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All Aboard: Four Stories About Trains
Ah, the romance of the rails. I still bear vivid memories of my family’s post-Christmas train ride to New York City when I was an adolescent. I listened to my non-Apple mp3 player and watched, wide-eyed, the people and places passing by. Last year, I hopped commuter train after commuter train trying to bridge the […]
Tennessee Williams on His Women, His Writer’s Block, and Whether It All Mattered
Tennessee Williams tasked James Grissom with seeking out each of the women (and few men) who had inspired his work—Maureen Stapleton, Lillian Gish, Marlon Brando and others—so that he could ask them a question: had Tennessee Williams, or his work, ever mattered?
Giving Visibility to the Invisible: An Interview With Photographer Ruddy Roye
“I want to introduce white America to people who they might never have met, and I want them to fall in love too.”
How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying: The True Story of J.C. Penney
This week, we’re thrilled to share a new Longreads Member Pick from Fortune magazine. “How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying” is Jennifer Reingold’s definitive account of what really happened inside J.C. Penney—from the dramatic reinvention of the company, led by new CEO Ron Johnson, to its disastrous unraveling (and Johnson’s firing) less […]
Remembering The Man Who Brought Helvetica To The Masses
This post comes via Longreads contributor Laura Bliss: In this week’s Economist, a remembrance of “font-god” Mike Parker, the typographer who developed more than 1000 fonts in his 50+ year career. Parker, who died last month at age 84, was a champion of great type: never drawing fonts himself, but rather coaxing others into perfection. His […]
The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg
An intimate recollection of a Beat legend.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Photo: doug88888, Flickr Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant? Wells Tower | GQ | June 4, 2014 | 32 minutes (8,196 words) […]
How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying: The True Story of J.C. Penney
Jennifer Reingold | Fortune | March 2014 | 29 minutes (7,108 words) Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle) Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks) When you find a savior, you don’t quibble over details. So it was that J.C. Penney, the long-stagnating mid-tier department store chain, announced in June 2011 that it was hiring Ron […]
All Aboard: Four Stories About Trains
Ah, the romance of the rails. I still bear vivid memories of my family’s post-Christmas train ride to New York City when I was an adolescent. I listened to my non-Apple mp3 player and watched, wide-eyed, the people and places passing by. Last year, I hopped commuter train after commuter train trying to bridge the […]

