The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Elizabeth Bachner | Hip Mama | June 2015 | 8 minutes (1,874 words)
This essay, recommended by Longreads contributor Maud Newton, is by the writer Elizabeth Bachner and appears in the current issue of Hip Mama magazine. The first issue of Hip Mama was published in December, 1993, by the founding editor, Ariel Gore, as a multicultural forum for radical mothers. Our thanks to Elizabeth Bachner and Hip Mama Magazine for allowing us to reprint this essay here. Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Matthew Beaumont | Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London | Verso | March 2015 | 37 minutes (10,129 words)
Below is a chapter excerpted from Nightwalking, by Matthew Beaumont, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. In this excerpt, Beaumont describes the complex and transgressive act of nightwalking in London during the 16th & 17th centuries. He paints a vivid picture of the city at night and explains what nightwalking revealed about class, status, and the political and religious leanings of those who practiced it. The plight of the jobless and homeless poor in this era, which also witnessed the birth of capitalism, are dishearteningly familiar today.
Beaumont draws on a variety of compelling sources, which have been linked to when possible, such as Beware the Cat, a puzzling English proto-novel that features a man who attains cat-like superpowers, The Wandring Whore and The Wandring Whore Continued, and A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, which defines, among other things, the 24 types of vagabond. Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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With the publication of my second book, ‘Little Known Facts,’ lightning seemed to strike. This novel was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and went on to receive other good reviews. Not long after ‘Little Known Fact’s’ publication date, Bloomsbury acquired a second novel and a story collection. The advance for these two manuscripts was $10,000 more than what they paid for ‘Little Known Facts.’
The open secret is that literary fiction does not pay big dividends. At least not to most of its writers and publishers. Even with excellent reviews, there’s no guarantee that your book will sell. ‘Little Known Facts’ had a mid-five-figure advance and it has earned about three-fifths of it back so far. It was reviewed in several major-market newspapers and won a couple of awards. I did readings in cities all over the country to promote it, wrote many guest blog posts, and all told, it has probably sold about 23,000 copies. That figure includes paperback, hardcover, and e-books. Not bad, but by the publishing world’s yardstick, not a standout, not at all.
— Author Christine Sneed, writing in the Billfold about the difficulty of earning a living as a writer of literary fiction—even with multiple book deals.

Jessica Gross | Longreads | June 2015 | 18 minutes (4,479 words)
In 1980, 29-year-old Christopher Kimball enrolled in a cooking class and was so frustrated by his instructors’ inability to answer his questions that he started his own cooking magazine. Cook’s Magazine, since reborn as Cook’s Illustrated, presents a small number of recipes refined through extraordinarily rigorous testing by the cooks in Kimball’s 2,500-square-foot kitchen lab. The bimonthly magazine—which features only black-and-white illustrations—eschews a focus on “lifestyle” in favor of treating cooking as a discipline and a craft. Over the years, Cook’s Illustrated has garnered a large and loyal readership—and spawned an empire, including a second magazine, Cook’s Country; many cookbooks; and two television shows. “America’s Test Kitchen,” the most popular cooking show on public television, is currently in its 15th season. We spoke by phone about what it takes to write a crystal-clear recipe, the Cook’s Illustrated business model, and Kimball’s not-quite success getting his own kids in the kitchen.
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That’s great—I should do that with my test cooks.
Yeah, that’s the essence of it—and it’s made even more difficult because every home cook’s kitchen is different. The cookware is different, the stovetop is different, the oven is different and they almost never use the right ingredients, or they substitute ingredients and leave ingredients out. So the variables beyond your control are substantial. In your case, if you have a set of Legos on a desk, you know exactly what the components are. In our case, they don’t have all the Legos. They substituted some other puzzle game for half the Legos and they aren’t going to actually build a whole building; they’ll leave out parts of it. And they won’t read your directions entirely. They’ll read parts of it but not fully. So it’s more like, “Write It, Kinda Do It.” Read more…

Nina MacLaughlin | Hammer Head, W.W. Norton | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,383 words)
The following is an excerpt from Nina MacLaughlin’s memoir Hammer Head—the story of MacLaughlin’s journey out of a drag-and-click job at a newspaper and into a carpentry apprenticeship. In this section MacLaughlin strikes out on her own to craft bookshelves for her father and meditates on the relationship between writing and carpentry, and learning to build with wood instead of words.
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The maple leaves dropped, the temperature fell, and we slipped into winter. After the skylight, in the slowing of the year, Mary planned to pause the progress on her third-floor office space in favor of redoing a bathroom downstairs, the one with the paintbrushes in the tub and the crumbling walls.
I swung by her place to pick up the last check she owed me before we took our annual break. She walked me through her bathroom plan.
“Give me a call if you want some help,” I said.
“We’ll see if I can afford you. I’m scared shitless about how much the plumbing is going to cost.”

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Alexander Chee | Apology Magazine | Winter 2014 | 19 minutes (4,822 words)
This essay by novelist Alexander Chee first appeared in Apology magazine’s third issue (Winter 2014). Apology is a semiannual print journal of art, interviews and literature, created by ex-Vice editor-in-chief Jesse Pearson. The fourth issue is available for preorder. Our thanks to Alexander Chee and Apology for allowing us to reprint this essay here.
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How could you, my friends would ask, when I told them. How could you work for someone like him? Do you ever want to just pick up a knife and stab him in the neck? Poison his food?
You would be a hero, one friend said.
I did not want to stab him, and I did not want to poison him. From our first meeting, it was clear, he was in decline. And as for how could I, well, like many people, I needed the money. Read more…
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