The Longreads Blog

Longreads Member Pick: After Visiting Friends (Chapter 1), by Michael Hainey

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This week’s Longreads Member Pick is the first chapter from the best-selling memoir After Visiting FriendsGQ deputy editor Michael Hainey‘s story of his father’s death and his search for answers. Hainey was 6 years old when his father, newspaperman Bob Hainey, died suddenly, but questions remained about the circumstances around his death. 

We’re proud to feature the book. Thanks to Michael and Scribner for sharing this story.

Read an excerpt here.

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Longreads Member Pick: Jason Zengerle's First Assignment for Might Magazine

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This week, we’re thrilled to feature Jason Zengerle, a contributing editor for New York magazine and GQ who has been featured on Longreads many times. Our Member Pick is Jason’s 1997 story on Michael Moore for Might magazine: “Is This Man the Last, Best Hope for Popular Liberalism in America? And, More Importantly, Does He Have a Sense of Humor?”

Jason explains:

This was the first story I wrote that could qualify as a long read—and it certainly wasn’t by choice. I’d just graduated from college and was doing an internship at The American Prospect, but I spent most of my time daydreaming about being an intern at The New Republic, which hadn’t seen fit to hire me. Hoping to change their mind, I’d routinely pitch TNR freelance stories, and one day I got the idea to write a takedown of Michael Moore: I sent in at a tightly-argued, perfect-for-TNR 1,000 words; TNR sent back its customary 20-word rejection. That would have been the end of it, but I showed the piece to my friend Todd Pruzan, who offered to show it to his friend Dave Eggers, who was then editing a little magazine called Might.

It turned out that Eggers didn’t share my dim opinion of Moore, but he did see the potential for a fun stunt. He said Might would be willing to take my 1,000 words arguing that Moore was a hack, if I’d be willing to embed them in a much longer shaggy-dog story of trying to track down and meet with Moore himself. By now, of course, the idea of pulling a Roger & Me on Michael Moore is pretty played-out, but at the time, I don’t think anyone had thought of it yet. And so on MLK Day weekend of 1997, I took a Peter Pan bus from Boston to New York, rented a gorilla suit for my unemployed actor friend Morgan Phillips, and set off on our little adventure.

The rest is history. By the end of that year, Might was out of business. Eggers was writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and on his way to becoming the voice of a generation. And I was an intern at TNR.

Read an excerpt here.

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Photo by Jimmy Hahn

Longreads Guest Pick: Digg's David Weiner

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Today’s guest pick comes from David Weiner, editorial director for Digg and a frequent contributor to the Longreads community. Here’s what he’s reading right now:

LA Review of Books

LARB really came out of nowhere for me. I was vaguely aware of them for the last year or two, but either they really started hitting their stride this past fall or I just wasn’t paying enough attention. A recent piece by Tom Dibblee, ostensibly on the history of Anheuser-Busch but really an exploration into the pitfalls of nepotism and the writer’s unabashed love for Bud Light Lime, is easily one of the best things I’ve read so far this year. It’s a bold statement, I know, but I really think the LA Review of Books is as close to the perfect literary review for this generation and these times as it gets.

Collectors Weekly

Don’t let the boring name fool you: Collectors Weekly has some of the more creative and bizarre stuff out there. The editorial arm of the site publishes one or two long reads a week, and almost all of them are worth reading from top to bottom. From an in-depth look at the return of the “Cosby sweater” (featuring an interview with the pudding-loving comedian himself) to a political history of the prosthetic limb to the tale of how an obsessive antique collector got hooked on opium, they’re constantly putting out content that scratches my itch for the weird.

Arguably, by Christopher Hitchens

Yeah, I’m that asshole reading Hitchens on the subway these days. And there’s no hiding it with the big, bright yellow cover. I was of course bummed when Hitchens died (partly because I naïvely thought he’d somehow escape his death sentence), but it’s really only after reading through this selection of his work that I realized how impactful a loss that was. The breadth of topics and his ability to make nearly any subject digestible is astounding. It’s basically like reading an opinionated Wikipedia, albeit a better and more inflammatory one.

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Would you like to be featured as a future Longreads Guest Pick? Just tell us what you’re reading.

Longreads Member Pick: Baghdad Follies, by Janet Reitman

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This week, we’re excited to feature Janet Reitman, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the author of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. “Baghdad Follies” is Reitman’s 2004 story on what it was like to be a war correspondent in Iraq. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the war, Reitman reflects on her early fears about traveling to Baghdad:

People talk a lot about what it’s like to cover a war; no one talks about what you have tell yourself in order to actually get on the plane so you can go and cover the war. ‘Baghdad Follies’ is a story about what reporters go through in covering war, and it began, in a sense, with my growing sense of panic over having signed up to cover the war. It was about an hour before I was scheduled to leave for the airport. I’d finished packing, and began to think—which right there is a killer. My thoughts went like this: I was insane. I’d covered other conflicts, but like, little ones. Africa. Haiti. This was Iraq. I’d been dying to go to Iraq. Now, I really didn’t want to go to Iraq—let alone go to Iraq to write a story about how dangerous the war had become for U.S. reporters. Which was what this story was about. 

So I called a friend who’d covered the Iraq invasion. ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to go.’

Huh?

‘I mean, no one will blame you if you back out,’ he said. ‘It’s perfectly fine if you stay home. It’s just a story.’

This of course made me feel that now I really had to go because there were also a lot of other reporters, most of who would kill for this assignment, and what was I thinking? …  ’I think I might die,’ I told him.

‘You might,’ he said. 

We debated the likelihood of getting killed or kidnapped for a bit. We decided it was 50-50 I got kidnapped, but probably only for a short while. Ultimately, we decided the best course of action was to get on the plane, fly to London, my first layover, decide if I felt good enough to keep going to Jordan, my next layover, and then, depending on how much I was freaking out, either keep on going to Baghdad, or turn back. ‘Look at it as a process,’ he said.

Two days and an untold number of tiny airplane vodka bottles later, I arrived in Baghdad and stayed a month, during which time two other colleagues, both of who had confided their own fears about doing this job, were kidnapped, and released. I told their stories in full. Then, I went home, regrouped, and returned to Iraq. Twice.

Read an excerpt here.

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Photo: Thomas Hartwell, via Wikimedia Commons

Longreads Guest Pick: Hilary Armstrong on 'The Horla'

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If you really love a story, we want to hear from you. Share your favorite stories with Longreads—old or new, nonfiction or fiction, book or magazine feature—and then tell us why you love it. If we like it, we’ll feature you and your pick. 

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Today’s guest pick comes from Hilary Armstrong, a literature student at UC Santa Barbara and Longreads intern. She’s chosen “The Horla,” the 1887 short story that you can read for free right here. Hilary writes: 

“There is nothing quite as exquisite as a fashionable French protagonist. The author’s full name sounds like eating a truffle: ‘Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant.’ I have never been to France, but this piece is, to me, a free trip there. That, mixed with subdued horror and confusion, make for a read that does not show its age.

“‘The Horla’ is Poe mixed with breezy summer days—a pleasant trip to France at its most romantic, slowly descending into Lovecraftian madness. If you are on a train, read to the middle and stop, because the ending will make you feel claustrophobic and anxious. This piece is Fantastic, meaning both the compliment and the genre, and there are few things that make me feel as classy as I do when reading fantastic literature. Enjoy.”

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Magazine, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Bloomberg Businessweek, fiction from Electric Literature, plus a guest pick from Moses Hawk.

Mary Gaitskill Recommends Saul Bellow

recommendedreading:


Vol. 8, No. 3

EDITOR’S NOTE

Years ago I had a conversation with a friend comparing John Updike and Saul Bellow. At the time I liked Updike a little better, but she said something on Bellow’s side that nearly changed my mind on the spot. “Updike sees,” she said. “He sees the world and he knows what he is looking at. Bellow looks and he doesn’t always know. Bellow is stunned by the world.” By that she meant that Bellow’s vision is deeper.

I’m not sure that she was right (I’m not sure, for one thing, that Updike is always so knowing), but I’m still thinking about what she said. This blunt and exquisite little beauty, “Something To Remember Me By,” is a small example and counter-example of what she was talking about. The narrator is a worldly old man with a sophisticated eye and a wise-ass sense of humor describing an incident from his boyhood. But for all his wise-assedness, he remains amazed by the force and plenitude of physical life: pocket lint, soiled snowbanks, a tile wall with gaps “stuffed with dirt,” the “salt, acid, dark, sweet odors” of strange pussy. Then there’s social life: the order of family and religion, the chaos of morality, crime, goofiness, love, deception and holy books, some of which hide money, others of which cost 5 cents and come apart in your hands. As his scornful older brother says, this boy “doesn’t understand fuck-all,” and through this boy’s eyes, who would?

The story takes place in depression-era Chicago and it is told almost like a fairy tale: the boy, whose mother is slowly dying, goes on the “journey” of his day at school and work. At its very start he kisses his bed-ridden mother; though he lives in a city, he then encounters hunters, steps over the blood they’ve spilt and enters a park (or wood). Later he enters a strange home to deliver flowers; in the dining room he sees a young girl lying in a coffin. Her frowning mother gestures with her fists. He sees “baked ham with sliced bread” on the drainboard, a “jar of French’s mustard and wooden tongue depressors to spread it;” there’s a dead body, but it’s these daily things that make him say “I saw and I saw and I saw.” Under this mortal enchantment the boy then goes to see his uncle and instead meets another girl, also supine, but naked and very much alive. The boy forgets his mother and is falsely seduced. He is humbled, does service, is punished. There is mercy and knowledge.

Actually punishment comes last, but mercy and knowledge have more power—which would say that my friend was wrong, that Bellow does look and know. Except that the knowledge of the story, which comes from the world of objects and cheap books, plus people who make fun, speechify, cheat and punch hell out of the kid—this knowledge is peculiar; blunt, yet hard to read, right in your face, but off the color spectrum.

“That was when the measured, reassuring, sleep-inducing turntable of days became a whirlpool, a vortex darkening towards the bottom.”

“I myself know the power of nonpathos, in these low, devious days.”

The boy turned old man thinks both these thoughts close on each other; his knowing and his amazed unknowing come together and fall apart again.

Mary Gaitskill

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Longreads Member Pick: Graveyards, by Scott McClanahan

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This week’s Longreads Member pick is “Graveyards,” a short story by Scott McClanahan about a family visit to the cemetery. The piece was published last year in Harper Perennial’s Forty Stories collection, and it will appear in McClanahan’s forthcoming book Crapalachia, a portrait of growing up in rural West Virginia, published by Two Dollar Radio.

Read an excerpt here.

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Longreads Member Exclusive: Contest of Words, by Ben Lerner

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This week’s Longreads Member pick is “Contest of Words,” Ben Lerner‘s October 2012 essay from Harper’s Magazine. Lerner is author of the award-winning 2011 novel Leaving the Atocha Station and three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw and Mean Free Path.

The story comes recommended by Matt O’Rourke, a longtime Longreads community member and creative director for Wieden and Kennedy in Portland (he also runs the Twitter account @fuckyesreading). Matt writes:

Ben Lerner has such an easy way with words that you almost lose sight of the fact that the guy is clearly a genius. He takes incredibly complex observations, and delivers them in a way that makes you feel like he’s hardly working at it at all.

‘Contest of Words,’ which I discovered in Harper’s last year, is about Lerner’s experience with language as a member of his high school debate team. It’s a piece of writing I re-read every few weeks, as a reminder that the smartest person in the room is only relevant if they can get everyone else to listen. I hope you enjoy the story as much as I have.

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Resurfaced: Peter Perl's 'The Spy Who's Been Left in the Cold' (1998)

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We’re excited to introduce a recurring series in which we work with publishers to dig up notable stories from their archives that were previously unpublished on the web. And we’re especially excited to kick this off with The Washington Post

Today’s piece is “The Spy Who’s Been Left in the Cold,” a 1998 Washington Post Magazine story by Peter Perl, who just announced he’s retiring from the paper after 32 years. Here’s more from the Post’s Marc Fisher:

“In the Washington Post newsroom in recent years, Peter Perl has been the official mensch, the go-to guy both for reporters trying to figure out their career paths and for editors struggling with how to keep aggressive and smart journalism at the fore even in an ever-tougher economic environment. But beyond his avuncular manner and wise counsel, what made Perl one of the newsroom’s most respected figures was what he’d done for the first quarter century of his time at the paper: Perl, who is retiring from The Post shortly, was a master storyteller, a specialist in the art of profiling people who didn’t want to be profiled and public figures who were assumed by journalists and readers alike to be overexposed. Perl drilled down to the psychological roots of former Washington Mayor Marion Barry’s struggle between the morality of fighting for the poor and the amorality of doing whatever it took to get his way. He discovered and sensitively revealed the hurt child beneath D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams’ oddly distant public persona. And in this finely-etched, subtly-shaded profile of a man he didn’t even get to meet, Perl shows us the many facets of Jonathan Pollard, the American intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel and is serving a life sentence in a federal prison. It is a story of deceit and betrayal, but also of devotion and righteousness. It is a typical Peter Perl tale, ignoring the easy conclusions and trusting that readers will come with him on a journey into the grey zone where all the most fascinating stories live.”

Read the story here.