Search Results for: village voice

On the Far Side of the Fire: Life, Death and Witchcraft in the Niger Delta

Child Rights and Rehabilitation Center, Eket, Nigeria

Jessica Wilbanks | Ninth Letter | Fall/Winter 2013 | 27 minutes (6,860 words)

 

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One of our previous Longreads Member Picks, an essay by Jessica Wilbanks, is now free for everyone. “On The Far Side of the Fire” first appeared in Ninth Letter and was awarded the  journal’s annual creative nonfiction award. This is the first time it has been published online.

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Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.

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A Longreads Guest Pick: Sari Botton on ‘Not Weird About Brooklyn’

Sari is a writer and editor living in Rosendale, N.Y. She writes the Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me column on The Rumpus. An anthology she edited for Seal Press, Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, will be released Oct. 8.

“My favorite longread this week is ‘Not Weird About Brooklyn‘ by Helen Rubinstein in the Paris Review Daily. Having left the East Village for upstate eight years ago with very mixed feelings on the matter, I tend to be very curious about other people’s stories of quitting New York City. Love-hate relationships with the place are so common as to border on the cliche – ditto the city’s tenacious gravitational pull despite the hate part of that equation, despite diminishing returns over time lived there. Rubinstein acknowledges the cliche, even the one inherent in writing about it, ‘the trope of the single woman in New York,’ while giving new, nuanced, if meta, voice to it. Her criteria for a potential mate made me laugh (and I cheered this one: ‘Not anti-memoir.’). I was reminded of an essay by John Tierny in the New York Times Magazine in the mid nineties about how fundamentally picky single New Yorkers can be. (In that one, a criteria for potential mates was, ‘…has resolved her control drama.’) Nine days before she leaves, as she packs up her apartment, Rubinstein seems at once melancholy and resigned to leaving, and as if she’s trying to convince herself she’s made the right choice. It’s a familiar conversation, one I have with myself all the time.”

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Caught Up in the Cult Wars: Confessions of a New Religious Movement Researcher

Susan J. Palmer | University of Toronto Press | 2001 | 38 minutes (9,328 words)

The below article comes recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, and we’d like to thank the author, Susan J. Palmer, for allowing us to share it with the Longreads community.  Read more…

A. N. Devers' Top 5 Bathtub Longreads of 2011

A. N. Devers‘ work has appeared online in Lapham’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and in other publications.  Her most recent essay, about poet Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House in Carmel, California, is in the Winter 2011 issue of Tin House. She is the founder and editor of Writers’ Houses, a website dedicated to literary pilgrimage.

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Maghag (n.): 1. A compulsive reader and hoarder of periodicals and magazines to a magnitude that endangers the well-being of the hag’s housekeeping ability, family relationships, and punctuality. Identified by a pruney skin that develops from spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathtub 2. Writer and procrastinator known as A. N. Devers.

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1. I always go for Scientology exposes. I’m cheap that way. “The Apostate” by Lawrence Wright for The New Yorker, with its heroic fact-checking effort, is so Xenu-shattering that it inspired a rebuttal from the Church of Scientology in the form of a poor-executed satire of The New Yorker.

2. My fandom of Paul Collins goes back a ways. His work exposes my periodical-weeding inability. If you came over to my apartment and demanded some Paul Collins, I’d be able to run to dusty stacks and the file cabinet and deliver a dozen essays of awesome. So I’m not surprised that his piece about the disappearance of child-writer Barbara Follett in the Lapham’s Quarterly Celebrity issue is perfectly constructed story of intrigue and wonderment, mystery and disturbia.

3. Anything I can say about Hungarian industrial designer and ceramicist Eva Zeisel’s Prison Memoir (A Public Space, issue 14) of being arrested in Stalinist Russia doesn’t do her charm and intellect justice. Just listen to this voice: “He put a number in front of my chest and I thought, This will make me look like those pictures of criminals one sees, Wanted for Murder. Then they took me to be fingerprinted, one finger rolled in the ink after the other, and again I thought, It’s like the movies. Again, we walked through many courtyards and the funny thing was that I did not see anybody. It was all empty. Finally, I was in my cell, and I still did not know what it was all about.”

4. Once upon a time, I was a professional archaeologist. Freelance survey and excavation work paid some of my bills my last year of college and my first couple of years out of school. I was waitlisted for a PhD to study caves with a famous spelunking archaeologist at Washington University and had determined if I didn’t get in I’d go a different route. By then I realized that archaeology and literature have more in common than people realize—and I love them for the same reasons. They are both, I believe, about our need to seek and excavate truth. But archaeologists, like many breeds of scientist, aren’t natural storytellers, and I am always glad when a writer happens upon archaeology and finds a way to explore the people and projects of a fascinating field. John Jeremiah Sullivan does this in his wonderful Paris Review essay, “Unnamed Caves” (purchase req.), and it’s now in his excellent collection, Pulphead. Go spelunking with him. Here’s a bonus: another favorite writer of mine, Elif Batuman, dug into Turkish archaeology in her essay, The Sanctuary” for The New Yorker (sub. required). She visits the world’s oldest temple and deftly unravels its history and mythology.

5. I would be lying by omission if I didn’t admit to reading a ton of celebrity dish in the tub. I think my favorite this year was “Lowe, Actually,” the excerpt in Vanity Fair of Rob Lowe’s memoir. I don’t really have a thing for Rob Lowe. Never have. (For instance, I loved West Wing but for the overuse of pancake makeup on Lowe’s face.) But I spent 6th grade idolizing S. E. Hinton for The Outsiders. And I was hooked again when I finally got to see the movie. So, yes, Rob Lowe had me at his mention of Ponyboy. Stay gold, y’all. 

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Benjamin Gold: My Favorite Longreads of 2010

benjamingold:

Hey it’s the end of 2010, publishers are still trying to figure out how to make money off their online content, and here are my favorite pieces of long form journalism that was published this year (plus one from the 90s)!


Richard Morgan, “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup,” (The Awl, August 2010)

As an struggling freelance writer, this article was, for me, especially meaningful. Morgan shows how success is totally ephemeral and relative (legions of freelancers would love for the career he describes), but also how the work can be its own reward.  


Keith Gessen, “Stuck,” (New Yorker, August 2010)

One way to tell if you really loved a story is when you bring it up all the time. Now, whenever I’m stuck in traffic with someone, I talk about what it’s like to drive in Moscow.


Michael Tedder, “Q&A: Ted Leo on Middle Class Indie-Rock Life, His Dissatisfaction With Your Karaoke Preparation, And Five-Dollar Words,” (Sound of The City, April 2010)

Thanks, in part, to this interview (and this one too) 2010 was the year I learned to love Ted Leo again. His great new album, The Brutalist Bricks, helped too.


Jason Aaron, “Where The Hell Am I?,” (Comic Book Resources, September 2010)

For his uncompromisingly close look at the life of a comic book creator, and the process it took him to get there, Jason Aaron’s series of columns is the best writing on comics I’ve read all year.


Mike McGonigal, “Temperature’s Rising: Galaxie 500,” (Pitchfork, May 2010)

I’m a big fan of Galaxie 500, and I knew the band members didn’t get along, but wow—they really don’t like each other! Beyond that, any band who manages to grab hold onto any semblance of success needs to reed this insider account of rock n’roll death.

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Kate Silver: Top Five Long Reads of 2010

I always love Kate Silver‘s #longreads picks. Here’s her Top 5.

frontofbook:

Longreads asked for a top five. Here are a few that stand out:

Christopher Hitchens, “Martin, Maggie, and Me” (Vanity Fair)
The Hitchens-Amis bromance is the ultimate had-to-be-there of Thatcher-era intelligentsia. Bottoms up.

Michaelangelo Matos, eMusic Q&A: Rob Sheffield (17 Dots)
Pop fans and glossy geeks will find plenty to love in this broad Q&A — like My Dinner with Andre if it were shot for VH1.

Julian Barnes, “Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer” (London Review of Books)
While plenty has been written about Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary, Barnes’ thorough historical breakdown and downright passionate prose make this lo-ooong read a must.

Jessica Flint, “Vampire Weekend’s Mutinous Muse” (VF.com)
Admittedly, I rolled my eyes when my Twitter feed filled up with Ann Kirsten Kennis, the unwitting Contra cover girl who is suing Vampire Weekend over the use of her image. This engossing, in-depth piece hooked me in. It points a finger at photographer Tod Brody, who claims the rights to the snapshot. Brody was recently subpoenaed in the case, but apparently he can’t be found.

Mara Altman, “Whit Stillman Is Running Late” (First Things) (registration required)
b/w Alex Carnevale, “The Last Tantrum” (This Recording)

The ’90s are dead. Long live the ’90s!