Sell Out: Part Three

[Fiction] The latest installment of Simon Rich’s serialized novella, in which the pickler hero attracts attention in Williamsburg:

“I do not know his words but I sense I am starting to lose him. I decide it is good time to make pitch.

“‘Whole Foods sells pickle jar for seven. I sell for four and include all the scum.’

“I point to the scum, which has collected nicely inside top of jar. The man smiles tightly as he hands me back the jar.

“‘I’ll come back later,’ he says.

“I sigh as he rides off on bicycle. It is almost seven and still I have no sales.

“‘Pickles here!’ I scream. ‘Pickles with garlic and scum!'”

Author: Simon Rich
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 31, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,525 words)

Sell Out: Part Two

[Fiction] From Simon Rich’s serialized novella for The New Yorker: A pickler strikes out on his own:

“Simon refills his coffee vat and smirks.

“‘Who’s going to hire you? You’ve got no education, no experience, no skills.’

“‘Simon,’ Claire says. ‘That’s rude.’

“‘It’s not rude,’ he says. ‘It’s realistic. I mean, for God’s sake, Hersch, you barely even know how to speak English.’

“My face begins suddenly to burn. It is painful to hear my great-great-grandson say these things. I know I am not so clever. I did not go to kindergarten like a fancy man. But I have always worked my best. I am not as worthless as he says.”

Author: Simon Rich
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 30, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,383 words)

Sell Out: Part One

[Fiction] The first chapter of a serialized novella, about a pickle maker from the early 1900s who is transported to modern-day Brooklyn:

“The science men come and explain. I have been preserved in brine a hundred years and have not aged one day. They describe to me the reason (how this chemical mixed with that chemical, and so on and so on) but I am not paying attention. All I can think of is my beautiful Sarah. Years have passed and she is surely gone.
Soon, though, I have another thought. When I freeze in brine, Sarah was with child. Maybe I still have family in Brooklyn? Maybe our dreams have come true?

“The science man turns on computing box and types. I have one great-great-grandson still in Brooklyn, he says. By coincidence, he is twenty-seven years, just like me. His name is Simon Rich. I am so excited I can barely breathe. Maybe he is doctor, or even rabbi? I cannot wait to meet this man—to learn the ending of my family’s story.”

“‘How about Thai fusion?’ Simon asks me, as we walk along the street where I once lived. ‘This place has these amazing gluten-free ginger thingies.'”

Author: Simon Rich
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 29, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,150 words)

Zusya on the Roof

[Fiction] An ailing man meets his grandchild:

“It had been years since his mind was so clear or focussed. Death had scoured it of the extraneous. His thoughts were of a different quality now, and bore sharply through. He had the feeling that at last he had got to the bottom of everything. He wanted to tell Mira. But where was Mira? All through the long days of illness she had sat in a chair at his bedside, leaving only for a few hours each night to sleep. In that instant, Brodman understood that his grandson had been born while he was dead. He wanted to know: had they named the boy after him?”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 28, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,858 words)

The Force

A history of America’s military spending:

“If any arms manufacturer today holds what Eisenhower called ‘unwarranted influence,’ it is Lockheed Martin. The firm’s contracts with the Pentagon amount to some thirty billion dollars annually, as William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, reports in his book ‘Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex’ (Nation). Today, Lockheed Martin spends fifteen million dollars a year on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions. The company was the single largest contributor to Buck McKeon’s last campaign. (Lockheed Martin has a major R. & D. center in McKeon’s congressional district.) This patronage hardly distinguishes McKeon from his colleagues on Capitol Hill. Lockheed Martin contributed to the campaigns of nine of the twelve members of the Supercommittee, fifty-one of the sixty-two members of the House Armed Services Committee, twenty-four of the twenty-five members of that committee’s Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces—in all, to three hundred and eighty-six of the four hundred and thirty-five members of the 112th Congress.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 23, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,444 words)

Bones of Contention

Inside the fight over a 24-foot-long Mongolian dinosaur skeleton, and efforts to crack down on the black market for fossils:

“As the bidding opened, at eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, Robert Painter, an attorney from Houston, stood up, a BlackBerry in his hand. Painter is six feet three and forty-two, with dark hair, rimless eyeglasses, and a deep voice. ‘I hate to interrupt this,’ he told the room. ‘But I have the judge on the phone.’ The previous day, Carlos Cortez—a state district judge in Dallas, where Heritage has its headquarters—had signed a temporary restraining order forbidding the company to auction the T. bataar, on the ground that the dinosaur was believed to have been stolen from Mongolia. The judge, defied, was not pleased.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 21, 2013
Length: 41 minutes (10,499 words)

Experience

[Fiction] A woman whose marriage is ending finds a new place to live:

“When my marriage fell apart one summer, I had to get out of the little flat in Kentish Town, where I had been first happy and then sad. I arranged to live for a few months in another woman’s house; she agreed to let me stay there rent-free, because she was going to America and wanted someone to keep an eye on things. I didn’t know Hana very well; she was a friend of a friend. I found her intimidating—she was tall and big-boned and gushing, with a high forehead and a curvaceous strong jaw, a mass of chestnut-colored curls. But I liked the idea of having her three-story red brick London town house all to myself.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 17, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,466 words)

The Party Faithful

In Israel, people like Naftali Bennett are leading a move to the right:

“More broadly, the story of the election is the implosion of the center-left and the vivid and growing strength of the radical right. What Bennett’s rise, in particular, represents is the attempt of the settlers to cement the occupation and to establish themselves as a vanguard party, the ideological and spiritual core of the entire country. Just as a small coterie of socialist kibbutzniks dominated the ethos and the public institutions of Israel in the first decades of the state’s existence, the religious nationalists, led by the settlers, intend to do so now and in the years ahead. In the liberal tribune Haaretz, the columnist Ari Shavit wrote, ‘What is now happening is impossible to view as anything but the takeover by a colonial province of its mother country.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 14, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,047 words)

Longreads Member Exclusive: Let’s Dance

For this week’s Longreads Member pick, we’re thrilled to share “Let’s Dance,” Sasha Frere-Jones‘s 2010 New Yorker profile of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy.

Frere-Jones writes: 

“When you begin writing a profile, your first worry is access. Does the subject talk in soundbites? Will he or she let you see anything that hasn’t been rehearsed? (‘Accidental’ meetings with famous friends, fans showing up en masse at coffee shops, etc.) Will you just get an hour in the hotel lobby? Will the publicist sit by your elbow as you talk for what ends up being less than an hour?

“James Murphy, as a subject, presented none of these problems. Over the course of eighteen months, he opened his home and his studio and his rehearsal space to me. The profile could have been almost any length. His monologue, in Laurel Canyon, on Louis CK’s genius deserved a page-long block quote, and his stories about his family in New Jersey could have made for a complete, stand-alone piece. But what I wanted to focus on in The New Yorker piece was how functionally, logistically independent Murphy is—he can really execute any single part of the record-making process, from conception to fabrication of widgets. And he isn’t just obsessive about detail but obsessive first about locating the important details, and then obsessive about attending to them thoroughly. I’ve spent my life playing with and observing musicians, and I’ve never seen a bandleader make so many small, ongoing demands of a band without alienating anyone. I did not expect all the hugging.

Read an excerpt here.

You can support Longreads—and get more exclusives like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 10, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,103 words)

Semi-Charmed Life

On understanding the lives of twentysomethings:

“Allowing for a selective, basically narrow frame of reference, then, it’s worth noting that much of what we know about the twentysomething years comes down to selective, basically narrow frames of reference. Able-bodied middle-class Americans in their twenties—the real subject of these books—are impressionable; they’re fickle, too. Confusion triumphs. Is it smart to spend this crucial period building up a stable life: a promising job, a reliable partner, and an admirable assortment of kitchenware? Or is the time best spent sowing one’s wild oats? Can people even have wild oats while carrying smartphones? One morning, you open the newspaper and read that today’s young people are an assiduous, Web-savvy master race trying to steal your job and drive up the price of your housing stock. The next day, they’re reported to be living in your basement, eating all your shredded wheat, and failing to be marginally employed, even at Wendy’s. For young people with the luxury of time and choice, these ambiguities give rise to a particular style of panic.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 7, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,818 words)