In their “How to Plot a Novel” package this week, New York magazine explores the inner workings of fiction from every angle. Christian Lorentzen analyzes how story works and affects readers. Boris Kachka provides an encyclopedia of every possible kind of plot, a history of plot, and a piece about computer mapping of story plots. […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Our top stories of the week, as chosen by the editors at Longreads.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
On Graywolf Press and the Lyric Essay
Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Remnants of Maycomb: What Happened to Harper Lee’s Hometown
Maybe it wasn’t just Nelle’s insecurity that held her back from becoming “the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” but also the dismaying decline of the “small-town middle-class” idyll she’d staked her career on documenting. She had, after all, written a historical novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed not in Monroeville but on an L.A. lot. There […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Anatomy of a Publisher
The work and sex lives of book publishers. Gottlieb, the former editor of The New Yorker, writes about Boris Kachka’s history of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Hothouse: “Gossip about Roger Straus’s sexual life (and everyone else’s) is a dominant feature of ‘Hothouse’—yes, FSG was hot in this way, too. Not only was Roger the Emperor […]
Posted inUncategorized
Possibly the best living American essayist and probably the most influential, Didion has always maintained that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it down. Yet over the past decade, she’s been writing down more about her own life than ever before. If you want to know about her upbringing, readWhere I Was […]
Posted inUncategorized
Ben Cohen's Top Longreads of 2011
Ben Cohen writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. In 2011, he also published a Kindle Single and wrote for Grantland, The Classical, Tablet, The Awl and Yahoo! Sports. You can follow him on Twitter at @bzcohen. *** I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly what it was about these stories that compelled […]
