The Longreads Blog

The Winners and Losers in the Book Business

“It begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of ‘basic’ publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in The New York Times Book Review or by being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.”

Daniel Menaker, in a New York magazine excerpt from his memoir, My Mistake, on life in publishing.

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Photo: gpoo, Flickr

What It's Like When You Are Desperate for a New Life

“One thing was certain: neither Youssef nor Rashid, nor Anoush nor Shahla, were going to get to the place they believed they were going. Rashid would never be reunited with his wife and sons in some quaint Australian suburb; Youssef would never see his children ‘get a position’ there; Anoush would never become an Australian policeman; Shahla would never benefit from a secular, Western education. What they had to look forward to instead — after the perilous voyage, and after months, maybe years, locked up in an isolated detention center — was resettlement on the barren carcass of a defunct strip mine, more than 70 percent of which is uninhabitable (Nauru), or resettlement on a destitute and crime-ridden island nation known for its high rates of murder and sexual violence (Papua New Guinea).

“How do you tell that to someone who has severed himself utterly from his country, in order to reach another? It was impossible. They wouldn’t believe it.”

-From a stunning 2103 New York Times story by Luke Mogelson and Joel Van Houdt, who went undercover on a boat taking refugees from Indonesia to Christmas Island in Australian territory.

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Photo: diacimages, Flickr

 

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Our picks of the week, featuring The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, Philadelphia Magazine, The New Republic and Politico Magazine, with a guest pick by Casey N. Cep. Read it here.

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side: Our Longreads Member Pick

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side

Mark Oppenheimer | The Atlantic Books | November 2013 | 88 minutes (22,700 words)

 

Longreads Members not only support this service, but they receive exclusive ebooks from the best writers and publishers in the world. Our latest Member Pick, The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, is a new story by Mark Oppenheimer and The Atlantic Books, about Eido Shimano, a Zen Buddhist monk accused of sexually exploiting students.

We’re excited to feature the first chapter below, free for everyone. If you’re not a Longreads Member, join today to receive the full story and ebook, or you can also purchase the ebook at Amazon

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EIDO SHIMANO, a Zen Buddhist monk from Japan, arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 31, 1964, New Year’s Eve. He was 32 years old, and although he had just spent four years in Hawaii, part of the time as a university student, his English was poor. Besides his clothes, he brought with him only a small statue of the Buddha and a keisaku, the wooden stick a Zen teacher uses to thwack students whose posture sags during meditation. Before flying east, he had been offered temporary lodging by a couple who lived on Central Park West. Not long after he arrived—the very next day, according to some versions of the story—he began to build his sangha, his Zen community. He did this, at first, by walking the streets of New York. The followers just came.

“It was the middle of the 1960s, full of energy,” Shimano recalled when we met for lunch in 2012. “And all I did was simply walk Manhattan from top to the bottom. And in my Buddhist robe. And many people came. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ So I said, ‘I am from Japan and doing zazen practice’”—Zen meditation. It was a kind of Buddhism, he told the curious New Yorkers. Now and again, somebody asked to tag along. Yes, Shimano told them. Of course. Before long, he had a small space to host meditation sessions, and all were invited. “Little by little, every single day, I walked entire Manhattan,” Shimano told me in his still-fractured English. “And every single day I picked up two or three people who were curious. And that was the beginning of the sangha.”

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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.

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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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David Mamet and the Art of the Closer

“When Greg Mosher directed Glengarry we had a lot of salesmen come in to talk to the cast, guys who were making five million dollars a year selling airplanes or industrial equipment. These people were super closers. There’s a whole substratum of people who are the closer, like the Alec Baldwin character in the movie of Glengarry. But the most impressive salesman was a saleswoman, a Fuller Brush lady, who came in and showed us how to do the Fuller Brush spiel. It was great. The first thing they do is offer you a choice of two free gifts, and they make sure you take one in your hand. So it’s not, Do you want one? It’s, Which would you rather have? And now that you’ve got one of their free gifts in your hand, how could you not answer their next question, which is also going to be answered—it’s going to be yes, and the next question’s going to be yes, and the next … .

“The idea was you’ve absolutely got to stick to the pitch. Have to stick with it. There was a great book called In Search of Myself by Frederick Grove, a Canadian novelist, a great writer. Nobody’s ever heard of him, but it’s a great book. It’s about the immigrant experience: coming here with nothing and what America does to that person. And one of the things he becomes is a book salesman who goes from door to door having to sell phony books. Heartbreaking, you know, that he has to do this. Heartbreaking.”

David Mamet, in the Paris Review, on salespeople and the making of Glengarry Glen Ross.

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A Former Basketball Star's New Life in Europe: Our College Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

College athletes who don’t go on to play professionally sometimes continue their career in Europe. And that’s usually the last we hear of them. But the University of Pittsburgh’s Jasper Wilson made good use of a trip to Strasbourg to profile former Pitt basketball star Ricardo Greer. Greer, now 36, does things like throw his kid a birthday party and dispute his salary with his boss. These are adult concerns, beyond dull to most college students. But Wilson saw these moments as part of his narrative, a “whatever happened to” story about a student-athlete who grew up to become a responsible adult who makes a living doing the thing college prepared him to do. Sports journalism is in desperate need of reporters who can identify fresh angles beyond the churn of conflicts manufactured by ESPN and talk radio. Wilson had to go all the way to France, but he found one.

Greer Made Career, Home Playing in France

Jasper Wilson | The Pitt News | November 6, 2013 | 12 minutes (2,928 words)

Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.


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How a City Considered 'a Poster Child of the Recession' Is Luring College Graduates Back Home

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“Rembert and Stuckert decided they would take Peace Corps assignments later that year and help with the unfolding hometown crisis in the meantime. ‘When we started Energize Clinton County, we thought, “Oh, we’ll do this for a few months and then head to the Peace Corps,”’ says Rembert. ‘Then it became six months and then it became a year.’

“‘When we were growing up, it was [considered] a failure to come back to Wilmington,’ he adds. ‘The idea was if you could leave, you should leave.’ Now, at 28, he is co-director of ECC, executive director of the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce, and a homeowner.”

– Cincinnati Magazine takes a look at the city of Wilmington, Ohio, after one of its biggest employers left and unemployment shot up to 19 percent. The city bounced back by launching a series of initiatives, including one to lure its own young people back home. See more stories about the recession.

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Photo by: Ohio Office of Redevelopment

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