.”

Wenner apparently felt one Hunter Thompson was all he needed, so George headed instead to the Boston Phoenix, that town’s version of the Village Voice. It was the ideal place for his freewheeling reviews of poetry, books, and music. His passion, however, was sports.

“The Two-Fisted, One-Eyed Misadventures of Sportswriting’s Last Badass.” — Alex Belth, Deadspin

See more #longreads from Deadspin

Featured Longreader: Karolina Waclawiak, deputy editor at The Believer. See her story picks from The Days of Yore, Senses of Cinema, and a wealth of picks from The Believer on her #longreads page.

She says to be sure to check out “In the Atomic City.” Because, “It’s super, super awesome.”

[Part Three of “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer.”]

It did not take long for Dr. Ann McKee to see the telltale brown spots near the outer surface of Boogaard’s brain — the road signs of C.T.E. She did not know much about Boogaard other than that he was a 28-year-old hockey player. And the damage was obvious.

“Derek Boogaard: A Brain ‘Going Bad’.” — John Branch, New York Times

See Part One here. And Part Two here.

Lapham's Quarterly editor Michelle Legro: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Michelle Legro, longtime Longreader, is an editor at Lapham’s Quarterly.

***

“The Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Paul Ford (The Morning News)

I doubt there are many people that will remember the December blizzard of 2010 better than Paul Ford, limping through the snow with his wife to their IVF procedure without any form of transportation and only a few hours on the clock to make a baby the new-fashioned way. 

“American Marvel,” by Edith Zimmerman (GQ)

We’ve all been there. Except usually, a movie star isn’t there with you. I had a friend tell me that a fellow writing teacher was using this piece as an example of how NOT to write a celebrity profile. When was the last time I remember reading any kind of celebrity profile? Oh yeah, this time.

“How Carrots Became the New Junk Food,” by Douglas McGray (Fast Company)

First we make the carrots small, then we make them cute, but how do we make them sexy? I love this attempt to make carrots, aka “3D Orange Laser Blasters” into an extreme snack celebrity. 

“Taming the Wild”, by Evan Ratliff (National Geographic)

Sometimes I weigh how much I like a piece with how much it affects my daily life. In this case, I spent a good month weighing the pros and cons of moving to a state where it was legal to own a domesticated fox imported from Siberia. Pros: Wildlife snuggles. Cons: Pretty much everything else. 

And finally, the very first best thing I read in 2011:

“The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist”, Rich Schapiro (Wired)

The most incredible, most true, most heisty read of the year. Haven’t read it? There is a bomb around your neck. I am going to force you to go read it right now. 

You might wonder why the best writer in American journalism would have fake poop as his Twitter icon. Or spend an inordinate amount of time making prank phone calls. Or concern himself with monkey sex, fake sneezes, or bacon taped to cats. As he once put it in a column, “I mostly write about underpants.”

Weingarten is not a horrible person, but there may be something wrong with him.

“How Do You Explain Gene Weingarten?” — Tom Bartlett, Washingtonian

See more #longreads from Washingtonian

The broadcast started at eight-thirty, with final predictions from the booth. Gruden looked solemn. “I think the Kansas City Chiefs are in real trouble tonight,” he said.

Jaworski looked at Gruden and Mike Tirico. “You guys can call me crazy, but I’m excited about Tyler Palko tonight,” he said. Tirico giggled, but Gruden just squinted.

“Monday Night Lights: Coach Jon Gruden on ‘Monday Night Football’” — Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker

See more #longreads about football