Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Jan. 3, 2014

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist.

Barry Yeoman | The New New South, Creatavist | December 2013 | 52 minutes (13,100 words)
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to feature “The Gutbucket King,” a new ebook by journalist Barry Yeoman and The New New South, about the tumultuous life of blues singer Little Freddie King, who survived stabbings, alcoholism and personal tragedy. You can read a free excerpt below.
Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and ebook, or you can purchase the story at Creatavist or Amazon.
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He stood at the kitchen window waiting. He had memorized everything around him: the pine walls, bare of wallpaper or even paint; the wardrobe where his widowed mother kept her churn for making buttermilk; the stove fueled by the firewood he cut each morning; the two coolers, one for dairy and the other for cakes and pies. He had branded them into his memory, these artifacts of a life that, after today, would no longer be his. Read more…
The author, on teaching a literature class at Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York:
As I mentioned earlier, the class I taught at Auburn was on existentialist literature, with works by Camus, Kafka, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on the syllabus. Existentialism, I told my students, and winced as I heard myself say it, is a “philosophy of the streets.” It was an overly dramatic statement, but I meant that existentialism is a style of thinking grounded in the messy ambiguities of life. One thing that distinguished philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard from the philosophers who preceded them was a willingness to reflect seriously about human emotions that, while not wholly neglected in the Western philosophical tradition, had tended to take a backseat to reason: emotions such as love, terror, pity, revenge, grief and joy. The prisoners in my class had an entire grammar of experiences to draw from, a familiarity with the courts, for instance, which gave them a special insight into Kafka’s The Trial, or a knowledge of what it means to be an outsider, which made them sympathize with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and they quickly warmed to the idea of drawing connections between their experiences and the concepts they encountered in the readings.

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…

J.B. MacKinnon | Orion | July 2013 | 12 minutes (2,875 words)
Our latest Longreads Member Pick comes from Orion magazine and J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World.
Thanks to Orion and MacKinnon for sharing it with the Longreads community. They’re also offering a free trial subscription here.
An account of house party thrown by a troubled teen in Florida:
During Justin’s game of beer pong, the ball bounced to the floor and rolled beneath the table, where it came to rest in a sticky, thick brown substance. Justin was mildly grossed out, but didn’t think much of it. He carried the ball to the kitchen sink and rinsed it under the faucet. Then he resumed the game.
As Mark Andrew was leaving the party, Tyler asked if they could speak privately. Tyler went outside and ordered all the kids standing there to get back into the house, so that his neighbors wouldn’t call the cops. Once everyone was inside, Tyler turned to Mark.
“Dude, I did some things. I might go to prison. I might go away for life. I don’t know, dude, I’m freaking out right now.”

–How to Read a Novelist author John Freeman, in conversation with Robin Sloan, at City Lights, talking about the art of the author interview.
(h/t contexual_life)
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Photo: Deborah Treisman
A visit to the “longest continuously running prison rodeo in America”:
To run their maximum-security prison at near capacity, warden Burl Cain and his staff have to be able to inspire hope and put a measure of trust in their charges. Begun as a source of in-house amusement in 1964 and opened for public consumption in ’67, the rodeo is crucial to that effort. The revenue it brings in supplies and maintains on-site trade schools and re-entry programs, pays inmate teachers and funds improvements to Angola’s infrastructure—and the opportunity to rub shoulders with people outside their usual social circle is something inmates look forward to year round.
Nicholas Jackson is the digital director at Pacific Standard, and a former digital editor at Outside and The Atlantic.

Mark Danner | New York magazine | April 2013 | 28 minutes (7,063 words)
Nicholas Jackson is the digital director at Pacific Standard, and a former digital editor at Outside and The Atlantic.
These year-end lists tend to be like the Academy Awards in that only work released during the last couple of months of the year are remembered well enough to make the cut. That’s a good thing. Sure, I’d like to recall every great quotation I read in 2013, every delightful turn of phrase. But it’s better that I can’t. It means, like movies, that there’s more work I would consider worthy of my time being produced than I could possibly make time for, and plenty that I did make the time for that’s already been displaced in my mind by just the latest of the hundreds of stories I read this year. So, I cheated. I went back through some archives to jog my memory and pulled up this comprehensive interview with Bob Silvers to mark the 50th anniversary of The New York Review of Books. Silvers has had his hands on several big pieces this past year (must-read stories by Zadie Smith and Nathaniel Rich; something about the favelas of Brazil; I vaguely recall an Oliver Sacks essay on, of course, memory), but ask any editor and I bet most would tell you that he’s influenced every piece on these round-ups … and any others you’ve read over the past five decades. This is a story about stories: How we make them, and why.
Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013
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