The Longreads Blog

18 Deep Interviews with Great Writers

"Frost/Nixon" — Imagine/Working Title Films

Kevin Smokler is the author of Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books you Haven’t Touched Since High School, an essay collection on the year he spent rereading 50 canonical texts from high school English class as a 39-year-old adult.

Out of everything shared in the #Longreads community, I particularly love the interviews. I even created my own hashtag (#deepinterviews) and you can find my most recent picks here.

And when it comes to authors, a great interview can completely reframe a book that you’ve read a thousand times, or give you the onramp into an writer’s work you haven’t yet experienced. Below are five of my favorite sources and recent discoveries for outstanding author interviews:

1. The Paris Review

Favorites: Take your pick. I’m particularly fond of authors you know are great talkers (Dorothy Parker, James Ellroy), who don’t show up much in MFA programs (William Gibson, Maya Angelou) and those who work in more than one genre (Joan Didion, Lillian Hellman).

2. The Millions

Favorites: Adam Mansbach, Michelle Orange and Katherine Boo.

3. AV Club

Favorites: Terry Pratchett, TV Critic Alan SepinwallJonathan Franzen.

4. eMusic Q&A

I’ve been an eMusic subscriber for years and had no idea they trafficked in audiobooks. That is until I ran across a very fine Q&A with short story writer Elissa Schappell. The audiobook of Schappell’s collection “Building Blueprints for Better Girls” was the excuse to talk with her not only about her work but the music that inspired it.

Other favorites: Eddie Huang, George Saunders, Greil Marcus, Ernie Cline.

5. Book Riot

Favorites: “Their 15 Minutiae” (with Emma Straub here) in which writers are asked about everything EXCEPT books and writing. Conceived and executed by bookseller Liberty Hardy, it’s a brilliant example of how an interview with an author should reveal the author as an interesting person who writes books not someone interesting because they write books.

Addendum: Ms. Hardy is also the creator of Paperback to the Future, a Netflix/Personal Shopper for Books kind of program. Which means she is crazy busy these days and “Their 15 Minutiae” is on temporary hold. We understand why but still say “come back soon.”

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Share your favorite interviews in the comments.

Reading List: Wread About Writing

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Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

Salinger’s life is being made into a movie. Someone said writers work best with only one kid. Print journalism is, apparently, still the domain of white men. It’s been an unfortunate week. Here are four pieces to help you refocus on craft and life and journey.

1. “I Did Not Vanish: On Writing.” (Cynthia Cruz, The Rumpus, June 2013)

A tender dream of an essay on writing, risk and choosing life.

2. “Writing About Writers.” (Bob Thompson, The American Scholar, 2009)

In this delightful essay, book reviewer Bob Thompson discusses his interview secret—the “Didion Rule.”

3. “An Interview with Poet Rebecca Lindenberg.” (Elizabeth Clark Wessel, Bomblog, February 2013)

Lindenberg is the poet behind the crucial “Love: An Index,” written after the disappearance of her partner, the poet Craig Arnold. Here, she discusses her experimentation with form, her influences and how she sees her work changing. Parts of this interview are poetry themselves.

4. “To Write About the Button.” (Rachel Aviv, Poetry Foundation, March 2008)

“[Grace Paley] was just the opposite of a Romantic poet … It didn’t interest her to be a poet with a capital P. She was an absolutely ordinary person, and she was proud of it.”

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Photo: Joshua Burnett

Longreads Guest Pick: Sarah Bruning on Women and Journalism

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Sarah Bruning is the associate features editor at Time Out New York and has contributed to Cosmopolitan, InStyle and CNTraveler.com, among other publications.

In recent months, both before and after Sheryl Sandberg released ‘Lean In,’ the media has scrutinized the issue of gender equality in the workplace across myriad industries. This week and last, a cover story in Port magazine prompted the media to focus the conversation on itself—specifically, on print magazines. A flurry of articles pounced on the article and engaged writers in a debate on the value, quality and perception of work published women’s magazines. Two pieces I thought raised particularly interesting questions were Jessica Grose’s ‘Can Women Do Serious Journalism?’ from The New Republic and ‘Here’s Why Women’s Magazines Don’t Produce “Serious” Journalism’ by Amanda Hess from Slate’s Double X blog. The writers comment on (sometimes conflicting) influences from within the industry—both on the editorial side and one the business end—as well as how readers influence the subject matter magazines decide to tackle.

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Our Longreads Member Pick: A Look Back at New York Woman Magazine

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This week a debate erupted about “serious journalism” in women’s magazines—and as part of this discussion, several magazine editors reflected fondly on the work of the late, great magazine New York Woman and its founding editor, Betsy Carter. New York Woman was published from 1986-1992; Carter went on to work for O, the Oprah Magazine and write books including Nothing to Fall Back On: The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist. She also just finished her fourth novel. 

We asked Carter to share a story from the New York Woman archives, and she chose “The Jogger D.A.,” by Victoria Balfour, from 1991. Carter explains: 

“It was the harrowing New York crime story of the late eighties and every woman’s nightmare: a twenty-nine-year old female investment banker brutally beaten, raped and left for dead in a remote area of Central Park. Eventually, five teenage boys from Harlem were found guilty and sent to jail. As a monthly magazine with a three month lead time on a story that was in the papers nearly every day, New York Woman decided to focus on ‘The Jogger D.A.,’ the prosecutor in the case, Liz Lederer, a young newcomer to the DA’s office.

“Now, twenty-two years later, the story has re-emerged with the discovery that the five young men were wrongfully convicted, and Liz Lederer has been vilified for coercing false confessions from those men. This piece revisits the hysteria that surrounded that crime, and the pressure on the woman in the DA’s office to get it solved. It’s also an example of how, at New York Woman, we tried to find our own take on a story of the moment, and how we gave it the kind of time and space it warranted.

“The goal of New York Woman was to speak to women of the city much as they would speak among themselves. We did investigative pieces, cartoons, reviews, fiction, humor—using the best writers in the city. No topic was off-limits. We tried to capture whatever was in the air and give it a unique spin that spoke to our readers.”

 
Thanks to Betsy and Victoria for sharing this story with Longreads Members.

College Longreads Pick of the Week: 'The Shady Lady,' by Danny Valdes, Dartmouth

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Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher and Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick is “The Shady Lady,” by Danny Valdes, and it comes from Dartmouth College, where professor and bestselling author Jeff Sharlet worked with his class to create 40 Towns, a new literary journalism project.

Sharlet explains:

“40 Towns is a new online magazine of literary journalism about the small towns along the Connecticut River in Vermont & New Hampshire. The writers are my students at Dartmouth College. 40 Towns grew out of my realization that every term at least one student—often more—writes a story I not only admire but actually envy, in the best sense. Work that’s just too good not to be published. I think that’s because young writers don’t know the formulas, and they don’t know what stories are ‘old’ or ‘too small’; so they make them new and life-size. The regional focus helps. Dartmouth students study overseas but they too rarely explore the reality of rural and postindustrial New England. So when they venture beyond the ‘Dartmouth bubble,’ they find themselves drawn away from imitation and towards the documentation of overlooked lives. If you take that impulse seriously, if you treat your students like the writers they’re becoming, they’ll write stories like those of 40 Towns—less polished but more vital and more exciting than much of what’s found in ‘real’ magazines.”

The Shady Lady

Danny Valdes | 40 Towns | Spring 2013 | 15 minutes (3,669 words)

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

articles read & loved no. 58

dietcoker:

Reading List: 21 Outstanding Stories from Women's Magazines and Websites

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Are women’s magazines avoiding “serious journalism”? Guess it all depends on who’s deciding what’s serious.

The New Republic asks that question in a new article, and our biggest problem with this debate (and, to be honest, the term “longform journalism”) is that it can often run everything through a male-skewed filter of what counts as “serious journalism.” We’ve seen serious storytelling in both.

The other problem is that we’re still relying on National Magazine Awards and print-only publishers to reflect the zeitgeist. I’ve mentioned that 65% of all #longreads started out in print, but we also should spotlight the work of online publishers who are pursuing in-depth storytelling.

So, here’s a start: 21 stories from women’s magazines and sites that we’ve featured on Longreads. On Twitter, Rebecca Traister is curating some of her favorite serious work. And we’d love for you to add your favorite women’s magazine stories in the comments.

Allure

The F Word, Jennifer Weiner

Marie Claire

The Big Business of Breast Cancer, Lea Goldman

Tiger Beatdown

The Percentages: A Biography of Class, Sady Doyle

O, The Oprah Magazine

‘I Will Never Know Why’, Susan Klebold

‘We Thought the Sun Would Always Shine on Our Lives’, Paige Williams

Promises of an Unwed Father, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Is Ecstasy a Viable Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?, Jessica Winter

Rookie

Higher Learning, Staff

XO Jane

How A Gun-loving West Texas Girl Learned to Fear Assault Weapons, Haley B. Elkins

It Happened To Me: My Parents Adopted a Murderer, Amity Bitzel

More

How I Lost $500,000 for Love, Aryn Kyle

Vogue

Notes on a Scandal: Jenny Sanford Vogue Interview, Rebecca Johnson

Sheryl Sandberg: What She Saw at the Revolution, Kevin Conley

Susan Rice: She’s Got Game, Jonathan Van Meter

Elle

I’m For Sale, Genevieve Smith

The Hairpin

My Brother, My Mother, and a Call Girl, Mara Cohen Marks

He’s So Unusual, Jane Marie

A Goodbye to Ambien in Dubai, Amy Schumer

The Evolution of Ape-Face Johnson, Carolita Johnson

Glamour

Relationship Violence: The Secret That Kills 4 Women a Day, Liz Brody

Jezebel

What Can a Civilian Possibly Say to a Wounded Soldier?, Chloe Angyal

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Share your picks in the comments

Reading List: Where the Witty Things Are

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Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

1. “This Wedding Season, Say Yes to Strangers: What I Learned From My Craigslist Date” and “A Brief Addendum to Our Craigslist Wedding Story.” (Lindsey Grad and Nick Hassell, The Hairpin, June 2013)

When a bridezilla demanded that Grad find a date to her wedding, she made the best of the situation—she took to Craigslist.

2. “The Amazing Atheist: The Full Interview.” (David Luna, The Annual, May 2013)

Traditional interviewing with a twist: Luna interviews T.J. Kincaid, better known as YouTube’s The Amazing Atheist. (Full disclosure: I am the editor-at-large for The Annual, a monthly humor magazine founded by my childhood friend and comedy connoisseur, Kevin Cole.)

3. “Jokes Taught Me About Sex.” (Andrew Hudgins, The Rumpus, June 2013)

To everyone who didn’t understand the dirty jokes their friends told in middle school: Hudgins understands you. And he may have had it a bit worse.

4. “And … Scene” “An Oral History of Upright Citizens’ Brigade Theater Partying and ‘Awkward Sexuality.’” (Brian Raftery, New York magazine and Vulture, 2011 and 2013)

Their former venues include a bloody delicatessen basement and a low-fi burlesque club frequented by Hasidic Jews. Upright Citizens Brigade has produced some of the wildest and funniest folks in comedy today. Here, Raftery compiles the experiences of the early days of Amy Poehler, Ed Helms, Bobby Moynihan, Horatio Sanz, Janeane Garofalo and many more.

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Photo: Marcin Wichary

Longreads Guest Pick: Todd Olmstead on 'Random Access Denied'

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Todd Olmstead is Mashable’s Associate Community Manager and an occasional music writer. He lives in Brooklyn.

My favorite longread this week is ‘Random Access Denied,’ by Sasha-Frere Jones in the New Yorker. It takes you through the mind of the reviewer, writing about a big-deal album, and peels back the curtain a bit. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that initial listening party? And yet, it’s about more than just an album. It’s about the way we listen to music. Frere-Jones, despite being a critical listener, isn’t lamenting leak culture or the rush for journalists to judge albums, though no one would blame him if he did. Rather, he presents an honest case for how we listen: Oftentimes in phases, via iterations of songs and bits of marketing, piecing together our opinions as we go. Rarely do we as listeners arrive at the finished product on album release day anymore, and that’s okay. As we come up on the summer’s next massively anticipated music release — Kanye West’s “Yeezus” — it’s worth this reflection before we rush in.

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Our Longreads Member Pick: The Skies Belong to Us (Chapter 5), by Brendan I. Koerner

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This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner‘s new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who’s been featured on Longreads in the past, explains: 
 

“On the morning of October 11, 2009, I encountered the 616-word newspaper story that would change my life. It was a New York Times report about a man named Luis Armando Peña Soltren, a former Puerto Rican nationalist who had helped hijack a Pan Am jet to Cuba in 1968. After spending the next 41 years living in Fidel Castro’s socialist ‘paradise,’ he had decided that he could no longer bear to remain apart from the wife and daughter he had left behind. So at the age of 66, Soltren had voluntarily returned to the United States. He had been arrested the moment he stepped off his plane at JFK Airport; he now faced a possible life sentence if convicted of air piracy.
           
“I was first struck by how much Soltren’s longing for his family had slowly swelled as the years flew by; it had taken him over four decades to muster the courage to risk his freedom for a chance to see his wife and daughter again. (I’ve always been drawn to tales of fugitives and exiles, who must often pay a steep psychological price in order to reinvent themselves.) But the more I thought about Soltren’s predicament, the more I was intrigued by its historical element—namely, the fact that he and two comrades had actually managed to hijack a Boeing 707 to Cuba in the first place. The New York Times piece gave the impression that such crimes were run-of-the-mill during the Vietnam Era. Given the airport security gauntlets we’re forced to endure these days, that seemed an almost unfathomable notion.
           
“Yet using a little Google-fu, I unearthed a lengthy list of dramatic skyjackings from the late 1960s and early 1970s—a time period I have romanticized ever since watching Mean Streets. There were plenty of fascinating characters who seemed to beg for deeper study, such as the Marine who fled to Rome to escape a court-martial, or the Mexican immigrant who just wanted to give a 34-minute speech about his troubles. But there was one name that tugged at my heart more than any other: Catherine Marie Kerkow.
           
“Why her? Well, for starters, she was a woman—skyjacking was almost exclusively a male pursuit. She was also high-school classmates with legendary miler Steve Prefontaine. But most important, she didn’t seem to have any obvious reason for getting involved in a spectacular hijacking—she was, by all accounts, just an aimless 20-year-old kid with no political ties, nor any history of criminality.
           
“So why did Cathy Kerkow turn her back on everything she’d ever known in order to hijack Western Airlines Flight 701? As my infinitely patient wife and kids can attest, my obsession with answering that question has now gobbled up a significant chunk of my life. The Skies Belong to Us is what I have to show for all those countless hours holed up with the keyboard, surrounded by teetering piles of marked-up documents.”

Read an excerpt here

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