The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson | Cast Away: True Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis | The New Press | September 2016 | 20 minutes (5,452 words)
Below is an excerpt from Cast Away, by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson. This story comes recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.
* * *
This war is none of my business.
Majid Hussain didn’t know who would turn up on his doorstep first: Colonel Gaddafi’s foot soldiers following orders to purge Libya of its migrant workforce, or vengeful rebels wielding Kalashnikovs and the conviction that everyone with black skin deserved to be lynched.
For months the Nigerian teenager had watched on television in Tripoli as rebels not much older than himself stormed through the desert in their cheap sunglasses and mismatching camouflage, and it had seemed inconceivable that this shabby army of the disaffected could pose a threat to Muammar Gaddafi’s calm and ordered capital. He had heard rumours that all Africans from south of the Sahara were at risk of attack from rebels seeking mass punishment for the few who had colluded with the regime – but surely these were just rumours? Every day Majid still went to work and returned home every evening to his reliable air-conditioning and his satellite TV. The rebellion had remained remote from his life, and he wanted it to stay that way.
This war is none of my business, he thought. I have already seen my own country torn apart by old hatreds – I don’t need to see that again.
Majid and his housemate Ali had laughed off reports on CNN and the BBC about fighting on the outskirts of Tripoli, and they didn’t want to believe the news that Gaddafi was bombing civilians in Benghazi. It was all Western propaganda, the two Nigerians convinced each other. Even when a spokesman for Gaddafi warned on public radio that they would flood Europe with migrants if there was any Western military action, the young men remained unconcerned. Read more…

Franz Nicolay | The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar | July 2016 | 25 minutes (6,916 words)
Below is an excerpt from The Humorless Ladies of Border Control, by Franz Nicolay, the keyboardist in The Hold Steady. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.
* * *
You don’t travel for comfort; you travel to justify the daily discomfort, … the nagging doubt, sadness, weariness, the sense of being a stranger in a world.
Our roommate on the sleeper train from L’viv to Kyiv was a stocky, ham-fisted forty-five-year-old veterinarian. A friend of his, he told us, had a visa to America in the 1980s, but he got caught stealing from the grain quota and now can’t go to America ever. He had conspiracy theories and opinions he was eager to share: they didn’t kill bin Laden, it could have been “any tall guy with a beard”—for that matter, I, Franz, look a little like bin Laden, don’t I? And we haven’t seen that much of Michelle Obama recently, have we? If there’s not a trumpet, it’s not jazz. Vitamin C doesn’t work, all you need is raspberry tea with lemon and the love of a good woman. Everyone’s been there— first beer, first guitar, first girl.
He stripped down to what would once have been called his BVDs, nearly obscured by his hairless belly, and snored all night. When we awoke, he was gone, replaced by an older man with a lined face and Clint Eastwood stolidity. “He has the saddest face I’ve ever seen,” Maria said. He slept first, facedown and fully clothed; then, when I returned from the bathroom, he was sitting upright, bag beside him, staring out the window. He never said a word.
I was a musician then, often traveling alone, sometimes with my new wife, Maria. I hadn’t always traveled alone: for years I had been a member of the kind of bands who traveled in marauding, roving packs, like “Kerouac and Genghis Khan,” as the songwriter Loudon Wainwright once put it. First there was the nine-piece circus-punk orchestra World / Inferno Friendship Society, a monument to pyrrhic, self-defeating romanticism and preemptive nostalgia that still haunts me like a family lost in a war. But I had ambitions, and World / Inferno had “underground phenomenon” baked into the concept. So I jumped to a rising neo–classic rock band called the Hold Steady, which became, for a few years, one of the biggest bands in what is, for lack of a term of representation rather than marketing, called “indie rock.” We opened for the Rolling Stones and played the big festivals and bigger television shows. Our victory-lap touring constituted an almost audible sigh of relief that we’d finally arrived— we’d never have to work a day job again. Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Amber Cortes | The Stranger | October 2016 | 15 minutes (3,636 words)
To celebrate its 25th anniversary, we’re proud to partner with The Stranger in featuring their oral history about the early days of the pioneering (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) independent newspaper. Read more from their 25th anniversary celebration here.In July of 1991, Tim Keck moved to Seattle from Madison, Wisconsin, to launch a newspaper. He’d recruited a handful of friends and colleagues from the Onion, the satirical weekly he’d cofounded and recently sold (yes, that Onion), to help him conceive a new, irreverent publication—one which sent-up the weekly newspaper format and had equal doses of reporting and criticism as it did satire.
Among those who joined him were James Sturm, Peri Pakroo, Nancy Hartunian, Wm. Steven Humphrey, Christine Wenc, Johanna “Jonnie” Wilder, Matt Cook, Andy Spletzer, and, later, Dan Savage.
Armed mostly with hubris, a few thousand dollars, and three slow-as-fuck computers, they initially set their sights on appealing to University of Washington students, but quickly found their real audience among the queers and weirdos who (used to) populate Capitol Hill. Their coverage of Seattle was necessarily informed by their perspective as outsiders, transplants… (are you really going to make me say it?) strangers. Read more…

Judy Tsuei | Longreads | September 2016 | 14 minutes (3571 words)
“140 pounds,” my midwife announces with a smile. “That’s a healthy starting point for your height.”
Even in recovery after fifteen years battling bulimia and compulsive overeating, the word “healthy” still feels like a euphemism for “fat.”
“You’re at nine weeks today,” she continues, talking to me while typing notes into her laptop. “How’s the morning sickness? Are you experiencing any nausea?”
Before I can answer, I make a rapid gesture and then run to the bathroom. I barely have time to lock the door behind me before dropping to my knees in front of the toilet. My stomach retches. I start gagging. Sweat seeps from every pore of my body.
Please, I plead with myself. I don’t want to do this. Please. Please. Please.
I lean over the toilet, gasping. I can’t stop it from happening. My breath comes in rapid gallops between moments of vomiting saliva, mucus, and water. I haven’t been able to eat all day, so there’s no food to purge.
More gasps. More heaving.
After a few minutes, I sink onto the familiar coolness of tiles beneath my shins. Kneeling. Praying.
Five years ago, I made a vow never to purge again. But, in preparing for a new life to form, I have to meet my old one head-on. Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week.
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Colin Dickey | Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places | Viking | October 2016 | 10 minutes ( 4,181 words)
Below is an excerpt from Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. In this excerpt, Dickey sleeps over in the purportedly haunted Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, Missouri, the historic home of a 19th-century beer brewer whose suicide sent a family into a tailspin of horrific tragedy. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers.
* * *
It is, quite literally, a dark and stormy night. A summer storm has settled over St. Louis: gray-black clouds turning the air yellowish and electric, the rain pulsing down in waves. The sprint from the parking lot to the front door of the Lemp Mansion—no more than fifty feet—leaves you soaked. The thunder is following on the heels of the lightning; it is right above us. In the bar the stained glass portraits of William Lemp, Jr., and his first wife, Lillian Lemp—the Lavender Lady—flicker to life from the lightning outside with disturbing frequency, the accompanying thunder coming fast afterward. It is the perfect night for a ghost hunt: the air already electric, everyone already a bit on edge. In his portrait, William Lemp looks prematurely old; the glass artist has added shading to his face to give the appearance of three dimensions, but the result instead is that he appears haggard, black pits around his eyes, deep creases in his skin.
As if he knows he’s going to die.
The owners of the Lemp Mansion seem quite content to capitalize on the building’s reputation. Ghost hunters come here regularly to take tours, use KII meters and ghost boxes, and record for EVPs (electronic voice phenomenon) and orbs. I’m here for one such tour, led by a local ghost-hunting group. I’m also here to spend the night, since the Lemp Mansion operates as a bed-and-breakfast—though I won’t be able to get into my room until 11 p.m. My room, the Elsa Lemp Suite, is itself part of the tour: the most haunted room in this most haunted house. Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Michael Brick | Longreads | September 2016 | 16 minutes (4,136 words)
In December, two months before cancer killed him, our friend Michael Brick sent a few pals an email.
“I’m entrusting to your care these two unpublished works,” he wrote. “I’m proud of them both. My great hope, of course, is to share them with the world someday.”
One was a manuscript for a fantastical picture book called “Natalie Had a Bicycle” that he had written with his son, John-Henry. He said it had been roundly rejected by every agent in America. That’s a damn shame.
The other was a word doc called, simply, “Ruback.”
It’s a long-in-the-making memoir of the failings of newspaper journalism. Or a newspaper journalist. Or, really, of one tiny story: a “Portraits of Grief” dispatch on the life of a New York firefighter. What Brick had written in 123 words, in an effort to efficiently encapsulate the life of a 50-year-old man who died on Sept. 11, came to haunt him. This piece is his effort to correct the record, and maybe find peace.
“All lives end unfinished,” he writes in the story. How true.
“I don’t have any specific instructions for you,” he wrote to his friends. “You may read them, of course.”
Originally slated for Harper’s September issue, the piece never ran. We’re pleased to share it with the world here.
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