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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Legendary country singer Merle Haggard died today at 79. Here are four profiles of the master, by four master writers, that follow him through the years.

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | June 2015 | 18 minutes (4,437 words)
I came here looking for something
I couldn’t find anywhere else.
Hey, I’m not tryin’ to be nobody
I just want a chance to be myself.
─Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens, “Streets of Bakersfield”
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On North Chester Avenue in Oildale, California, an 83-year-old honky-tonk named Trout’s stands down the block from a saloon with an aged western facade, and across the street from a liquor store that sells booze and Mexican candy.
Trout’s opened in 1931 to give hard-working locals a place to dance and drink and unwind to live music. During the 1950s and ’60s, local country music legends Buck Owens and Merle Haggard played Trout’s, in their own bands and others, and kept people dancing while helping popularize the raw, propulsive style known as the Bakersfield Sound. Read more…

Below is a guest reading list by Eva Holland, a writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory, whose work we’ve featured on Longreads many times in the past.
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Canada’s magazine industry recently threw its biggest party of the year: the National Magazine Awards. The Canadian event differs from the American Ellies, with more categories and more nominees per category: this year’s awards were up for grabs among 326 nominees from 80 publications, spread across 43 categories. “Gold” and “silver” winners get awards, and the balance of the nominees receive honorable mentions. That spawns the occasional joke about how in Canadian magazines, everyone gets a medal for participation, but—go ahead, call me biased (I was a nominee/honorable mention in the “society” category, for “The Forgotten Internment”)—I like the way our format lets us celebrate many different sorts of work, not just the “biggest,” most ambitious features.
Here are a few of my favorites from among this year’s winners: Read more…

Nathan Rabin | Longreads | June 2015 | 8 minutes (1,900 words)
“Working in the media in 2015 is like being part of an epic game of Musical chairs. Every day the music starts and you race madly to hold onto your fragile place in the world.”
I published that in a Facebook post after being let go from my latest employer, comparing working in pop culture media in 2015 to participating in an insane daily game of musical chairs. You try your best to keep up, to maintain the heat, the buzz, and the pageviews to stay in a game that has a disconcerting obsession with putting aging writers out to pasture to make way for younger, cheaper, more malleable replacements.
Every time you see that one of your film critic colleagues has been let go or taking a buyout (see: Lisa Schwarzbaum, who was at Entertainment Weekly for 22 years before taking a buyout, or Claudia Puig who took a USA Today buyout after reviewing films there for 15 years), you breathe a nervous sigh of relief. For that day, at least, you are safe. Read more…

Jillian Lauren | Plume | May 2015 | 11 minutes (2,636 words)
Below is an excerpt from Jillian Lauren’s memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted, as recommended by Longreads contributor Sari Botton. Read her interview with Lauren about memoir and family.
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In a one-bedroom apartment in West Orange, New Jersey, late winter 1973, my mother, Helene, is home in the middle of the day, dancing to the Hair soundtrack while cleaning the house, when she gets a call from an old college friend named Jillian. Jillian married a fertility specialist after graduation and lives in Chicago now. My mother called her years before, seeking advice. Helene is on a list for a study in experimental fertility drugs, but the process seems to be dragging on forever. After nearly four years of trying to conceive, her diagnosis is unexplained infertility. Read more…

Werner Herzog | Of Walking in Ice | University of Minnesota Press | April 2015 | 12 minutes (3,048 words)
Long out of print, then in print in only a difficult-to-find small press edition, Herzog’s brilliant, strange jewel of travel writing has been reissued this spring. It is excerpted here courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press in the U.S. and Vintage in the U.K.
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At the end of November 1974, a friend from Paris called and told me that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would probably die. I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death. I took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag with the necessities. My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them. I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself. What I wrote along the way was not intended for readers. Now, four years later, upon looking at the little notebook once again, I have been strangely touched, and the desire to show this text to others unknown to me outweighs the dread, the timidity to open the door so wide for unfamiliar eyes. Only a few private remarks have been omitted. Read more…

“As soon as the Vanity Fair cover comes out, I’m free.”
Vanity Fair has just released its cover image of Caitlyn Jenner—photographed by Annie Leibovitz, with a story by Buzz Bissinger.
The story is not yet available online, but Jenner tells Bissinger: “If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it, I would be lying there saying, ‘You just blew your entire life.’ ”

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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Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,345 words)
After getting her start in the Chicago improv scene, Kay Cannon went on to write for 30 Rock—where she was on staff from the very beginning—and New Girl, for which she was also an executive producer. Her debut screenplay, a quirky a cappella comedy, became the hit film Pitch Perfect. The sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, is in theaters now. Cannon and I spoke by phone about why a cappella is so uncool, the movie’s treatment of weight and race, and Cannon’s feelings about her own teeth.
Yeah, I kind of put it out into the universe. I’m around a lot of creative people, so you start to talk about ideas, and maybe somebody helps spark something. I actually think this one was kismet for me, because I had said something to Elizabeth Banks, who’s my friend, just in conversation. A long while later, and separate from what I’d said to her, her husband found out about this book, Mickey Rapkin’s Pitch Perfect, and thought it would make a great movie. So when I got the call from them to say, “Hey, would you be interested in writing this?,” it was just such a wonderful collision. Read more…
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