Search Results for: New York Times

‘To Be Polite By Ignoring the Obvious’: Jess Row on Unpacking Whiteness in Literature

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Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,662 words)

Despite the recurring cycle of conversations on topics such as the need for fully-funded MFA programs, the financial challenges of sustaining oneself as a writer, and the lack of diversity in all levels of media, the issue of whiteness in publishing — and the privileges that come with being white in publishing — continues to justify our scrutiny. We are aware that white people hold much of the power in the literary world, but how do we assess this fact critically, understanding that whiteness is not just a factor in the economics of writing, but in the writing itself? Novelist Jess Row investigates this question in his latest book, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. In his own words, “American culture has evolved a theory of the white psyche that rarely, if ever, considers racism as a direct or even proximate cause of its disorder and distress.” Read more…

My Love Affair with Chairs

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Keah Brown | An excerpt adapted from The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me | Atria Books | 2019 | 17 minutes (4,556 words)

 

My longest relationship has been with chairs. We are very happy together, committed and strong, in sickness and health till death do us part, etc. There are arguments and disagreements as in any other relationship, but we apologize and make up before nightfall so we don’t go to bed angry. The notion of love at first sight is a little cheesy but true. Chairs and I have traveled around the world and back again. We cuddled on the beach in Puerto Rico, shared stolen glances in the Virgin Islands, danced the night away in Grand Turk, and gave some major PDA in the Bahamas. My chairs are loyal, with vastly different personalities but an equal amount of appreciation for the butt of mine that sits in them. A few of them like to play it cool: they don’t want me to think that they care as much as they do, and I let them believe that it’s working. After all, sometimes you have to let your partner think they have the upper hand, to work toward the long game of the bigger thing you want later. However, you and I, dear reader, we know the truth. The chairs in my life love me, and I honestly can’t blame them. Read more…

Hot for Teacher

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Courtney Zoffness | Longreads | Excerpted from Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,795 words)

What did they want? More than anything? Violent things. Unattainable things.

More than anything, she wanted to taste blood, said one student.

More than anything, he wanted freedom, said another.

Your characters need to have desires, I’d explained in the previous class. Drama arises when people struggle to get what they want.

Their first writing assignment of the semester at this midsize East Coast college: compose a short fictional sketch that begins with wanting. Compelling, complex fiction, I’d said, grows out of desires great and small. Their opening sentences offered proof.

More than anything, she wanted a baby.

More than anything, he wanted things to return to the way they were.

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Say Goodbye to Volleywood

Illustration by Joan Lemay

Rick Marin | Racquet and Longreads | September 2019 | 9 minutes (2,347 words)

This story is produced in partnership with Racquet magazine and appears in issue no. 11.

Twenty-five years ago, Vitas Gerulaitis was found dead in the pool house of a friend in Southampton, N.Y. Not from drugs, as many suspected after his well-publicized battles with addiction. Vitas was sober. The cause was shockingly random and banal: accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty propane heater.

He was 40 years old.

The funeral was so crowded they had to put speakers outside St. Dominic’s Church in Oyster Bay. On YouTube you can see raw AP footage of Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, and Bjorn Borg—the three biggest stars in men’s tennis of the ’70s—carrying the casket of their perennial No. 4, Connors wrapping his arms around Borg and McEnroe in sorrow.

Mary Carillo, a friend since they were New York juniors together, was there: “John could not stand Jimmy, Jimmy did not like John, and nobody got close to Bjorn,” Carillo said. “Only Vitas would be friends with all three of them.” They were all better tennis players than he was, but it was they who worshipped him. In her eulogy she said, “Our golden sun has set.”

Governor Mario Cuomo shut down the Long Island Expressway for the funeral procession to make its way from St. Dominic’s to the cemetery. Construction workers took off their helmets in respect. Did they know it was Vitas? Maybe not, but it was a fitting tribute for a blue-collar kid from Queens who made it big in a white-collar game.

A game that lost more than a tennis player when they buried Vitas. Grace that would be replaced by power. Fame that spilled over from the sports pages onto Page Six. A sense of fun that is just…gone.

A generation after his death—when tennis champions are meticulously calibrated überathletes inhabiting a curated world of kale water, “teams,” and corporate branding—it’s impossible to conceive the swath Vitas cut through the world he so vividly inhabited.

“There were few people I’ve ever met who were so damn alive,” Carillo said. “That it’s been 25 years is a little hard to take.” Read more…

Anaphylaxis of the Mind

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Alyson Pomerantz | Longreads | September 2019 | 21 minutes (5,316 words)

About 12 years ago, at my law firm’s holiday lunch, something strange happened when I took a bite of the crab appetizer. There was a tickling sensation in my throat. I say tickle, which makes it sound playful, but it was uncomfortable. I tried to clear it with a sip of wine, but the tickle stayed put. I went to the bathroom because the privacy of a small toilet seemed a better place for me to investigate what was wrong, despite the fact that it was poorly lit and I couldn’t open the door without it hitting the sink.

Of course, I could divine nothing in the tiny bathroom about what was causing the tickle deep in my throat. I sat on the toilet and tried to breathe, but my breathing only grew more labored.

I decided to call my doctor, who also happens to be my father. Though he worries about his children, he has that doctor way of being calm and cool in an emergency. Reciting some figures about anaphylaxis, he told me I should get to a hospital right away.

One of my co-workers helped me find a cab. The driver reminded me that he was not an ambulance, but I didn’t have a lot of experience with emergencies, and so I pleaded with him to take me to the hospital. At New York Presbyterian I stumbled toward the front desk, gesturing at my throat. I could barely whisper my name when the attendant asked.

They ushered me to a curtained-off space where I was given a huge dose of Benadryl. I was examined, but the doctor saw and felt nothing, which she said didn’t necessarily mean anything one way or the other. She implored me to breathe and told me she would be back to check on me. This was in 2007, before smartphones could entertain us, and so I eavesdropped. The curtains were thin, and apparently everyone else there knew enough not to come to the emergency room by themselves. A woman on the other side of the curtain pleaded with the person she was with to stop touching “it.”

Eventually the doctor told me I was stable and could leave. My orders were to get an allergy test as soon as possible to sort out what had happened. I didn’t yet know that the allergy test was going to raise more questions than it would answer.

After the doctor left, I weighed whether I should splurge on another cab. The thought of riding the subway seemed daunting after what I had just been through, but I was fine, wasn’t I? The woman next to me urge her loved one to stop doing whatever he was doing again. The attentive badgering made me suddenly desperate for my own mother, who had been gone six years at that point. My mother was the one who always told my sister and me to treat ourselves after we’d been through something hard, but my father’s voice, the practical one, also loomed large in my head. I was 30 years old, wishing my mother were alive to give me permission to take a cab.

At that moment, nothing seemed sadder to me than sitting in that hospital, alone, convinced that but for a dose of Benadryl, I would be dead.

Read more…

The Geography of Risk

AP Photo/The Philadelphia Inquirer, Clem Murray

Gilbert M. Gaul The Geography of Risk | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2019 | 24 minutes (4,833 words)

 

It is the peculiar nature of hurricanes that they are both uncommon and utterly predictable. Depending on an island’s geography, it may have a one-in-ten chance of being hit, or a one-in-a-thousand chance. Those are only odds, of course, but they are important because hurricanes are best understood as numbers and probabilities. Some areas are simply more vulnerable than others — Southeast Florida, Puerto Rico, the Florida Panhandle, and the Gulf states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. While you may reassure yourself that you have only a one-in-a-hundred chance of being leveled by a devastating storm in a given year, it’s highly likely that there will be a hurricane in one of these geographies, and someone’s house will be destroyed.

Moreover, the chances appear to be increasing, though not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine. Even accounting for years with lots of hurricanes, including 2004, 2005, 2017, and 2018, the number of hurricanes has held relatively steady for centuries, dating back to the founding of the nation. What has changed is the amount of property at the coast, which amplifies the opportunities for damage and the likelihood that federal taxpayers will spend ever-larger sums to help coastal towns rebuild after hurricanes.

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One Man’s Poison

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Kyoko Mori | Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents | University of Nebraska Press | September 2019 | 19 minutes (3,670 words)

 

Before my mother’s suicide the year I turned twelve, my father and I seldom saw each other. An engineer who became a board director at a steel-manufacturing conglomerate, Hiroshi traveled all over the country on business. Even when he worked in his office in Kobe, he left early and came back — if he came back — past midnight. My mother waited up, but he often called from some noisy bar to claim he was leaving on a business trip. Other phone calls, from women looking for him, made clear that my father had several girlfriends who vied for his attention. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that he was a liar and a cheat and that women were attracted to him all the same.

Since his free time was devoted to playing rugby with former college teammates, Hiroshi seldom joined my mother, brother, and me on family vacations or outings. He did once attend a family reunion — for his side of the family — at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Kobe. My brother, Jumpei, four years younger than me, was still a toddler. When we got to the restaurant, our relatives hadn’t arrived yet, the banquet room wasn’t ready, and my mother had to take Jumpei to the bathroom. I was left to sit at the bar with Hiroshi while we waited. He must have had to help me up to the barstool, but I don’t remember him lifting me or holding me on that occasion or any other. What I do recall is the woman behind the bar placing a glass of soda pop in front of me, smiling in an exaggerated way, and saying, “You look just like your father. How lucky for you. He is so very handsome.”

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‘Nobody in This Book Is Going to Catch a Break’: Téa Obreht on “Inland”

Members of the US Camel Corps in the southwestern desert, 1857. (MPI/Getty Images & Random House)

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4,042 words)

Téa Obreht’s debut The Tiger’s Wife casts quite the shadow. It was a National Book Awards Finalist, won the Orange Prize, and landed its 25-year-old author on the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list. We’d understand if Obreht let the acclaim go to her head. We’d even forgive a sophomore slump. Fortunately for us, her novel Inland bears the same storytelling rigor and frictionless prose of its predecessor.

While Tiger’s Wife drew from Obreht’s childhood in the former Yugoslavia, Inland is set a world apart and a century earlier. Namely: the American West, spanning the second half of the 1800s. Parallel narratives follow Nora, a homesteader in the Arizona territories, and Lurie, an outlaw wanderer and conscripted “cameleer” in the U.S. Camel Corps. (An actual troop, and the novel’s genesis.)

As you’d expect, life is punishing and violence ever-present. The well at Nora’s farm has run dry, and her husband Emmett, the local newspaperman, has left to find water; her two grown sons soon follow. Nora is left to protect and watch over an invalid mother, her youngest son, and an annoying teen ward who conducts séances in town. Lurie also communes with the dead, absorbing the posthumous “want” of his partners-in-crime as he traverses the territories. An immigrant Muslim from the Ottoman Empire, Lurie is also a wanted man, pursued by a dogged marshal on a charge for manslaughter. For much of the book Lurie takes cover in the camel corps — led by a charming Turk named Hadji Ali — and bonds with his trusty camel Burke.

Lurie’s and Nora’s stories will intersect, a meeting which elevates Inland to something spectacular and timeless. It’s cliché to say a book has “reinvented” a genre. But Obreht’s achievement feels that way: like a full reset of the American Western. Its characters are those often ignored in cowboy tales, and the Camel Corps spotlights a little-known piece of history while exemplifying the Why not? spirit of possibility — possibly the oldest American tradition. I asked Obreht about her novel over caffeinated cocktails in Manhattan. Read more…

‘Victims Become This Object of Fascination… This Silent Symbol.’

Dessert, c 1923, by Frederick G Tutton. (The Royal Photographic Society Collection/Victoria and Albert Museum, London/Getty Images)

Jonny Auping | Longreads | August 2019 | 14 minutes (3,848 words)

 

While reading Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites, there will probably be a point when you’ll think to yourself, “This person is obsessed.” You might be referring to any one of the book’s real life characters who took their obsession with violence to its most illogical extreme. You might actually be referring to Monroe herself, who doesn’t shy away from the notion that she might still have been digging deeply into these stories of bloodshed even if there were never a book to tell them through. Or, you might realize that you planned to sit down and read for only 20 minutes, but it’s been over an hour and you can’t tear yourself away.

Questions about the nature of obsession permeate Savage Appetites, which tells the stories of four women whose connections to violent crimes — either as investigator, killer, defender, or victim — became the obsessive center of their universes. Monroe, whose stories have been featured at places like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly, also weaves in personal experiences and historical context in order to take a macro-view of the true crime genre. What are the causes of our obsession with violent crime and, perhaps more importantly, what are the political and sociological consequences of it? Read more…

‘The Survivor’s Edit’: Bassey Ikpi on Memory, Truth, and Living with Bipolar II

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Naomi Elias | Longreads | August 2019 | 24 minutes (6,573 words)

 

Bassey Ikpi remembers the Challenger explosion; she can recall the exact moment it happened, in 1984. She can remember, in exquisitely painful detail, how she felt watching that tragic accident unfold on live television, in 1984. Yet Google and the history books tell us it happened in 1986. “What is truth,” Ikpi asks, “if it’s not the place where reality and memory meet?”

The blurry line between emotional truth and fact is stylishly captured in an optical illusion of a book cover (designed by Matthew McNerney) for Ikpi’s new memoir-in-essays, I’m Telling The Truth But I’m Lying. The Nigerian-American author takes up the project of remembering, with great dexterity and compassion for herself. Ikpi opens up about living with bipolar II; “Imagine you don’t fit anywhere,” Ikpi writes, “not even in your own head.” We experience her life pre- and post-diagnosis; her adolescence in Stillwater, Oklahoma; her early twenties touring as a spoken word artist with HBO’s Def Poetry Jam; her sleepless nights; and her hospitalization.The latter proves to be a turning point, one that finally gives her a name for her mental illness and — as the book demonstrates — a framework for understanding the story of her life.

The diagnosis is clarifying; it allows her to see how mental health impacts her relationships to her family and friends, and to herself, often determining what she feels and remembers, and how she remembers it. In this way Ikpi also uses her book to interrogate the nature of memory itself — how fragile it is, how it can be colored and recolored by trauma and guilt and self-preservational drive. “I learned how to take the truth and bend it like light through a prism,” Ikpi explains in the book, “I learned to lie beautifully.” Rather than present readers with a sanitized cluster of biographical data, Ikpi offers a memoir that places the reader inside her mind, conflict and all. Read more…