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Longreads Best of 2013: 22 Outstanding Book Chapters We Featured This Year

This year we featured not only the best stories from the web, but also great chapters from new and classic books. Here’s a complete guide to every book chapter we featured this year, both for free and for Longreads Members: Read more…

The Tigers in Beijing Wear Suits

“He read a legend of a girl whose father took pains as she should never go out into the world. But one day she wandered through a gap in the wall before her father found her. ‘What is that creature with fluffy hair that goes baa?’ ‘It is a sheep, my daughter.’ ‘And what is that creature with big dangly things that goes moo?’ ‘It is a cow, my daughter.’ ‘And what is that tall, two-legged, bearded, thrillingly handsome creature that is staring at me?’ ‘It is a tiger, my daughter. If you go close, it will devour you.’ And the girl replied, ‘I have a strange longing to be devoured.'”

-From The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel, a collection of stories spanning every genre from magical realism to historical fiction, all taking place within or around Beijing. Read more fiction.

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Writers and the Fear of Failure

“Failure was something that these novelists all kept talking about, which is a weird thing with the Nobel Prizes and endowed teaching positions and everything. It’s easy to look at them and think, you’re establishment; but most of them, I think, if they are any good, still see themselves as outsiders. They still feel like they’re one bad sentence away from failure; and they feel like they’re living on the edge, and I think that comes from the fact that they’re projecting the very limits of their imagination and mind out into the world. The things if I said to you now, they would probably be uncomfortable and socially awkward, but they’re doing it by themselves, in the dark. Yes, they have editors and publishers waiting for these books but they never know if they’ve completely gone off the reservation. And so, when you sit down with as a journalist with someone like that, and their book’s not yet out—you’re a month ahead of schedule, sometimes two—and you’re one of the early readers you develop intimacy quickly because you’re one of the first people outside of the inner circle when you’re a novelist of some success you wonder how much they get criticized by their friends anymore, and that’s a very exciting couple hours.”

How to Read a Novelist author John Freeman, in conversation with Robin Sloan, at City Lights, talking about the art of the author interview.

Read the interview

(h/t contexual_life)

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Photo: Deborah Treisman

Lust in the Golden Years

“Still, I decided, age alone was no basis for rejection. That’s exactly the basis on which I have been rejected many times. The bank, given my age, refused my request for a loan when, in my first year of renting, I found a small house I wanted to buy. The loan I could get—based on my future earning power—would have been a very small one and the down payment would have had to be enormous. On the street, the eyes of the young and not so young slid by me. I look my age. Nobody but someone even older than I wants to look my age. Nobody wants to be my age. I am too close to death for younger people to want to pay attention to me. People think it a great compliment to say to me, ‘You certainly don’t look your age.’ Well, what should my age look like? And if I did look my age, would I be unbearably ugly? Should I stay inside the rest of my life? Because I wasn’t going to look better, not ever. So, really, was I going to do the same with the men who answered my ad? No. It would take more than the age of the writer for a letter to hit the no pile. So it wasn’t Herb’s ‘Have Viagara, Will Travel’ that consigned him to the no pile; it was its brevity.”

-From A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance by Jane Juska, a memoir based on a simple ad taken out in The New York Review of Books: “BEFORE I TURN 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Read more on romance.

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Photo: killerciao, Flickr

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What Happened When We Discovered What Mattered

“Besides nearly killing me, college taught me several things. Namely, that external identity mattered. Being black mattered. It determined where to get off the Boston subway without receiving a baseball bat to the head. Being the biracial child of a single, white mother determined which whites would beg me, breezily to integrate certain spaces and which black would turn their back, stage-whispering about ‘messed-up Oreos.’ Being female determined the number of times I would cross my professors’ minds, and the number of men who would grope me, curious for integration of a sort. Being from the rural Northwest encouraged peers to smile at my accent and unfamiliarity with the New York Times. Being on financial aid meant I spent my vacations huddled in dormitory rooms with the heat turned off, my afternoons serving Faculty Club highballs to pinstripe-suited recruiters who placed their tips wearily in my hand with a whispered confession: ‘You’re probably better off where you are.’ Yes, the outside mattered, and it all mattered more than what I believed did.”

From Meeting Faith: An Inward Odyssey, the award-wining memoir by Faith Adiele, who venures to Thailand on a Harvard scholarship in order to fully understand—well, everything. Read more memoirs.

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Photo: adiele.com

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Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.

Happy holidays! Read more…

Casey N. Cep on Ariel Levy’s ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’

Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.

There is a kind of loss that our culture does not yet understand. The death of a child is the worst tragedy we can imagine, yet we lack understanding for the hundreds of thousands of women who miscarry every year. Miscarriages are an invisible loss for most women, one they suffer by themselves. Imagine the courage, then, that Ariel Levy summoned to write “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” She not only shares her experience of pregnancy, but also her miscarriage and the sorrow that followed it. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part grief narrative, the essay is remarkable from its opening memories of Levy’s own childhood to its heartbreaking ending: “But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic.”

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'Understand Your Enemy': What It Feels Like to Be Depressed

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“It always helps to understand what’s happening, and to be able to understand your enemy. It helps you cope and helps you panic less. Now that I know what depression looks like and I know what the general steps are, there’s also a progression I can look at and feel comforted by. I can feel horrible, but I know what’s happening, which takes the fear out of it. You also have that little bit of, ‘Well, this ended before, maybe it will also end this time.’

“But being depressed is still one of the most terrifying things I can imagine. After I saw the movie The Matrix, it was terrifying to imagine waking up from reality and being in this blank room and having nothing to entertain me. That’s sort of what my depression was like, living my worst nightmare of being in this room alone, and complete boredom.”

-Allie Brosh, of Hyperbole and a Half (and a book of the same name), in conversation with Jen Doll at The Hairpin. Read more on depression.

Read the story

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Photo: ruocaled, Flickr

The McRib Economy

“The one thing we can say, knowing what we know about the scale of the business, is that McDonald’s would be wise to only introduce the sandwich (MSRP: $2.99) when the pork climate is favorable. With McDonald’s buying millions of pounds of the stuff, a 20 cent dip in the per pound price could make all the difference in the world. McDonald’s has to keep the price of the McRib somewhat constant because it is a product, not a sandwich, and McDonald’s is a supply chain, not a chain of restaurants. Unlike a normal restaurant (or even a small chain), which has flexibility with pricing and can respond to upticks in the price of commodities by passing these costs down to the consumer, McDonald’s has to offer the same exact product for roughly the same price all over the nation: their products must be both standardized and cheap.”

From Willy Staley’s now-classic conspiracy theory about the McDonald’s McRib sandwich, in the Awl.

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Photo: ruocaled, Flickr

Beating Rituals and Sex Ceremonies in Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church

“The central pillar of Moon’s theology held that Eve had a dalliance with Satan in the Garden of Eden and then slept with Adam, which is how human beings were burdened with original sin. Moon also believed that people, movements, and even entire countries embodied these biblical figures. He himself was the ‘perfect Adam,’ and his mission was to help humankind reclaim its original goodness by forging a new world order led by Korea, the ‘Adam nation.’ America, the ‘archangel’ nation, would play a key role in this mission by helping Korea to rout communism, after which it would bow down to the Korean-led regime, with Moon as its king and messiah.

“Moon told his followers that they could join his sin-free bloodline by marrying a spouse of his choosing and engaging in a series of rituals. First, the newlyweds would beat each other with a bat, and then they would perform a three-day sex ceremony involving prescribed positions in front of Moon’s portrait. After the final sexual interlude—in missionary position—the bride would bow down to the groom, a confirmation that they had restored the ‘lost ideal of goodness.’”

-From Mariah Blake’s latest story in The New Republic, on the rise and fall of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Read more from The New Republic.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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